What does Google Panda consider to be content?

[Shatner]

We've been talking a lot around here about the amount of content on pages, and the originality of that content.

But here's a question I don't think has been addressed.

What does Google consider to be "content"?

Does it recognize, for instance, images as content? Or video embeds? Or does only text count as content?

A lot of people are talking about "thickening up" their pages for instance, but say you run an ecommerce site... could adding more product images be considered "thickening" it. What if you added four or five video embeds? Would that count too? Or does only originally written text count?

[rico_suarez]

many gallery sites don't have a single word of content and still rank high in their niches (graphics, photos, videos etc). Google certainly considers this as content. Having a single image or video on one page does not mean it's a thin page. But how it all works is a mystery to most of us...

[Shatner]

Maybe we should define it by what Google does NOT consider to be content?

Ads
widgets
whitespace
internal links
outbound links

I assume it doesn't count things like logos, etc but how does it distinguish those from images which might be content?

And how do we know it can tell say, an embedded video from a widget (assuming the video embed isn't something standard like Yahoo or Vimeo)?

[brinked]

widgets are most definitley content. Anything in flash can be considered content and there are a lot of full sites only available in flash

[Dan01]

I use alt tags AND title tags on images. Google talks about it on videos too, but typically I use YouTube, so they handle the tags.

[Shatner]

>>widgets are most definitley content. Anything in flash can be considered content and there are a lot of full sites only available in flash

Does Google know that though? And could it be confusing them with ads?

[dibbern2]

video content is listed and submitted in your video sitemap, so of course its content.

[Shatner]

>>video content is listed and submitted in your video sitemap, so of course its content.

What if it's not submitted in the sitemap? My question is what does Google really understand about what's on a page?

If a flash banner ad and actual flash content are basically implemented using the same type of code, how does Google know the difference?

I just notice that everyone who is talking about adding more content to their pages is only talking about it in terms of writing more text, and nothing else. Why?

[freejung]

I assume it doesn't count things like logos, etc but how does it distinguish those from images which might be content?

Probably by the number of pages the image appears on. If you have the same image at the top of every page, it's probably not "content" for any particular page.

[Shatner]

>>>Probably by the number of pages the image appears on. If you have the same image at the top of every page, it's probably not "content" for any particular page.

Or it could be duplicate content.

Must be more to it than that.

[SanDiegoFreelance]

Let me start to answer your question with a very related question - what does a teacher consider, "answer in your own words," to mean? Clearly the answer needs to be in the English language - using the appropriate terms. That being said I have seen sites where if I search for a sentence that same sentence appears (verbatim) on over 1000 other sites ... this being the case for many micro contractor sites, with the only difference being the city and company name ... they are and have been difficult to find even before panda.

To date I do not believe we are seeing any effort by google that images / flash or any content other than text is being looked at for uniqueness. What moved is that re-ordering the words so they are not verbatim but very similar in terms of words used and density are no longer acceptable if one reads between the lines of what has been said to the public.

I tend to think there is considerably more hype than actual changes. It would be mass slaughter to sites selling the same products if the requirement of uniqueness meant that one does not list the features of a product provided by the manufacture. However, it would be sure foolishness for a retailer to try to compete with say Apple by optimizing for the keyword Ipad using the content provided by apple.

If your only content is what is the talking points of products - you are running thin. Popularity may help but may not save you, if Google continues down the Panda path.

[Shatner]

>>To date I do not believe we are seeing any effort by google that images / flash or any content other than text is being looked at for uniqueness.

That's my belief too. Which is ridiculous if they are really that narrow focused, but it seems that way.

If it's true, that could mean you'll have a page with say, 50 unique images and 10 unique videos on it and one short paragraph of quoted text at the top, and that page would be a Panda penalty because it contains no unique content, in Google's eyes.

I think it's really important that we determine if this is true.

[SanDiegoFreelance]

Shatner, I do not think a great deal of optimization is possible with non-text content. Old school is it is already penalized in that regard whether or not it is unique (flash sites may have made progress, and it may not necessarily remain that way with html5 canvas, html5 svg, and flash all providing progressive information. But text is still core ... in urls, titles, links and on page. It is the links to flash sites inform Google of the importance and keywords.

Avoid the same text in titles and on pages. URLs be definition are unique - link text uniqueness does not come in to play because most links are the title or company name.

Progressive content using ajax, flash or using images / canvas text are methods to remove content which otherwise would be a repeat. A last ditch effort to avoid a penalty, which if you don't have one may never come. Kind of going to the extreme and not using the English language.

If the demand for uniqueness was as extreme as Hype would lead you to believe then ebay would be a loser.

Top 10 Gainers ... 1) ebay.co.uk = 42.06%

Now if text sites get hit with penalties based on nothing but similar content flash sites may be the last ones standing. But that is not a realistic expectation. People would switch over to bing.com when they don't find what they want.

Panda is a mix of thin content and other factors like heavy advertisements - ebay is thin with no outside ads.

Ehow is a loser who had content reworded (not much different than the rewording that goes on for products on ebay) and lots of ads.

[edited by: SanDiegoFreelance at 10:10 pm (utc) on Apr 22, 2011]

[dibbern2]

Its NOT a big deal. We know textual content is a factor in play, so you go with that.

The rest is secondary. It will become evident over the months to come.