10 Tips/Guides to Surviving Google Panda Update (SEO)

For so many people the Panda update is a disaster and there are a lot of people looking into going back to 9 to 5. There is a lot of chaos in the SEO world and article writing world at the moment. Some have even gone as far as saying that article writing as we know it is dead. No matter how the Panda update affects you, the truth is that life will never be the same. You need to remember that this is not the first time that Google updated their Algorithm. However, something major happened that has left even old timers worried.

Even though the intention of this update was genuine, unfortunately, some good sites that target the US-visitors have been hit by the Panda update, as well. If your site is one among those, then here are the top 10 tips to survive the Google Panda Update:

1 - Follow what Google suggests: “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.“ (Please see Google Panda Update guidelines link)

2 - Get rid of any possible duplicate content from within your site. Make use of the robots.text to block Google’s bot from scrolling your categories, tags and any other page that might appear as duplicate content.

3 - To help Google bots to get rid of the www and http://www confusion, add “rel=canonical” tags to block either of these versions of your URL structure.

4 - Find out the pages that are affected the most by the Google Panda Update and if these pages have a higher volume of duplicate content then rewrite and tweak them to make them unique.

5 - Stay away of too much advertisements on any particular page. The ratio of content vs. advertisement seem to have an impact on the overall ranking here.

6 - Find out how much of your site (% of pages) is constituted by your lowest quality pages and consider using 301 redirects to point them at the best and high quality pages of your site.

7 - Even if this doesn’t seem important, make sure you edit and ease up any pages that are ‘over optimized‘ [aka 'keyword-stuffed' in an desperate attempt to rank higher].

8 - Work towards a faster and higher quality site/blog that the readers would find informative, filled with quality editorial content and easy to navigate.

9 - For all those photo or video-centric sites or blogs out there, try ensuring that you include some meaningful textual content (related to the images) along with your photo/video galleries.

10 - To survive the loss in traffic caused by this Google Panda Update, opt for social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Try using these social media platforms to direct traffic to your business site and build up your brand presence.

Here's also 10 top fixes for Google Panda issues from squibble-canig.blogspot.com.

1. Noindex
2. 404 Not Found
3. URL Removal
4. 301 Redirect
5. Disallow: /tag
6. Nofollow
7. DMCA
8. Canonical Tags
9. Parameter Handling
10. Reconsideration Request

• Reference/Source: Techchunks.com[Mar 24, 2011]