Joey Muller dot com

10 ways to wrestle Google Panda

Google’s recent update to its search algorithm, called Panda, has left many sites scrambling to pick up lost traffic. Unfortunately it’s an uphill battle for most of these sites. As WordTracker’s Mark Nunney wrote earlier this week: 

The problem with Panda is that it’s a hack to fix a broken algorithm.

Large content farm sites containing crap were appearing at the top of Google’s SERPs. The sites were not breaking any rules.

Google’s algorithm couldn’t stop them.

Specialist quality sites like those talked about in this article were getting top for populist searches they weren’t built for.

Google’s algo was not working well enough.

Searchers were finding inappropriate and poor sites and this is a threat to Google’s success.

Aaron Wall goes further than this and says that the content farm industry publicly made Google look stupid

Google had to act.

But it couldn’t fix the algo. So it bolted on Panda.

Panda is not part of the main algo. Panda is run every 4-7 weeks. Panda does not change the algo so that better results appear for every keyword search.

Instead any site that falls foul of Panda gets crudely wiped out by a site-wide, all-keyword handicap. That handicap can’t be lifted until the next time Panda has been run.

And it probably won’t be lifted then because very few sites have had a Panda slap lifted.

Yikes! All those years of hard work spent building back links, optimizing pages for the long tail, designing content silos and creating better internal site links, wiped away in an instant! It seems hardly fair and if you ask me, it’s not! But I’ve been around long enough to know Panda is just another thing Google does… because it can. Learn from it, do the best you can, and change your strategies if necessary.

Ok, how do you combat the negative effects of Panda? Here’s a condensed summary of Mark’s suggestions:

1. Look at your pages with the thinnest content and use robot tags to noindex them.
2. Don’t plaster your pages with ads.
3. Are you pulling in content from feeds? Pare down on these. They’re merely duplicate content.
4. Use your analytics know-how to find pages with high bounce rates. What keywords are driving traffic there? Maybe those keywords simply don’t match the content. De-prioritize them.
5. The reverse of number 4: further optimize pages for keywords that ARE working on your site, as demonstrated by low bounce rates and high “average time on site.” 
6. Use images and videos to support your content, and place them above the fold.
7. Use share buttons.
8. Use comments to foster discussions.
9. Build your brand—whatever that means to you.
10. Refer to Mark Nunney’s Google Panda update survival guide. It’s a must have for SEOs and web product / site managers.

Got a Panda success story? Panda fail? Let me know!