E-commerce Sites Should Be Prepared to Face Google's Panda

E-commerce Web sites should clean up their content before Google’s (News - Alert) “Panda” goes global, according to Greenlight, an independent research firm.

Google is taking special efforts to eliminate duplicate content on Web sites. The search engine giant is also looking at an algorithm change, Panda, to reduce low quality content.

Panda is designed to tackle content farms. It is expected to destroy the rankings of spam sites which many Google users are sick and tired of seeing in the search engine results pages (SERP). After its successful run in the U.S. it may hit the U.K. sites.

Greenlight is urging Web sites to take necessary steps to ensure their sites rankings and that visibility is not affected. Greenlight also unravels how the update might go about judging quality content and sorting it from the junk.

The content on Web sites should be well written. Businesses should aim to attract many clicks when ranking in Google, by optimizing the message with the page title, meta description and URL.  In each pages, there should be multimedia to offer better experience to consumers. Users should have clear options to go elsewhere on the site if the first landing page does not "do it" for them in the first instance.

“We know Google has strongly considered using user click data in this way,” said Adam Bunn, director of SEO at Greenlight, in a statement. “It filed (and was granted), a patent called method and apparatus for classifying documents based on user inputs describing just this.”

According to Bunn, it is likely Google only uses this data heavily in combination with other signals as user click data as a quality signal, is highly susceptible to manipulation. Hence it’s historically being such a minor part of search engine algorithms,

User click data concerns the behavior of real users. Google can track click through rates (CTRs) on natural search results.  It can track the length of time a user spends on a site. This collective in all probability provides enough data to draw conclusions about user behavior. 

Despite regulatory and economy challenge, e-commerce is doing well. The online retail spending reached $43.4 billion in Q4 2010. This online retail spending does not include travel e-commerce growth consisting of auctions, automobiles and large corporate purchases, according to comScore, a leading provider of digital world measures.