10 Tips to Recover from Google Panda Update

How can your site recover from Google Panda Update? Google which makes roughly 500 yearly algorithm adjustments recently launched a new version of its famous Panda algorithm as reported by Matt Cutts on Twitter “Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).”

Google Panda Update Recovery

Google Panda Updates first came in the month of Feb 2011 which affected many top sites like HubPages, Squidoo, DaniWeb, etc. Many small publishers who are not concentrating on quality content got affected by this algorithm whose main aim was to reduce the ranking of low-quality sites.

My site also got affected by this update and I learned some tips from my mistakes which I would like to share and hope it will also help you if your blog is hit by this new panda update.

Note: If you really want to improve your site then it will take considerable time and effort.

Google Panda

1. Know your site

Make a complete list of your site or blog URLs and analyze the content of each URL carefully. Note the URLs in an excel sheet that needs improvement like those which have very little content, lots of spelling mistakes, and copied content.

2. Check Page ranking

Note the pages/posts which were at the good rank in Google search results before the Panda update and now they have low rankings.

Improve the quality of the content of these pages, share them on social media sites like Facebook, and Twitter, and submit them to social voting sites like Digg, and Mixx with unique headlines.

3. Improve the internal linking of pages

Google loves internal linking as much as external links, so keep that in mind when you write new posts- interlink these with old posts with relevant keywords.

4. Clean your site

It can be done by removing posts/pages which are irrelevant to your site or not adding any significant value to your site.

5. Use more Google services

Use Blogspot, Youtube, and Google plus wherever you can, because you will find that Google is giving preference to their sites or content as compared to other sites. e.g YouTube.com and Android.com were among the top winners of the increase in traffic from the Panda update. And always update yourself with new additions or improvements in their search algorithm at Google’s webmaster blog.

6. Gain authenticity

If your site has very little page rank then get some good backlinks by submitting on high PR sites (quality) that accept guest posts.

7. Too many ads

They may be causing problems for the viewers and interfering with the reader experience while on your site, so keep control of ads and also select the appropriate location for them.

8. Lessons from past

The curious case of Daniweb & Hubpages: Daniweb.com an IT discussion forum is affected two times by Google Panda update, first in Feb 2011 and 2nd this time, but both times DaniWeb recovers from this update.

How do they do it? The first time they recover by changing the entire site’s URL structure. The actual URL of every single page has changed. (Changing site link structure can be very harmful to your site)

Hubpages recovered by implementing subdomains across the site but google clearly states that

“Subdomains can be useful to separate out content that is completely different from the rest of a site — for example, on domains such as wordpress.com. However, site owners should not expect that simply adding a new subdomain on a site will trigger a boost in ranking.”

9. Listen to Google

Google’s Amit Singhal said,

“Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent…That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is.”

He adds more “Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.”

10. Concentrate on your blog niche

Become a master in that niche (do not divert from your site niche).

Super Tip: “Write original well explained articles which people love to link bait naturally like Wikipedia”

This is a guest post by Arun Garg from Arunii who loves to write about SEO, blogging, and gadgets.

Share with friends

About the Author: P Chandra is editor of QOT, one of India's earliest tech bloggers since 2004. A tech enthusiast with expertise in coding, WordPress, web tools, SEO and DIY hacks.