The Panda Effect – How to Recover From It

Google Panda has been keeping everyone alert and frightened all the time. Though Panda is a good search engine due to its quality, it still is a nightmare for many. Earlier, if your site content was low in quality then only that content was penalized. That was not much of a scare for site owners. But with the current update, Panda penalizes the entire domain if the site content is has low quality and irrelevant content. This is literally dropping a bomb on the site owner. Bloggers are not sure when they will be hit with the penalty and what they should do to recover from it. Fear not, it can be worked out.

Let’s look into some of the reasons what are the checkpoints in Panda to penalize a website. Oops! Now it’s a domain.

1. Poor content quality – All sites with poor content quality are at high risk of falling prey to the Panda algo. A couple or more of irrelevant or low quality content will not pass the checker unnoticed.
2. Poor grammar in the content also is noticed by the tool. Even though you have valid and interesting content, if readers are not able to understand the language used due to grammatical errors then the tool penalizes you for that.
3. The SEO structure in your page is another very important factor to escape the tool. Improper structure has no shot at winning favor.
4. Too many advertisements – If your site contains way too many advertisements, then you may gain favor and income from the ad site owners, but Panda does not approve of having too many ads in any page.
5. Load time – Another very important factor is the site loading time. If your site has many ads or links then it may be very slow to load. Like normal audience, even Panda is impatient. Slow loading time of the site implies fast penalty by Panda.
6. Broken links – Some sites have a lot of links and the majority just lead to the 404 error page. Doesn’t it frustrate you when you are almost always led to the error pages? Well, it definitely irritates Panda checker.

How do you know if you have had the Panda attack? This is very simple. Monitor your site traffic of the past 10 – 15 days. Compare this result with the site traffic graph during the time Panda was released. If you see a drop in traffic, then have no doubt – you are under attack!

For those of you who were attacked, below are a few recovery tips. Follow them diligently and you can get a significant rise in the site’s traffic.

1. Improve your content quality:
Google appreciates contents that are good in quality and lengthy. When I say lengthy, I don’t mean pages and pages. A good blog can be written in an average of 500-1000 words and presented very well. Also, it is equally important to have keywords in your article. The article may be well written, nicely presented and easy to understand, but if there are no keywords in the write up, then it will not be displayed in the Google search results.
2. Make your content SEO optimized:
Writing keywords is an important aspect in the blog writing profession. SEO optimized sites will always show up in search results while others are less often shown. Search engines have some inbuilt algorithms based on which they decide the ranking of a site. These rankings decide where you site should show up in the search results list. Use HTML tags, heading tags to emphasize your text so that they get a good ranking.
3. Remove Duplicate and unnecessary pages / content:
Some sites contain many indexed pages and links to navigate to each page. Most of these pages show up in the Google search results. When looking into the contents of the page, they may be the same as the 1st few pages of the site. This leads to duplicate content in the site. When these pages show up in the search results they are termed as unnecessary pages in the site. Remove these pages and instead, keep healthy authentic content which are not duplicated anywhere else in the site. Let your site be small, it doesn’t matter. But let it be readable and interesting.
4. Promote your site:
You may not believe this but a lot of likes from Facebook, Google+ and other social networking sites will definitely help increase the ranking of your site. Include links to social networks so that people can like any content, share it if they like and rate your articles. If they see that the public like your content and are reading it then who can stop your site from growing strong?

Mentioned here are few of the tips which can help you in increasing you site audience and thus the traffic. This does not guarantee a 100% bounce back in the eyes of Panda checker. But at least a 70% increase in traffic can definitely be seen and you can live without the fear of being penalized again.