Google Panda update survival guide
The aims of Panda are noble: to remove poor quality sites from the top of Google’s results pages. Or as Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam, puts it in a blog post announcing Panda.
"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."
What factors make a site vulnerable to Panda?
Conduct qualitative research (that’s speaking with individuals and not a big questionnaire) to find out which of a sample of sites they considered to be low quality and why.• Use the results to define low quality sites with the factors that Google can measure. This gives Google a mathematical definition of low quality.
If we start here, we can think of a number of factors that Google might be able to measure to define low quality, including:
• A high % of duplicate content. This might apply to a page, a site or both. If it’s a site measure then that might contribute to each page’s evaluation.
• A low amount of original content on a page or site.
• A high % (or number) of pages with a low amount of original content.
• A high amount of inappropriate (they don’t match the search queries a page does well for) adverts, especially high on the page.
• Page content (and page title tag) not matching the search queries a page does well for.
• Unnatural language on a page including heavy-handed on-page SEO (‘over-optimization’ to use a common oxymoron). Eg unnatural overuse of a word on a page.
• High bounce rate on page or site.
• Low visit times on page or site.
• Low % of users returning to a site.
• Low click through % from Google’s results pages (for page or site).
• High % of boilerplate content (the same on every page).
• Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site (by count or %).
• Low or no mentions or links to a page or site in social media and from other sites.
If any of these factors is relevant to Panda, it is unlikely that they will be so on their own.
Google Panda have said that “low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.”
It's important to define the difference between an algo change and a penalty.
A penalty must be served if it has a time limit and lifted if it is to be removed.
An algo change exists and its results will continue until it is changed, your site changes (or your site gets whitelisted).
Panda is an algo change but no ordinary one. It's an algo change that works like a penalty because if your site crosses the Panda Line then the whole site is affected, quality pages too.
Is a Panda penalty applied at the keyword level?
To find out if Panda is applied at the keyword level and not just to pages you can:• Find a page that gets results for different keywords
• See if Panda has had different effects on traffic for those different keywords (but to the same page).
• 36 scraped versions of the article.
• two showing above the page with the original.
• one of these being a low quality scrape on a low quality site.
• The other being a part scrape that credits and links back to the original.
• The original page has lost 75% of its organic US Google traffic since Panda.
• That traffic came from over 1,000 different keywords and of those I tested none had been spared.
What to do if you’ve been hit by a Panda
Google suggest:"If you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”
Let’s add a bit more to that, put it into practical actions and make a process …
• Find the pages and page types hit worst on your site.
• Isolate differences between those hit and those not.
• Test changing those factors on hit pages but use this method of analysis with caution because the pages hit most might not be the pages earning you the penalty.
• Make a list of your different types of pages. Eg, forum, quality article, low quality article, light category, quality category, product, blog post, etc. Put the list in a column in a spreadsheet and start building a table.
• Add columns for relevant factors like ‘lots of ads’, little content, some dupe, all dupe, etc and also number of pages and % drop in Google US organic visits. Fill in the values for each type of page.
• Look at how much of your site (% of pages) is taken up by your lowest quality pages and improve that.
• If you are scraping or otherwise copying other site’s content, replace it with quality original content or test removing some (or even all) of those pages (and adding 301s from them to relevant pages higher up your site’s hierarchy).
• If you have a large number of pages with dupe (of your own copy), weak or almost no content, improve them or remove (and 301) them or block them from Google with robots.txt.
• If you have lots of pages that dupe your own copy (eg, as happens with some content management systems and on a lot of ecommerce sites that build new URLs for ‘faceted’ pages) then add rel=canonical tags to the ‘duped’ pages. This stops Google seeing those pages as dupes.
• Edit any ‘over-optimized’ pages.
• Improve anything that might make the user’s experience better.
• Offer users more when they first enter a page. Eg, images, videos, attractive text and pages linking to your best, related editorial content.
• If possible, make your content’s language more accessible and more real?
• Promote your content on social media including Twitter and Facebook.
• Build your brand awareness across the web wherever you can.
• If you’re sure your site is ‘Google clean’ and worthy, Let Google know about it but don’t expect this to have much effect.
• Make as many of these changes as you can at once in the hope of shaking off the penalty quickly. With editorial content improving, you can then add back any marketing you are missing, in steps, checking to see you don’t get slapped again.
