Optimizing Your Web Site
Google is one of the top search directories on the Web, and if your site is ranked high in Google, you’ll get more page views. But Google doesn’t work like all the other search engines, so you should be aware of these tips for optimizing your site for Google.
Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design.
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a “spider” to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.
Search engine designers found that by relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters.
Google Panda refers to the changes introduced in 2011 to the search algorithm used by Google to improve Internet search results. The change aims to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” in search results and return high-quality sites to Google’s users. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social Networking sites, and a drop in rankings for advertising sites. This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results.
Panda rollout hasn’t been the smoothest with web including Google’s webmaster forums being filled with complaints of scrapers / copyright infringers getting better ranking than original content. At one point, Google publicly asked for data points to help detect scrapers better. Google’s Panda has received several updates since the original rollout in February 2011 and the effect went global in April 2011.