The purpose of “Panda” in the last major change made to their algorithms of Google was to remove the top of the index of low quality sites and otherwise present in the top quality sites. But what is a high quality site?
Google gives us some clues on their blog in the form of questions you should ask about your site:
- Do you consider the contents of the site are reliable? For example, if you want to read about a disease, do you trust the information that is written on this disease?
- Are the contents of the site are written by experts in the field or a result of instantaneous work of an editor of content? Returning to the example of the article written about a disease, many sites offer information on diseases, but only little offer information written by doctors.
- Does the site offer several articles on the same subject but with minimal changes in the keyword?
- Do the content on the site suffer from grammatical or spelling errors?
- Do the content on the site represent the topics of interest to site users or represent an attempt to write on keywords they believe will them rank well in Google results?
- Do the content on the site represent original material, new research, a story by first time or are recycling material from other sites?
- How much editorial control exists on the site?
- What the site has added value compared with other sites in the same industry?
- Do you consider the site as an expert in the field?
- Does the article is full of ads and commercials in a way that distracts the user to read well?
- Do you consider the site as one that would have marked in your favorites or share with a friend?
- Do you think the secure site to pay it with your credit card?
Reading these questions/tracks can not help but think these article directories (or content farms) whose purpose is precisely ranker well the results of the search engines to generate traffic (and indeed contaminated the Google index). Finally, these sites were the most affected with the “Panda” update.