Google Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird Comparison

Google is the king of the search engine world, which is why everything it demands. SEO experts and the websites they work on, hesitate or delay taking action, they are bound to be executed, which in Google terms means being added to the bottom of the search results pages.

Search engine uses to ensure relevant and helpful results to its users. Currently, three dominate the SEO sphere: Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird.

Panda Algorithm

Despite being launched in February 2011, the Panda Algorithm is used till date. Through this algorithm, the search engine would target websites that published low quality content and penalize them whenever possible. It was this update that established the power of content, making it one of the top factors for evaluating and analyzing websites.

Panda checked Google’s index for websites that had duplicates or numerous ads. It also skimmed through websites to detect those that employed wrong techniques like black-hat SEO. Fortunately, the websites that were penalized had a chance to recover. 

SEO specialists had to create original content that added value to its readers. They also had to get the ad ratio right as well as carry out regular SEO audits to ensure the lack of empty pages, broken links and internal duplicates. With Panda surviving till date, it’s important that you ensure that the issues it addresses are taken care of or else the amount of organic traffic to your site will be reduced.

Penguin Algorithm

Penguin Algorithm was designed to update its predecessor and complement its efforts to counter poor content by detecting maligned and black-hat SEO practices. Through this update, Google aimed to catch websites that were spammy, overly-optimized or keyword stuffed to penalize them.

Over-optimized inbound links

Link Farms

Links from article marketing websites that contain thin content and anchor text links to a website

Reciprocal links and poor quality inbound links with irrelevant partners

Hummingbird Algorithm

Hummingbird also embraced a new fashion in delivering results. For example, via Google Voice, users can search for a number of things, starting from the best cinemas and all the way to the nearest Chinese take-out joints. This ensured the search engine’s ability to respond to users’ actual search intent and ultimately deliver relevant data.

How to Make Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird Work for You

Now that you know about the three Google updates used today, you need to adapt your SEO strategy according to them to succeed. To give you a nudge in the right direction, here are five strategies you should incorporate.

Avoid Low Quality Content and Duplicate Content Within Your Site

                                                               Make sure to produce unique and fresh content for all the pages on your website. You should also use robots.txt to hide any duplicate pages until you fix them.

Create Textual Content if Your Website Lacks These

                                       

                                                               Keep your articles long and detailed to add value to your readers. You should especially fill your interaction-aimed pages with readable content. These aside, create rich media content like videos and images and format it in a way that makes it visible to search engines.

Forget about Keyword Stuffing and Find a Reasonable Keyword Density

                                                               Don’t stuff keywords in your page title, meta description, or H1. Fit only a few keywords in proper sentences and avoid trying to get them on every page or every subtitle.

Optimize Your Content According to Users

                                                          Searchers usually seek at least one of three things. Informational content is for general information, navigational for finding sites on the web, whereas transactional is for running certain transactions. You should create different types of content for each of these and optimize them with conversational phrases people use in mind.

Expand Your Keyword Research

                                                            Don’t stick to specific keywords and key terms. Instead, search for related keywords, acronyms and spelling variants of the keywords you use. You can also turn to Google Suggest for keyword ideas.

Panda Security Updates

Panda Security has released a new version of its cross-platform corporate solution. The cloud security company's Panda Cloud Office Protection (PCOP) version 7.0 enables customers to act independently to secure their IT infrastructure against attacks.

PCOP 7.0 includes new dashboards and remediation capabilities and allows customers to access information about their detection, license and protections status. The solution also delivers in-depth threat data reports that are organized by risk level, according to Panda Security.

Google: Manual Actions Updated Twice Daily But Emails Sent Once Daily

Google updates their data for manual actions within Google Webmaster Tools twice a day on average and then only sends out emails once a day on average with notices.

He said:

I believe webmaster tools data for manual actions updates, maybe, twice a day. Something around that range. And emails we may send out once a day.

Google+ Drops Name Restrictions

Google announced last night on Google+ that they have removed their naming restrictions, preventing you from using nicknames and pseudonyms.

So if you wanted to use the name "rustybrick" because you didn't want to use your real name, for privacy reasons, you can. If you wanted to use "GoogleGuy," you could.

This was how things were back in the day, very few people 10 years ago used their real names. Everyone used nicknames within the social network or discussion forum they participated in. Now, it is less common.

Google+ is now allowing for it because, well, I guess they want to solve their YouTube comments problem. Here is the post:

When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.

Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.

We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.

Google Sandbox Defined

A site is sandboxed when it is new and does not rank for keyword phrases that are not incredibly competitive (such as a unique company name) in Google after making the page "search engine friendly" and after being indexed.

Some are mistaken that a sandboxed site is a site that has not been indexed by Google. That is wrong. Sandboxed sites are very much so indexed by Google, but have a hard time ranking for keyword phrases, no matter how competitive they are.

Google Sandbox Version Two?

Google Sandbox was a term coined back in 2004 when SEOs and webmaster began noticing their new sites were not ranking as quickly as they use to. In short, your new site got put into a sandbox, where you waited, until you would rank.That has not been talked about much in years but there are always some webmasters and SEOs that bring it up. Truth is, new sites can rank fast in Google these days, if they meet Google's algorithms requirements.

That being said, a Black Hat World thread has some SEOs and webmasters complaining it is taking longer than usual to rank new sites in Google.

If you look past all the bickering and yelling in the thread, there are many SEOs and Webmasters, likely on the black hat/churn and burn side, agreeing that it is taking longer.

Can this be a new Google Sandbox or just a specific case of some webmasters not building sites right .

Payday Loan Algorithm 2.0 Launched: Targets “Very Spammy Queries”

Google has confirmed they have released a new algorithm update to their Payday Loan Algorithm update over this weekend.

This algorithm specifically targets “very spammy queries” and is unrelated to the Pandaor Penguin algorithms. A Google spokesperson told us:

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.

The original Payday Loan Algorithm launched just about a year ago on June 11, 2013. Back then, Google’s Matt Cutts told us the algorithm impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries, but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries where Web spam is typically higher.

Google told us this specific update is an international rollout and it affects different languages to different degrees, but this impacts English queries by about 0.2% to a noticeable degree