If you own a website, you will agree with me that there is nothing as devastating as waking up one bright morning only to realize that your website traffic has been seriously affected. The rolling out of the Google Panda stoked controversy with website owners crying foul. Even the most authoritative sites registered a dip in traffic and everyone was in up in arms. To this date, there have been 4 updates of Google Panda ostensibly designed to expunge low-quality content from number one page of Google.
Before we look at how you can recover from Google Panda effect, it’s important that we look at the kind of sites that attract a Google Panda penalty. These are:
- Websites with thin content (low-quality weak content)
- Websites with duplicated content
- Websites that utilize black hat SEO
- Websites that contain content with poor grammar
- Websites that don’t have a proper SEO structure
- Websites that essentially work as content farm
- Websites with too many ads
- Websites that take too long to load (slow loading time)
If any of your websites have any of the above, you can be rest assured that they won’t be immune to a Google Panda update and as a result will suffer a dip in traffic and rankings. But how do you recover from a Google Panda penalty once you’ve been hit?
Expunge low-quality content from your site
Considering the fact that Google Panda is designed to penalize sites with thin or low-quality content, the first thing you need to do is ensure that you have a good and high-quality content in your blog or website. You need to ask yourself whether the content on your site is well researched, gives value to the readers and in good grammar. Getting rid of low-quality content should be your first step.
Embark on writing high-quality content
The content you post on your site should provide value to your target readers, be well researched, in proper sentence structure and communicate your message in the most simple and comprehensible manner. If you are not a good writer, you can always enlist the services of a professional writer. You also need to replace low-quality content with high-quality content.
Avoid posting duplicated content
Now that we’ve gathered low-quality content will seriously affect the ranking of your site, the next thing is to ensure that your content is unique and not duplicated. Duplicated content whether it is within your own domain or cross-posted will seriously hurt the health of your website. Plagiarism is something that Google takes very seriously hence it’s important that you post only unique content on your website.
Be conversant with how SEO works
You cannot effectively recover from Google Panda if you are oblivious of the search engine optimization basics. Not learning about SEO is a gamble you cannot afford to take as the future of your website and everything else depends on it. In essence, you need to be familiar with keyword research, optimization of keywords, effectively building of backlinks, on page SEO and off page SEO among others.
Avoid linking to low-quality sites
The links to your site should be natural and those to other external sites should be containing relevant and useful information to your websites. Check whether your site has any broken links and rectify the problem. A flurry of too many useless links will negatively affect the ranking your site.
If you have suffered a dip in traffic and ranking due to the Google Panda update, you need not give up and become disillusioned but rather use the above mentioned ways to make your site rank highly once again.
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