How to survive/recover from Google Panda/Farmer update–A close look
The recent Google Panda update has affected around 12% of the search results (actually more) and has now gone Global. Many websites is suffering from low traffic including some big portals.
Lets quickly move to the probable factors which could make your website vulnerable to Google Panda/Farmer Update:
- Website does not have enough content to be useful (shallow content).
- A low amount of original content on a page or site or a high % (or number) of pages with a low amount of original content.
- The content of the website has been copied from other sites. This might apply to a web-page, a site or both. If it’s a site measure then that might contribute to each page’s evaluation.
- The website has poorly written content (Spin contents).
- Page content as well as page title not matching the search queries a page does well for.
- Over-Optimized (on-page) webpages like excessive use of a word or phrase on a page.
- High bounce rate on a page or very low visit time.
- Low CTR % (click through rate) ie. amount of clicks going to a page or site from Google search results divided by the amount of impressions.
- High % of content place holder contents (boilerplate), repeated content on every page.
- Low quality(or %) of inbound links to a page or site.
- Low social media presence of a webpage or site.
One more very important point :
High Quality website or pages Can be Affected as well.
The low quality content on part of a website can impact the rankings of the entire website. This could be possible in case of quality websites as well.
Following is what Google suggested in their Official discussion forum:
“It’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.
For this reason, 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.”
Troubleshooting Google Panda/Farmer Update:
Following are some important points you can do to avoid or troubleshoot Google Panda negative impact:
- Check all pages of your website (specially those which provides you more traffic) for any poor or copied content. Re-write the content if you cannot remove it.
- Ask yourself, if the page has quality content and is useful to your visitors?
- Check Ads/content ratio on a web page. Ads spoil the quality of a webpage.
- 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 301 redirect from them to relevant pages higher up your site’s hierarchy).
- If you have lots of pages which duplicate content of your own websites then implement rel=”canonical” tag pointing to the original content.
- If you have any web-page which is over-optimized ie. specifically targeted to a particular keyword (check keyword density) then edit and fix it.
- Make user-experience better.
- Promote your content/blog on social media including twitter, facebook etc
- Check Google webmaster tool for any possible crawl errors.
If you have need any assistance regarding Google Panda update, contact me at sales@seofreelance.net. You can also fill in the form at the left.