Email Marketers on guard as Google Panda bites down on bad content

While optimization experts are still altering their websites to test the reach and SEO punching power of Google’s Panda Update; now more than ever: content, presence and more importantly; domain authority in terms of organic search results, are a part of the same email marketing kung fu.

Ranking well on a Google search has become the single most important aspect of online marketing. Google is brawling to reward relevant and well-written content, so keeping your website on the safe side of the bamboo-munching algorithm is a big part of staying top-of-mind with consumers.

The Panda Update, which is the most recent change to the omnipotent ranking machine, hit the international online marketing and SEO community hard, since it suddenly rendered worthless hours of link building and article syndication. Google is disrupting standard online marketing practices that have been successfully pushing products on search engine users, with its new sweet-tooth for quality content. 

A number of questions have been posted by the search-mammoth in an attempt to loosely answer what the Panda update is about. According to Google, the chief queries when evaluating content should include:

•    Does the site have redundant articles on the same or similar topics?
•    Does this article have factual, stylistic, or language errors?
•    Are the topics driven by genuine site reader interests, or does it generate content by guessing what might rank well in search engines?

All of which is really just another way of saying that large amounts of poor or duplicated content will impact your entire domain and online reputation. This has been something of a moot point for email marketers since pushing sends via opt-in mailing lists directly to subscribers means that the big bad panda has no direct influence on their bulk marketing campaigns.

Or does it?

Email newsletters are sent directly to a subscriber’s inbox, which doesn’t get crawled and read by Google, and therefore place no direct weight on one’s page authority. However viewed broadly, the purpose of email newsletters is to provide content that will spread virally; planting ideas, suggestions and desires into the minds of the market. Newsletters (or parts thereof) get forwarded to friends, shared socially or can be republished, repurposed or referenced in any number of ways. You may even add HTML newsletters on your own website, in which case Google will consider it to be a part of your domain’s content mesh. Whatever the case may be, there is an excellent chance that your newsletter could at some point or another fall under the Panda’s pouncing peer.

Google’s unleashing of their new verb-savvy pet  may not be as much out of the good intentions they have proliferated in the press - of eliminating black hat SEO practices and ensuring that readers are directed to the best and most relevant content possible. Social share is going big and the search empire is ever vigilant that their grip on site ranking is slipping as a result. Facebook is slowly devouring traditional search engine home turf, which has Google kicking up fur in an attempt to fight off what seems like an almost inevitable slump towards becoming an endangered stock. 

For now though the Panda is the king of numbers, so it’s business as almost-usual. Our advice for the next time you compose an email marketing newsletter is to pause in consideration; take steps to create impactful, quality content to ensure you're out of the grips of the panda's claws.