So Google rolled out this thing called Panda a few weeks ago and half the forums I read are on fire about it. Sites that ranked forever are gone. Content farms that pumped out 500 articles a day are getting wiped out. People are angry.
I am not angry. I am kind of excited.
Here is why. For the last two years, ranking felt like a game of who could stuff the most keywords and build the most junky links. I never liked playing it, mostly because I was not good at it and it felt gross. Now Google is basically saying: write for humans, or lose.
That is a game I actually want to play.
What I am seeing
I went through a few of the sites I help with and looked at the pages that lost traffic. Almost all of them were the thin ones. Two paragraphs, no real answer, just there to catch a search. The pages that held steady or went up were the ones where somebody actually sat down and answered a question properly.
For Qysh Me this is great, because answering questions properly is the entire point of what we are building.
What I am doing about it
I am going back through old pages and asking one dumb question on each: if a real person landed here, would they be happy? If the answer is no, I either fix it or delete it. I already killed a handful of pages this week and my traffic did not drop. That tells me they were doing nothing anyway.
I do not know where Panda goes next. Nobody does. But if the direction is “make things people actually want,” I am here for it.
Write a comment