Professional SEOs have long contended that Google shows favoritism to big brands. This may or may not be true.

Some SEOs argue Google’s made some changes that more or less continue the evolution of the internet. And it just so happens big brands benefit the most.

What’s the truth?

We don’t know.

But what we do know about Panda 4.1 is that it’s very clearly designed to help small and medium-size businesses. Forbes wrote a blog post announcing this.

It’s nice to have something cut-and-dry in an ever changing world of search engine algorithms.

Panda itself is really all about taking poor and low-quality content websites and shoving them to the bottom of the search results. Panda 4.1 just means Google does this with even more accuracy than ever before.

Panda 4.1 Winners and Losers

Depending on the quality of your site’s content, you could experience very good or bad results.

Check out some of the winners:

• Comdotgame.com – 1353% traffic gain
• Hongkiat.com – 406% traffic gain
• Babble.com – 379% traffic gain

And here’s what happened to the losers:

• Yellow.com – 79% traffic loss
• Similarsites.com – 79% traffic loss
• Free-coloring-pages.com – 76% loss

What Specifically Should You Do (or Not Do)?

There are no precise answers to what to do about Google Panda 4.1. If you understand SEO and what Google’s trying to do with the web, you’ve been writing high-quality content for some time now.

Even if you’ve noticed a huge dip in traffic over the last couple weeks (when the update was rolled out), you can still recover. But it may not be cheap!

If you’re a small business and you write the content with an attitude of offering the most value for your readers, you’ll be just fine. Hiring professional agencies and writers can pull you more leads, get better engagement, and get your rankings higher than an in-house employee or doing it yourself.

But as long as the words you write make sense and are helpful, you should be okay as a general rule.

4 Simple Tips for Pleasing Panda:

1. You want your bounce rate as low as possible. If it’s above 70%, your writing needs work or you need to ask your customers questions and answer those on your blog.
2. Make sure what you write is unique. If you’re a contractor, odds are your topic has been written about hundreds or thousands of times. But, most blog posts are brief. Go in-depth and write the best guide ever that includes everything your customers need to know about the topic.
3. Include rich media to increase engagement. Add a few simple images. Slip in a YouTube video. Create an Excel chart and insert it. Anything you do to break up the words gets you lower bounce rates, longer times on the page, and more social shares.
4. Write for your customers, not Google. Make them happy and Google will love you too. After all, its job is to give searchers the most interesting results.

Keeping your Google Rankings is simple – always deliver value to your website visitors.

But it isn’t easy!

Focus on working hard over the long term, and Google will reward you as a result.