Google's New Panda Algorithm Totally Changes Your Martial Arts Website Ranking

As is widely known, and also frustrating for some, Google has a tendency to make changes that may or may not be to everyone's liking. In the prevailing spirit of Google's wont to make distinctive changes, they've done it again! Panda, Google's largest, and most expansive change to Google's algorithm to date, has gone through some major changes itself lately. The changes affect everyone; martial arts websites and karate websites are no exceptions.

Search engine changes always impact webmasters more than anybody. The often unexpected changes can affect traffic to and from websites in conjunction with links to other sites. It used to be that visitors could find and access links on a website or blog that would link up to other sites totally unrelated to the specific industry of the page they were on. For example, on karate websites, you might find links to other pages that have nothing to do with karate or even martial arts websites. That's changed. And that's a good thing!

Also, reciprocal linking as gone the way of the Dodo. You can create a link to somewhere, but linking back is not an option. That certainly makes the web less of a web, but may make it more effective, with less criss-crossing and duplication. At least, that's the purported logic, I guess.

What did negatively impact websites is that 11+ million websites were booted from the search results! In other words, if a visitor does a search for martial arts websites, several of them may not show up in the search because their "popularity" isn't high enough to allow them to be found in the search. That says a big "ouch" for the little guy just starting out, or not big enough to justify a higher or even existing ranking. But it also sends a message to webmasters who think it advisable to create their own websites "off the cuff."

In Panda's February 24th debut in the U.S., it was estimated that nearly 12% of search inquiries were affected. Subsequently, Panda has been distributed to the U.K. and additional countries. In general, it wasn't greatly embraced, its alterations resulting in many people losing their jobs as a result of the Panda effect.

That was largely due to the huge losses of visitor traffic on some websites. Other websites had to radically change their basic operating procedures. Some websites even went on a serious rampage, trimming and cutting as they frantically raced through their programming and pages in an attempt to figure out how to fix problems they didn't expect to have, or could even define. Pages that had been effective and productive previously, were now clogging things up, slowing the flow of traffic. That had some serious impact for many martial arts and karate websites.

Too many links from websites and web pages with bad content, or irrelevant links, were affecting the search results. Promotion seemed to prevail instead of quality. As a result, the consumer complaints poured in.

Panda's subsequent improvements were meant to realign the system so that page quality, instead of promotion, would affect websites' appearance in searches. Those changes affect karate and martial arts websites in a very big way! It means that martial arts and karate websites need to re-evaluate their content and appearance, and quickly! They need to shake up their average to fair content, and consider removing their home-made content altogether!

It says a lot for the inclusion of professional quality website design for karate or martial arts websites! It underscores the necessity for, and benefits of, martial arts and karate websites opting for a professional website designer, thus ensuring that the websites will appear higher in the search engines, or even appearing at all! For website owners, it means forgetting the homemade designing, and letting the professionals hone their site to razor sharpness!

It's also become more crucial that websites have original text and content. That is more important now than ever before! If somebody is going create a website, it greatly behooves them to hire out to a professional web designer to make sure the content is uniquely original, relevant, succinct, concise, and professionally designed. Duplicated content will be more easily detected and, as a consequence, result in either being disallowed or in preventing the website's appearance in searches at all!