Google Panda was one of the most controversial algorithm update from Google, but with time it helped a lot to remove low-quality websites from search engine and overall it improved the quality of search results. Though for many webmasters, Google Panda updates are still a headache and at unknowingly many good websites lost their search engine ranking due to Panda penalty. If you are one of those bloggers who lost their web site traffic after latest Google panda algorithm update roll out, Here I will be sharing tested tips to recover from Google Panda.
Before we move ahead with panda recovery tips, I would like you to know Google Panda is a domain level penalty. What I mean is, if earlier you’ve had low-quality content, it was your content that was penalized, but now if you have low-quality content, your complete domain will be penalized. One of the simplest ways to get rid of Panda penalty is by getting rid of low-quality content. I will do a separate post for identifying low-quality posts but here I will give you a brief idea that will help you get started with the recovery process.
We all know that Google rolled out the Google Panda alga globally, and you might also have noticed many bloggers talking about a traffic increase or significant traffic drop. We always talk about SEO optimization of blog posts and since the Google Panda algorithm it’s become mandatory to do proper SEO on the site level and content level. In this post I will be talking about how to recover from Google Panda effect, and what you can do to better optimize your blog for the Google search engine, so that your blog will be bullet-proof from future Google Panda updates in 2015 and the coming years. Panda is just algorithm iteration, and as Matt Cutt, mentioned, now sites will also get penalized for over SEO optimization. So, I would suggest avoiding any black hate SEO (If you are doing it), and focus more on quality content and increasing your site’s social media presence. In particular, Google+1 is going to be a holy grail for bloggers in the future.
Before I move ahead with Google Panda recovery tips, let me tell you something about Shout Me Loud traffic. Shout Me Loud was affected by the Google Panda algorithm, and the traffic drop was around 60%. I have always taken care of SEO, but at the initial days of blogging, when I was new to blogging, most of my content was short and of low quality. We will look into a couple more factors that lead to Panda penalty for this site and other sites in my network. One thing, in particular, Google Panda taught me was about the importance of keywords, and why you need to have a target keyword in a post. Just for the info, in this process I recovered the traffic but as I mentioned, recovery was not 100%. Slowly it’s increasing, and by ranking for target keyword now I’m getting more targeted visitors.
As I mentioned above, Google Panda is a domain level penalty, so even a couple of bad content/posts can affect your overall blog ranking. The very first step you need to do is figure out thin content or content that doesn’t add much value. For example, in the initial days of my blogging, I usually wrote posts with 30-50 words with one image and a link. Something, which I can say doesn’t add much value to readers. I guess, this is the same dilemma with others too.
Often I found out I had much low-quality contents, thereby, I had a couple of choices: no-index them, delete them or update them with detailed information to make it a quality content, so that it would be helpful and useful to readers.
Anyways, before you find out more about recovering from the Google Panda algorithm change, first understand what kind of website Google Panda is going to affect.
- A website with low quality (Thin content)
- A website that works as content farm
- A website with useless pages indexed in Google (Same as content farm)
- A website with improper SEO structure
- Duplicate content (On-site and off-site)
- Too many advertisements
- Poor grammar
- Slow site loading time
- SEO over-optimization (Black hat SEO)
Here are some of the most common reasons for Panda penalty:
- Low-quality content: Too short, not well researched.
- Poor grammar (Still working on it) Sigh!
- Ad/content ratio
- Too many broken links (404 links)
Less CTR from Search engines (Poor meta title, weak meta description)
There could be other factors, but these are something that needed instant attention. Most of the broken links and redirects were quickly fixed by the Broken link checker WordPress plugin.
Now before we move ahead, here are some factors you should know about Google panda:
- It’s a domain level penalty.
- A few low-quality posts can drop overall domain ranking.
- Google trust quality sites.
- Google Panda lowers down overall ranking of low-quality sites.
- On-site SEO optimization becomes important.
- The quality of a post is taken as a prime factor for ranking.
- Niche based websites are better than generic sites.
So let me be honest. There is no way to get 100% of your traffic back by keeping the same content, but with a good strategy you can recover from Panda penalty and drive more traffic than what you had.
How to find out if the Google Panda algo affected your website?
This is the first thing that you should be doing as webmaster. The recent Panda update was rolled out on 23rd September 2014, go to your analytics and see the graphs for the date mentioned above and compare it with last 10 days. If you see a significant drop or rise in traffic, that means your website is getting the hiccups of the Google Panda effect.
Source: Shoutmeloud
