Google Panda Update: What Does It Mean for Travel Websites?

Google’s recent Panda update has hit the world of search hard and sent shock waves through the web. Many huge web businesses have been hit hard and seen traffic plummet by millions of visitors. But what was ‘Panda’ and how will it affect your travel marketing?

Sad Pandas
The aim of the Panda update was to reward high quality content and ‘punish’ large sites which house low quality or duplicate content without providing real value for the user. It resulted in many large sites seeing a severe loss of organic traffic, in particular article submission sites, voucher code sites and information portals. Many more suffered, though Google gave away clues as to what you needed to do to recover from Panda 1.0 which resulted in sites across the web scrambling around and updating content as quicly as possible.

Travel Industry
But what does it mean for the travel industry and travel websites? Panda has basically reinforced the need for your site to be full of quality content that users will find useful and trustworthy. If your website has reams and reams of duplicate content or is packed with low value, unregulated content from guests then you need to switch the focus to creating quality, unique content that users are more likely to share. This might be a long job, but it will be worth it in the long run if you want the Google machine to be your friend again. If you want ranking success then you need to give the Panda what it wants!

Link Building Implications
The Panda update also has implications on how you carry out the link building activities on your site. If your link building campaign was focused on article submissions or paid links on low quality sites then you’ll be getting less link juice from those sites since Panda struck. The emphasis on carrying out a white hat link building campaign and participating in the travel community has become more important than ever.

If Panda has hit your site hard then get in touch and SEO Travel will help you get your site back in line with Google’s guidelines and bring back the visitors that the Panda ate up.