Today I am talking about how the latest "Panda" update from Google might affect your SEO rankings.
In this good post from Dr. Peter J. Meyers from SEOMoz, you will find out the main consequences of this algorithm change for your site. Although this last update is basically aimed to "thin" sites or sites with lots of non-original content, it might have a bad side effect on eCommerce sites.
If you’ve been hit by the Panda update or are just worried about its implications, you’ve probably read a lot about “thin” content. We spend our whole lives trying to get thin, and now Google suddenly hates us for it. Is the Panda update an attempt to make us all look like Pandas? Does Google like a little junk in the trunk?
It’s confusing and it's frustrating, especially if you have real money on the line. It doesn’t help that “thin” content has come to mean a lot of things, and not every definition has the same solution. To try to unravel this mess, I'm going to present 7 specific definitions of “thin” content and what you can do to fatten them up.
Quality: A Machine’s View
To make matters worse, “thin” tends to get equated with “quality” – if you’ve got thin content, just increase your quality. It sounds good, on the surface, but ultimately Google’s view of quality is defined by algorithms. They can’t measure the persuasiveness of your copy or the manufacturing standards behind your products. So, I’m going to focus on what Google can measure, specifically, and how they might define “thin” content from a machine’s perspective.
1. True Duplicates (Internal)
True, internal duplicates are simply copies of your own pages that make it into the search index, almost always a results of multiple URLs that lead to the same content. In Google’s eyes, every URL is a unique entity, and every copy makes your content thinner:
A few duplicates here and there won’t hurt you, and Google is able to filter them out, but when you reach the scale of an e-commerce site and have 100s or 1000s of duplicates, Google’s “let us handle it” mantra fails miserably, in my experience. Although duplicates alone aren’t what the Panda update was meant to address, these duplicates can exacerbate every other thin content issue.
The Solution
Get rid of them, plain and simple. True duplicates should be canonicalized, usually with a 301-redirect or the canonical tag. Paths to duplicate URLs may need to be cut, too. Telling Google that one URL is canonical only to link to 5 versions on your own site will only prolong your problems.
2. True Duplicates (Cross-site)
Google is becoming increasingly aggressive about cross-site duplicates, which may differ by their wrapper but are otherwise the exact same pieces of content across more than one domain:
Too many people assume that this is all an issue of legitimacy or legality – scrapers are bad, but syndication and authorized duplication are fine. Unfortunately, the algorithm doesn’t really care. The same content across multiple sites is SERP noise, and Google will try to filter it out.
The Solution
Here’s where things start to get tougher. If you own all of the properties or control the syndication, then a cross-domain canonical tag is a good bet. Choose which version is the source, or Google may choose for you. If you’re being scraped and the scrapers are outranking you, you may have to build your authority or file a DMCA takedown. If you’re a scraper and Panda knocked you off the SERPs, then go Panda.
You can read the rest of the article here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content