Written by brbpsingh
Jan 26 ~ Category: seo
Last week, I was lucky to join brbpsingh
of brbpsingh and brbpsingh of brbpsingh on a panel (ably moderated by brbpsingh for the
Ticket Summit on the recent changes in search marketing. The attendees are
ticket brokers an dpartner sthat move most of the seats for entertainment and
sporting events in the U.S., so you can imagine that they have a fierce
interest in search marketing. It fell to me to explain the dreaded Google Panda
update of its search ranking algorithm. I say “dreaded” because so many people
have treated this latest reshuffling of the search results as something
approaching apocalyptic disaster. If it has been a nightmare for you, my
condolences, but there’s no going back, so we all need to understand the idea
behind Panda and we might need to change the way we think to succeed in the brave
new Panda world.
First off, Panda isn’t named after a
bear–it is actually the surname of the Google engineer whose ideas lay behind
it. And, although it is about to celebrate its first birthday, it isn’t a
single event wrapped in the past. Google Panda has ushered in a series of
changes over the past year, with a couple of ranking algorthm updates
interpsersed with more regular changes in the data that it depends on.
Panda is revolutionary because it
adds a new ranking factor to Google’s algorithm–a quality score imposed on
sites by human raters that decide whether the site would be worth visiting
again, for example. Dozens of human raters might visit the same site and Google
averages their answers. High quality sites get boosted in the rankings, with lower-ranking
sites, well, not so much.
Now, this wouldn’t be terrinbly
interesting if that is all there were to it. For even Google, with its vast
resources, can’t afford to pay human raters to visit all the sites that reside
on the Web–not when they need many raters to judge each site and when those
sites change regularly and need to be re-rated. No, they needed something a lot
cheaper than that approach.
Enter machine learning, a technology
that looks for patterns in data. Instead of Google having to use human beings
to rate every site, they instead rated a small number of sites and then applied
those ratings to all the unrated sites that were similar to the rated sites.
So, if your site wasn’t rated. but it has the same characteristics as sites
that are lkow in quality, your site will be treated as low in quality.
You probably want to know what
patterns Panda is looking for, so that you can avoid them, but no one is
saying. In fact, the very way that the algorithm works makes it a difficult
question to answer. Machine learning algorithms are trained with some of the
human data that Google collected, and then tested on the rest of the data. So
the algorithm keeps trying to find more and more patterns until it can actually
preduct the answers that the human beings gave. At that point, the algorithm is
unleashed on pages that have not been rated, assuming that the training it
received against known answers will now allow it to predict the quality level
of sites that have not been rated.
What this means is that, for the
first time, what human being sthink of Web pages is an explicit ranking factor.
So, if you’ve been just following some rote rules about how to optimize for
search, you might be in trouble if people don’t actually like your pages. This
is, alas, the fate of most search optimizers who are only trying to feed the
Google beast what it wants, instead of creating a quality experience for
searchers. Thise that give searchers what they want are now being rewarded more
than ever.
Google is believed to be going after
so-called “content farms” with Panda–low-quality sites produced at low cost by
hack writers. But some marketers worry that there are other sites affected.
Google reassured marketers that merely having a repeated product description
from the manufactuerer is not considered content scraping, but searchers might
find it to be a low quality exprerience when they have to look through so many
stores and keep reading the same information.
Does this mean that Panda never
downgrades a site unfairly? Hardly. All of this technology is imperfect,
although Google is constantly tinkering with the training data and algorithms.
In fact, Google is collecting lots of data from people pressing +1 buttons, and
might find someday that those are all the human raters that they need–and they
won’t have to pay anyone.
So, many more changes are still
ahead. And if Google’s Panada update is successful, you’ll see Bing go in that
direction, too, affecting 30% more of the U.S. searches. And who knows how
Panda might evolve in the future. To check out all my slides from the event,
take a peek at “Google Panda Update” on Slideshare.
About the Author: Copyright Mike Moran brbpsingh is an IBM Distinguished
Engineer, expert on Internet marketing, and the author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., the best-selling
book on search marketing. Mike also writes the popular Biznologynewsletter and blog.
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