2013 has been widely regarded as the year of SEO. While most bloggers applied SEO techniques to dramatically improve their sites’ position on search engines, a number of people with malicious intent managed to come up with several spam algorithms and spurious methods which were dishonest in nature, and then incorporated them into their sites to get their ratings up. This trend, however, has been burnt to the ground thanks to Google’s newest invention in 2014- the Google Panda Algorithm.
What is Google Panda?
While previous versions of Google algorithms too had a pretty wide reach, none of them can touch the level of the Panda algorithm. Designed with the sole purpose of purifying the internet from spam methods and poor quality websites, Panda is able to track down and penalize 99% low quality or spam webpage within seconds. It is an incredibly advanced tracking algorithm which does not only affect a single webpage but can also bring down the ranking of your entire website. It not only singles out spam sites, but also is capable of burying any site with low quality content.
How does Panda Catch You?
Your site is incredibly vulnerable to Panda if it contains plagiarized content, or posts articles shorter than 150 words in size. Content farms and articles with high percentage of grammatical errors are immediate victims of this new algorithm. If your site is too slow, or has a number of links to low-quality sites, it will be flagged as well. Hidden content and broken links are also detected with ease.
What you can do to Escape Panda
Realistically, the only thing webmasters should do to protect their site from the wrath of Panda is to improve the quality of content on their website. You must find and eradicate any content or blog posts which are of poor quality, are replete with grammatical or spelling errors or contain broken links or links to poor quality websites. While you may use a webmaster tool, it will not be easy to keep track of “good” and “poor” content because Panda will attack the ratings of every page on your site. So, editing manually is the most foolproof way of rescuing your site. If you have several sample pages or useless pages, you must de-index them by selecting the “remove URL from search” option in Google Webmasters WordPress tool or any analogous tool on your CMS. Posts with high keyword density are almost instantly flagged as spam. You must shuffle your words around and also use plugins like EasyWPSEO or Yoast WordPress SEO which help you optimize your posts easily.
The Ultimate Remedy
In a situation like the present, when the world of content marketing has changed completely, you need an effective SEO assistant which will be able to manage a number of aspects of your website by itself, and be able to present quality content with a high ranking even after being thoroughly scanned by Google Panda. This is where Paradox SEO comes in. Gone are the days of low rankings. Paradox SEO is a one-of-a-kind complete SEO solution which has been programmed and designed by experts to single out the good content and set aside the bad content in your site. It also provides directions for improving your score by analyzing over 200 different ranking signals. It doesn’t just collect metrics but also interprets them to send the blogger in the right direction.
Guest article written by: Dam Miller is an expert on [tp lang=”en” only=”y”]Paradox SEO[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]Paradox SEO[/tp] and he is in this industry for the past 10 years. He likes to share his knowledge with other SEO professionals. You can read his other articles here.
Hi Dam,
Thanks for the explanation of what specific kinds of things will trigger Panda to think your website is spammy or full of errors.
I had trouble with Panda last year. I have a series of posts called ’10 Free Things to do in …’ various cities around the world. Prior to Panda, Google LOVED these posts and many of them were in SERP 1-8 for their keywords! suddenly, Google decided those posts were all over-optimized!
I didn’t know what the problem was, however. I just saw a massive decline in my Google search results and many of my posts completely disapeared from search entirely!
I hired an SEO expert, a friend, who quite luckily figured out teh problem and worked with me to correct all those posts. Thank God she knew what was wrong, else I would never have figured it out.
It’s very aggravating when Google changes its policies so taht they adversely affect sites, like mine, that were following google’s previous policies correctly. Not too fair, really. A lot of good sites are getting caught up accidentally in their changes. Boo.
IN any event, I was able to resolve my issues. That time.
Thanks for explaining a number of points that Panda could find wrong with our sites as well as suggesting what to do about them.
cheers, Lash