What is Google Panda and how to recover after Google Panda effect?
Before helping you with the Panda recovery tips, it is very important to know what Google Panda is?
Since February 2011, Google started using Google Panda which is a change to Google’s search engine ranking algorithm. The main aim of Google Panda is to penalize low quality sites and return high quality sites at top of the search engines result. Google Panda affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results. If your site or blog is one of it, then the following tips will be useful to recover your site or blog from the Panda effect.
When you say a high quality site.What does it actually mean?
Following are the questions that must be asked in order to find out if a site is of high quality or not :
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
- Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
- Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
In order to increase the quality of your site, the above questions need to be answered.
Google Panda algorithm mainly focuses on the following drawbacks of a website:
- Website with low quality
- Website which works as content farm
- Website with not proper SEO structure
- Duplicate content
- Too many advertisements
- Poor Grammar
- Site loading time
- SEO over optimization (Black hat SEO)
How to find if your site is affected by Google Panda algorithm?
Decrease in traffic is an easy way to find the affect of Google Panda. But if your site traffic drop is result of panda or something else, is by analyzing traffic drop dates and matching it with Panda update dates given below.
- Once you are sure that your site is affected by Panda, first step is to analyze your site’s traffic and know where major changes have occurred. You also need to confirm that the traffic is reduced from Google organic, not from referrals and other sources. Now you have to find which pages have got penalty. Since there are many pages in your website/blog and different pages are getting traffic from different sources. You have to keenly observe and find out exactly which pages have been penalized by Google Panda. This can take time but you have to fight your way through.
- You need to go through the points that are mentioned above “drawbacks of a website”. These are the points that are mostly responsible for the panda affect. Therefore in most cases the pages which are stuffed with adds, duplicate pages, low quality pages, more keyword density, etc. are affected by the panda.
- Once you have found the pages that are affected by the panda algorithm, block those pages from Google to further crawl these pages. This will remove the effect of those pages on your website in future. Since these web pages are not participating in generating much traffic, blocking them won’t affect the traffic as much.
- However blocking all the affected pages is not an efficient way to handle the panda affect. So after finding the affected pages, calculate the number of pages that can be improved. Since blogs have posts and posts can be rewritten so you can take a chance to rewrite the blog post in a better way with more words and less keyword density and a better quality content. Content is the king. Always do a research before writing any post. Try involving visitors in your post and help them spend more time which is good for SEO. Reduce the number of advertisements on the pages as advertisements can cause interference to readers and could be a reason of decrease in traffic. After doing so if you end up with posts and pages that can’t be improved, delete them. No traffic, no money. Only a burden on the site.
Read more: What is Google Panda and how to recover after Google Panda effect?