Unofficial Google Panda Update or Not?
Last week Google announced a brand new page layout algorithm update. This is a landing page quality update which will see Google Bots look at the layout of a webpage and note the amount of content you see on a page once you click on a result.
This is as an opposed plan to having people scroll beneath ads in order to get this – sound familiar?
Yes! You wouldn’t be wrong many have stated that it is extremely similar to Google Panda. Already many people assume that it is Google Panda Algorithm which is penalising ad heavy pages. Google have claimed that the new change isn’t one which is going to affect every single site but rather just those which have an excessive number of ads obstructing people getting to the content they requested in the first place.
It is going to affect less than 1% of searches on a global scale which is less than one in one hundred. If you do believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change then you need to take a look at how your web pages used the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or hard for a used to locate. Check your website on a number of screen resolutions also.
If you have been penalised it is an algorithm penalty not a manual one so if you simply fix the layout of your page then Google Filters will pick this change up next time they come to crawl your site and providing everything is in order then the penalty will be lifted and you can start to rank highly again. It is the manual penalties you need to avoid.
Although this particular Google change isn’t going to affect a huge amount of sites we are wondering what is going on in Google world right now? After all is this simply an unofficial Panda update for 2012?
What do you think?