The king of search engines makes history; does it mean anything for online publishers?
In May 2011, Google hit a milestone by becoming the first company ever to reach 1 billion unique visitors, according to comScore.
Compared to its numbers from May 2010, Google’s unique visitors rose by 8.4% in May 2011.
Research on this data began being tracked by comScore in 2006, when Google was experiencing 496 million uniques each month.
The Panda updates continue
In addition to the rise in uniques, Google is in the news for its latest Panda update.
And as Google’s Panda Update 2.2 rolls out, I wanted to provide some background from Search Engine Land as to what Panda really is about.
Although some people initially thought that Panda was an entirely new algorithm being used by Google, it’s necessary to realize that Panda is more of a new ranking factor that has been added to the existing algorithm. It serves as a filter to identify low-quality pages. Unfortunately, too many low-quality pages may mean that your entire website gets deemed as low-quality. This won’t boot you out of Google search results necessarily, but being tagged will likely allow other more qualified sites rank higher in search results.
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Google for content producers and publishers
The staggering number of unique users doesn’t only mean something for Google; content publishers have been benefiting from the search engine’s success for some time now.
By providing great content publishers can avoid penalties from Panda, while reaching new audiences that may have started using Google for their search queries.
5 tips for avoiding a negative Panda experience
-Present well-written content and pay attention to spelling and grammar.
-Do not directly copy content from other locations around the web. Instead, use the information, word it appropriately and give links and citations when fitting.
-Be careful with the ad to content ratio, especially above the fold. An excessive amount of ads with only minimal copy could potentially hurt your pages.
-Give value and insight within the content you produce.
-When linking to other web pages, link to quality sites. Linking to low-quality website could have a negative impact on your site.
Additionally, here are a few more resources for properly working with Google for added website traffic:
–Google Sheds Light on Quality Content
