This past 6 months or so has seen many businesses hit by Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, with some online presences failing to appear in SERP at all. The idea from Google is to make search results more useful and relevant to searchers, but in reality, all it really seems to be doing is making sure the big brands who can afford massive advertising campaigns are always on top.
Google’s head of spam,
Matt Cutts, puts it slightly differently however. He says: “This [panda] update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."
However, the Panda updates come with collateral damage though: some sites which are of a high quality are still finding themselves penalised. If you think this is the case for your site, then the first step to take is to
report it to Google.
Of course it could be that Google’s robots are seeing something that you’re not when it comes to quality; with large sites especially, it’s often difficult to see the wood from the trees. So what makes a site especially vulnerable to Google?
In order to discover the things that people find to be of a low quality, Google first conducted research in which they questioned individuals on what they considered to be low quality. They then used the results to come up with algorithms which recognise a site as not being up to scratch.
These included:
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A high percentage of duplicate content on the site itself or within a post
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A high percentage of inappropriate adverts that don’t match the search queries a page does well for
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Page content doesn’t match the queries the site does well for
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‘Unnatural’ content which could point to over-optimisation (such as keyword stuffing)
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Low visit times on the site
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Low clickthrough from search results
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Low quality or lack of inbound links
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No mentions from social media.
It’s a
combination of these factors which will have an effect due to algorithm changes. To test if your site is being affected on a page or site level, then you can go into the ‘organic’ segment within Analytics to find out. All pages should see a similar drop if the entire site has been affected, whilst if it’s just a page, then all will become clear when you look at the analytics for each page.
It’s also a good idea to use Google Analytics to have a look at keywords. To do this, select a page which usually performs well due to keywords. It’s worthwhile here looking at more than one keyword to see if traffic has a different effect for each of the keywords.
How to overcome negative SERPs due to Panda updates
"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,” say Google.
It’s also a good idea to carry out a site-wide audit, including:
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Finding the pages which are causing the problem
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Looking at the difference between those and pages which are still performing
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Test changes in order to ensure site-wide consistency
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Duplicated or curated content should either be taken down or blocked from robots.txt
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Check accessibility
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Add alt tags to images
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Use social media to promote content
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Remove keywords where they have been used over-zealously and check content for grammar and spelling - if you can’t do this, employ someone who can.
Basically, if you follow white hat SEO practices, then you should have your site reclaiming its ranking position in no time.
Google’s updates have come in for a lot of criticism but they have also had a good effect, knocking content mills and link farms down the ranking and positioning them as what they are – useless. Don’t let bad SEO practices affect your site the wrong way, give it a good clean up if necessary and ensure that all future content is well planned out. Build quality links and don’t just add indiscriminate links and get rid of all that inline advertising!