If you website hasn’t been hit yet by Google Panda, consider yourself lucky. There is no doubt we have stepped into another new year, but it hasn’t stopped the search giant Google from rolling out yet another Panda update.
Last year it unleashed the most belligerent campaign of major algorithm updates even in its campaign to fight against spam. 2013 seems more of the same. Since Google Panda hit the whole scene 2 years ago, thousands of websites have been clawed. Even sites generating an avenue in six figures found that their entire livelihood got evaporated overnight! It is largely because they didn’t take the update seriously and follow Panda guidelines.
Over the couple of years iSearch Solution has helped a number of website owners recover from this algo update. The team also has worked with our existing clients to Panda proof their sites and none of our client’s site victimized by Panda.
We have pulled a list of to Dos as well as action plans to help your website avoid the risk of penalty. The steps include:
Wipe out Low Value & Low Quality Content:
The main purpose of Google with Panda is to assist users to find high-quality websites by shrinking the visibility of low-quality content that is able to perform well at scale, algorithmically. So it must be your critical mission to weed out that low-value content from your website.
But here is the million dollar question what constitutes low quality and how to identify?
Looking at user engagement signals used by Google to identify low-quality content is a much more realistic approach. This approach would comprise key-behavioral metric like anemic unique page views, Low to no visits, Short time on page and High bounce rates.
You may find these metrics a bit susceptible and noisy to external factors, but these are most competent method to bring low-value content to light at scale.
There are some ways by which you can manage the pages having low-quality content and poor performance. These include:
- Removing any low content to no user engagement signals
- To improve visitor agreement, adding additional internal links or can say practicing deeper indexation
- Merging the content of low or shallow pages into thicker or more useful documents
Flush out Duplicate Content:
Duplicate or copy content issues have always been found serious for websites as well as SEOs. The search engine giant Google has taken a noticeably different approach to how take charge against websites with high degrees of unoriginal content. Dupe and duplicate content may sink the entire site.
So with that consideration, website owners require taking the issue of duplicate content seriously. In order to Panda proof your website you must be thinking about purging duplicate content.
Here are a few steps and suggestions that include:
- Meta directives
- 301 redirects
- Canonical tags
- Remove URLs via Webmaster Tools
- Block pages via Robots.txt file
- Choose your favorite domain in Webmaster Tools
Undoubtedly, cleaning up presented dupe content is of utmost importance. But it’s just as critical to take a precautionary measure as well. It means, concentrating on the root cause of the duplicate content problems before they finish up in the index. Here we have listed some great ideas on how to keep away from duplicate-content problems altogether.
Thicken-up Thin or Shallow Content:
Google generally put the thin content in its hate list. And this condescension is not just reserved for spammy scraper websites or emaciated affiliates. Even this theory may also get directed at websites having unoriginal content or very little original content. Such sites also come into the category of low content containing sites.
The recommendations to thicken up the thin content of such sites include:
- Add images & videos
- Put a thousand words of fresh value-add content on the web-page in an effort to treat every page as a complete guide on a particular topic
- Encourage user reviews
- Pipe in an API data as well as content mash ups
- Set thin pages off to sub-domains that Google hints at
It is worth observing that these recommendations can be applied to most types of low content pages.
Develop High-Quality Content:
On the backside of checking the low-value content problems, you must always publish the highest quality content over your website. For majority of websites, it is a total change in mindset, but nevertheless raising your content publishing principles is mandatory to make your site Panda-proof.
Google give relevance to two types of content:
- The content published on the site should be highly informative
- The content should be easily understandable
Well, these are just fundamental preventative measures for Panda proofing. Don’t run behind the ranking game only, make your content worthwhile and allow it grab users’ attention by implementing these preventative methods.