How Google Panda 4.0 Affects SEO

Here’s the real simple gist of how Google Panda 4.0 affects your website. You ready? Okay here it is.

Specialized Approach

Panda 4.0 deals more with a specialized approach to websites. Always remember that how Google deals with your website is much like how a librarian will deal with a book. If your website has more content about a specific topic, it will naturally rank higher. However, if your website also has a lot of other topics aside, it will dilute your website’s authority.

Being a Jack of all Trades in terms of your website topic has never been more harmful than when Panda 4.0 rolled out. Google now favors the specialized websites more. Likewise, if you’re dealing with a specific niche, having a site that has a lot of content about that specific niche has never been more beneficial.

Check out this study by Cognitive SEO on how the traffic of some websites rose as high as 904% after Google Panda 4.0 rolled out.

Action Points

Knowing this, what should you do?

If you ask me, the best thing you can do is focus. Just have a few certain key themes in your website that you are extremely passionate about. If Google will reward a specialized approach, then be specialized. Start weeding out topics that you are not really passionate about or die them down.

After all, you can’t be best at everything. So take off the things that you can only be good at and focus on the things you can be the best at.

SEO Hacker Study

Personally, SEO Hacker has seen an approximately 100% increase in traffic since Panda 4.0 hit. It’s still increasing today especially when I publish a new article. That’s because we’ve tried our best to keep the topics centered around SEO. It can be something about our company, about our team, about some news in our industry or simply just tips and tricks that we give out.

Of course, if there are winners after Google 4.0, there are also losers. Check out how much eBay and other big websites have lost after Panda 4.0 rolled out.

While I could also attribute the 100% increase to the number of links that SEO Hacker has gained due to our upcoming SEO Summit 2014 event this June 21, or to the fact that we have successfully implemented Schema microdata across all our pages, it makes a lot of sense that this increase in rankings and traffic is due to Panda 4.0 because of the timing.

I know that 100% may not look as great as the whopping 904% that Cognitive SEO pointed out, however it has already bagged us one new contract from the day Panda 4.0 rolled out until today. Since our contracts start at $1,500 per month, that’s already a considerable conversion for us.

 Tips for Keeps: Keep your site’s theme focused. Don’t dilute. It pays off.