Written by:
Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:33:34 GMT 

Was Your Website Affected By the Panda Update?

The panda update affected one in every eight websites in Google's index and is arguably the biggest algorithm update they have ever done. In studying many of the sites affected by this update, I have come up with a list of items they all have in common, and I think I have a pretty good idea of what caused people's sites to lose their rankings. Follow this guide and you can get out of the rut, and prevent your site from being dropped in the future.

1. Content

Does junk content generated by some "article generator" form the main content on your site? It doesn't matter how good your Markov algorithm is or how nice the articles look, if it doesn't make sense to a reader it's junk. This does not sit well with Google.

Are you scraping RSS feeds as your primary content? This is also a bad idea as this is duplicated all over the net. You can get some pretty neat software products to scrape RSS feeds and make pages out of them, or even scrape Wikipedia or similar sites, however, if you use this as your main content, you'll lose your rankings. Create your own content.

2. Links Spammed in Bad Neighbourhoods

Are you posting your links at FFA (free for all) sites or Link-dumps, etc? You could be putting yourself at risk. Take a good look at the site. Are they providing any real value to their visitors? If the answer is no then you shouldn't be posting your link there. Even if it is a "hot PR6 .EDU" domain with a backdoor that lets you post your own link, resist the temptation. Google uses human reviewers and they spot this stuff.

3. Comment Spam

Don't do it! There are plenty of good opportunities to post valuable comments on relevant sites. There is nothing wrong with this, however randomly commenting on sites just to get your links up is a bad idea. If you are trying to sell furniture and you post your link on a completely unrelated blog, you're doing nothing to help your rankings. In most cases people will filter and delete it anyway, and in the worst case Google will penalize you for it.

4. Watch Your Bounce Rate

Are you paying attention to your bounce rate? If you're using Google Analytics on your site, you can check your bounce rate to see how often people leave your site immediately. If you have a high bounce rate, make sure you add some content in to the site, and use the affiliate stuff for ads on the side, not actual content.

5. Keyword Stuffing

Another outdated SEO trick people use is loading up text with keywords. All this achieves is your text will be less readable, sound silly and compromise your credibility. It does not work. Keyword stuffing hasn't worked for years, and even less so now with the panda update. In fact, it actually hurts you. Adding keywords is fine, but keep the density very low (3-5%) and make sure it sounds natural. Read it out loud, and if sounds silly don't publish it.

Conclusion

I hope these tips help you get a better idea of how to panda proof your site. Even if you have been hit by this update, you can recover. By following these rules you can shield yourself against future updates.

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