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:
- Look at your pages with the thinnest content and use robot tags to noindex them.
- Don’t plaster your pages with ads.
- Are you pulling in content from feeds? Pare down on these. They’re merely duplicate content.
- 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.
- 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.”
- Use images and videos to support your content, and place them above the fold.
- Use share buttons.
- Use comments to foster discussions.
- Build your brand—whatever that means to you.
- 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!
Search advertising can only carry you so far
If you rely on search advertising to bring home the bacon, be careful you don’t fall into a common trap for search marketers: putting everything into search and not enough into the outer reaches of the web, where people spend most of their online time anyway.
Building out your search campaigns fully is absolutely necessary. But you may reach a point where you’ve over-engineered them yet you’re scratching your head wondering why all the hard work optimizing and building isn’t paying off like it used to.
If this happens to you, let me ask you: what are you doing besides search?
I believe in a holistic approach to online marketing. It’s unfortunate Google Analytics is a last-touch attribution model because search appears to be your big winner when you’re winning. It’s true, search does deliver you people who are already interested in your brand or products. But that’s just the thing: they’re already interested. How did they get interested in the first place? This is where you should be looking when you’re in stuck in a rut wondering why search just isn’t performing like it used to.
In a recent article on Clickz entitled “How to distinguish between good and average talent,” writer Joni Ngai sums it up well:
One of the biggest myths that I have heard is search advertising, email, or what-so-ever channel is the most effective marketing channel. If you are looking into the customer journey, there are many customer touch points, including both offline and online communications. Search is normally the last mile used to drive the customer to take the desired end action, such as to register for the special deal or purchase the product. Without understanding that there are other activities and customer touch points that would ‘attribute’ to the final outcome, wrong decisions are often made. I have seen brands that have stopped all other advertising and allocate their entire budget to search. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the desired results. Why?
Those who understand the attribution model would not make such a decision because they always think through and focus on the customer journey in a more holistic way and they use technology to help them when it is necessary. It is this ‘integrated’ strategy that takes the customers through the journey to the end goal.
