For those in the SEO industry the past week has been very busy with Google releasing two new updates to their ever evolving algorithm. Google confirmed it has rolled out the Panda 4.0 and Payday Loan 2.0 updates. But what are these updates?
What is Panda 4.0
- Panda was first released in February 2011
- The purpose of the Panda update was to stop sites with poor quality and duplicate content ranking in the top search results
- Within its first roll out the update targeted article directories and spun content and there have been soft, rolling refreshes over time
- It was confirmed that Google has released a new Panda 4.0 update
- By officially releasing a new update, Google is signifying this is a major update with potential for significant rankings flux
- Google has stated it will impact c.7.5 per cent of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice
What is Payday Loan 2.0?
First launched in June 2013
- The Payday loan Algorithm update targets specific search queries that returned results pages with a high volume of spam
- This mainly impacted competitive industries, primarily payday loans, insurance and accident claims search queries
- Overall impact was very query-specific and in the scale of algorithmic changes had a moderate impact.
- This week, Google announced it was rolling out an update stating: “Over the weekend we began rolling out a new algorithmic update. The update was neither Panda nor Penguin — it was the next generation of an algorithm that originally rolled out last summer for very spammy queries.”
What happened to eBay’s organic traffic?
Following any large Google updates the SEO community always reviews the winners and losers. It was first reported that Ask, eBay and retailmenot were the big casualties of the most recent updates. A quick review of the search visibility of www.ebay.com in search metrics confirms a circa 50 per cent drop in organic traffic recently after the update (see graph below)
Other reports indicate that Google have actually placed a ‘manual action’ against the eBay website and the timing of the drop was purely a coincidence. Reports claim the Panda update would affect the entire site and not individual pages within the site.
Reviews of the eBay visibility drop indicate that Google has removed a wide range of low quality ‘doorway’ pages from the listings, which has resulted in the 50 per cent drop in organic visibility. These doorway pages were category and sub-category pages that eBay was creating specifically for ranking purposes and were over optimised to influence search visibility.
These doorway pages had the following traits:
- Over-optimised text
- Anchor text footer links to pass authority
- Cleverly linked into the site architecture to manipulate rankings
Although eBay was very clever with these pages, it seems it ‘overdid’ the optimisation and is now seeing the repercussions from Google.
Conclusion
Over the past couple of years the Google search team has been regularly making large updates to its algorithm. In addition it has implemented manual actions against some very large brands, with eBay being the latest casualty.
Google’s goal has always been to create quality unique content ‘that places users at the heart and not search engines’. These updates from Google send a message to all brands large and small that sites that invest in quality content for their users will be rewarded in their search engine rankings.