Helpful Content Update = Panda of Today
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence and North Star Inbound. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
I appreciate the many new people who have subscribed over the last few week, so here are some of my favorite newsletter posts you might have missed:
Like many others in the SEO industry, I tinkered into it. I read some books and blogs and then started playing with my own websites. I was hooked from the beginning by seeing how my efforts paid off in rankings on search results and then the keywords people searched. (Back then, they weren’t hidden by Google).
Admittedly, many of my tactics were not the approaches I advocate for today. I stuffed content with keywords, bought links, and even made automated content sites, one of which got me a cease and desist from Sarah Palin.
See below:
February 23, 2011
All of that changed thirteen years ago. I worked at a start-up focused on the automotive space. The big idea was to have a specific website for every make and model car produced in the US. Each site would have unique content about the car but would duplicate shared assets (like classified listings) across the entire website portfolio. While the unique content was the highest quality, the unique-to-duplicate content ratio was only 1:10.
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When Google rolled out the Panda algorithm on February 23rd, 2011, all of our websites were caught in the dragnet, and we saw a 40% decline in organic traffic in a single day. This could have been a fatal blow for a company that had generated nearly all its users and revenue from organic search. Recovering this traffic was do or die.
Attempts to recover
As this was an algorithmic rather than manual penalty, our reconsideration requests to Google’s search quality teams were met with non-answers. The Google search quality team insisted there was no actual penalty on the sites that could be removed.
After more information about the Panda update came to light, we determined the real cause of the problem. Panda focused on content quality, and the whole site was at risk when we didn’t meet the bar.
While we had plenty of valuable, high-quality content, it had been overshadowed by our duplicated, lower-quality content. We needed to shed this low-quality content and get Google to value our high-quality content again.
From then on, the recovery path became one of only tactical and technical SEO. Using canonical tags, directives not to index content, redirects, and outright website removals, we reduced our footprint of one hundred-plus websites to twelve. The twelve remaining websites had vastly reduced content, and anything not deemed to be high quality enough was left on the cutting floor.
SEO pivot
Going through this process was a masterclass in technical SEO. Before we figured out what the algorithm had targeted and why we lost our traffic, we assumed it was because of our bad behavior regarding grayer SEO tactics like buying links and keyword stuffing. As a result, I immediately disavowed those tactics and resolved never to cross some of those lines again. (Don’t judge my fear until you have been in this position!)
In August of that year, Google reran the Panda update (at the time, updates were launched on an interval basis rather than real-time), and our efforts were rewarded with a strong recovery. Our network of sites, now just ten percent of its size, returned to generating 90 percent of our pre-penalty traffic. However, we didn’t stop there.
We kept a rigorous focus on having only quality content. When we pruned the sites, we only had four websites left. In October, still in 2011, Google reran the update and this time our aggregate traffic reached 125% of its pre-penalty levels. Our efforts at improving the sites with purely technical efforts had been rewarded.
Panda forced a change in strategies
We had a great strategy before the Panda penalty and tactics to achieve it. After Panda, our strategy changed; likewise, we needed to adjust our tactics to achieve it. Oddly enough, our tactics after Panda were to undo many of our prior tactics. Just like our tactics had helped us achieve a lofty traffic goal, our new tactics did the same.
More than what Panda did to that company, it changed me. It helped me gain a new understanding of Google’s role in the search world.
Google is not there to serve websites and marketers; Google’s success relies on providing its users with a great experience that keeps them coming back and, ideally, clicking ads.
That experience helped me pivot to a strategic outlook that eventually morphed into my product-led SEO framework.
Helpful Content is Panda of 2024
Many people in the SEO industry today were not doing SEO thirteen years ago when Panda came out and, therefore, have not internalized Panda's lessons in their core SEO processes. Panda became obsolete, so Google updated it with what I think is the Panda of the AI age: Helpful Content Updates.
The Panda algorithm was designed to demote low-quality content that was made for SEO, and it used user signals similar to Google Ads quality score to calculate these signals. However, the sheer volume of AI content and the ability to mask quality make this challenge that much more difficult for an algorithm.
Helpful Content Updates incorporate AI signals to beat AI content and the secret to beating this algorithm is not to be even more sneaky with quality signals, it is to integrate the lesson I and many others did after Panda: focus on the user.
The secret to beating Google
I think there is value and a need for AI content, but it has to be user-centric first (see my post on product-led SEO) rather than search engine-focused.
As I learned many years ago, the secret to beating the algorithm is not trying to beat the algorithm. As the consistent winners from every algorithm update shows, the sites that provide the best value for users and search engines over time see the traffic grow over the long term, even if they have slight declines from a particular update.
There will be more helpful content updates or whatever else Google calls them, and the best defense is a good offense. Build for the user, and the algorithms will follow.
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