10 Ways To Recover From The Google Panda Update
After the dreaded panda update to Google’s search algorithm there have been a lot of horror stories online about how people have lost rankings and traffic. auto posted blogs no longer generate anywhere near the same amount of traffic. The features of Pandas update mean certain SEO methods are now defunct. Only marketers who learn how to adapt their services for the better will survive. Posting articles on Press Release sites is not going to get you the rankings like it used to do.
I thought I would write a guide on the top 10 ways to stop the effects of panda on your website.
1. Stop Auto Posting!
Before the panda update you could run an auto blogger and do pretty well with targeting your blog to a particular subject and putting tools in place to link certain keywords.
The panda update has stopped this and put simply, theirs no way to recover from it and still auto blog. You simply have to write fresh, unique content. Try to create a content building service that revolves around a couple of unique content posts a week on your blog, this will do wonders of overcoming the effects of Panda.
2. Don’t Just Post Press Releases From PR Companies.
This was a big killer for one of my blogs. Traffic dropped 80% after the panda update, because we were just copy and pasting press releases sent to us from pr companies.
Now days you HAVE to read them and re-write them, if the press release was worthwhile to put on your website in the first place, making it unique by re-writing it will do wonders to your blog.
The simple fact is that it would have done more before the panda update too!
3. Make Sure To “NoFollow” Outbound Paid Links.
Put it this way, Google hates paid link building. Google doesn’t like the idea of websites selling authority and believes that link building should be natural.
There are websites out their that base the worth of their links on page rank, and even though PageRank is old it can relate to the authority of the website.
Adding NoFollow will cut the effect that panda will penalize your website.
4. Don’t Just NoFollow Every Link.
NoFollwing every link is just as bad as leaving every link as default to do follow.
Linking to Authority websites in your websites category shows that you are associated with the websites category and also shows you’re not just a spammer.
5. Make Sure Your Address Is On The Website.
Google likes to see businesses take responsibility for their websites, posting an address gives your website a respectable and responsible look online.
6. Create A Privacy Policy And Terms of Service.
Terms Of Service and a Privacy Policy work the same way as adding you address, it shows Google you’re a respectable and responsible website online. New UK laws around cookies also state you need to tell visitors of any tracking information so adding this will help with that too.
7. Check The Ratio Of Ads To Content Ratio Isn’t Too High.
If your ratio of adverts to content is too high, Google will rank your website lower as it classes is as a website only out to make money via adverts. we’ve all seen them, websites full of adverts without hardly any content, or domain squatters just posting adverts linked to the keywords in the title. The panda update has ranked these kind of websites lower.
8. Make Sure Your Website Design Has Been Coded Properly.
Badly coded website design is a real killer. Make sure you use a respectable website designer (like us!) who can code your site so its valid, and has a basic SEO Aware layout. Make sure titles are set correctly, 1 H1 per page with H2′s under it and so forth.
9. Act Against Plagiarism To Keep Your Content Unique.
As soon as your content isn’t unique anymore it will be ranked lower. Act against plagiarism, make sure you get other copies of your work taken down. Make sure you state that your work is copyrighted to you! a great free plagiarism checker is http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/
10. Improve The Loading Time Of Your Website.
If your site is slow loading, Google will rank your site lower than a faster performing website. Make sure your images are small in size and not stretched a great tool to help with image size is http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/.
Make sure you don’t have to many calls to Css and Javascript files, if you can combine and minify them! check out http://code.google.com/p/minify/
Also make sure you use the async google analytics code, this will help load times massively.
One small tip i have here is that when we had the Facebook like widget from the Facebook developers it actually slowed our site down around 3 seconds and included over 10 calls to Facebook!
I hope this guide helps you and if you have any tips yourself please leave a comment as We are very eager to here other peoples experience with the Google panda update.
