Google rolled out another update to their Panda Update with what some are calling version 4.1 and the internet was buzzing!
Ok, maybe not your ‘internet’ but it was in mine. 😉
Plenty of people complaining how they suddenly have no traffic, they dropped for this keyword, they don’t rank on the 1st page of Google for this, yadda, yadda, yadda…
With this latest update there’s no earth shattering news. Matter of fact Google said,
Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.
That’s cool. Here’s what that means and why you’ve been doing SEO wrong.
#1 Your Site has Thin Content
Matt Cutts explains this
I’m working on a site right now that had tons of pages with thin content. Very thin content. It’s a lot of work but you can recover.
Thin Affiliate Pages are mentioned too. Are you syndicating content? That’s considered thin too! Cut and pasting articles? Not a good thing either.
#2 You’ve been Keyword Stuffing
I don’t need to really explain this do I?
You either have or you haven’t been doing this.
Your ‘Keywords’ don’t really work anymore since Google started using ‘Latent Semantic Indexing‘ – that’s ok if you don’t know what it means. Just stop it with all this crazy keyword stuff! (pun intended)
“Ok, what can I do to fix it?”
Google has a simple form (Site Recovery Form) that you can fill out that essentially submits an apology to Google with your promise that you’ll stop doing it in the future. Within 4 to 5 hours your site will be back in good standing. Here’s the LINK
Seriously, the first thing I would do is fire your SEO company, or whoever you listened to to get you here in the first place.
Next I would start writing quality unique content. You’ll need to have a properly built site and have the new content submitted to Google for crawling on a regular basis – but first you’ll need to remove all the bad stuff.
If you feel like hiring someone, I’m not cheap but I am for hire.
Your recovery from this Panda thing isn’t an overnight thing. It’s not just getting crawled by Google, they need to then measure users engagement with your site (hey I have a series on that) The simple fact is that it’s going to take months. Sorry about that.
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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