Google Panda Update 2015
Can your business handle a 50% drop in organic or non-paid visits from Google?
That’s what might be coming your way in the form of Google’s Panda algorithm update.
Now, before we get into whys and how’s and what can be done, lets take some time to understand Panda and its purpose.
Simply put, Google Panda is a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.
The goals of Panda are noble: to remove poor quality site form the top of Google’s result page. Or as Google’s Head of Spam department, says in his blog about Panda:
“ This 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 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 soon.”
What factors make your site Vulnerable?
1. Low quality
A high % of duplicate content. Low quality in terms of design, authority and content. This might apply to a page or site. A high amount of inappropriate adverts. Page content not matching the search queries a page does well for.
Concentrate on your own high quality content to deliver the authority and usefulness.
2. Ads bombardment
If you are running a billion ads on your site, it wont only hurt your visitors but also search engine will recognize your site as non-quality content producer.
3. Website speed
Website Speed matters a lot. A better web hosting server give you high quality speedy web hosting service. If your webserver is slow and pages take time to load, then you can face a Google Panda penalty.
4. Visitor Return
Search engines checks whether a visitor goes again to that website, or not? Are they staying longer or not? Do they share content on social media or not?
Have you been hit by Panda?
There is nothing wrong with being vigilant and not taking the possibility of a Panda penalty for granted. On the other hand, it won’t do you any good if you pull the plug on several SEO and marketing campaigns for fear of them triggering a penalty.
So first, assess if there is a decrease in your metrics such as organic traffic, click through, SERP rankings, etc., and that in fact, is result of Panda penalty and not some normal fluctuations in the ranking.
Check you Google Webmaster Tools inbox: Google actually sends a notification to webmasters if there are any violation to guidelines.
Look at the major drop dates, if they coincide with the release of the updates.
How to recover form panda?
Panda penalizes the site for the most obvious reason, copied content or plagiarism. If you are thinking that you are innocent then most likely some one else has copied your content or articles.
In order to recover from Panda, find out the sites that copied your content, and file complain against those sites to Google.
Here are some free tools to find who copied your articles:
- Small SEO Tools
- com
- com
- Plagiarism-checker.me
- Plagscan
It will take Google 8-10 days to remove all the content from search engine listing page. Now wait for the next Panda update form Google.
Once you have taken appropriate steps, you should get your lost traffic back with the next Panda update.
With that said, the next Google Panda 4.2 refresh has just begun in July 2015. However, this rollout is slow and will take months to fully roll out, so far no one has seen any major changes as a result. There is however, a cutout date and if you make necessary changes to your site by then, maybe your website will not be penalized.
We’d love to hear from you about any problems you’ve had with search engines and processes and whether Panda update made any difference. Contact Artistik Designs.
References:
- http://www.seopious.com
- http://www.pandablogger.com
- http://www.pitstopmedia.com
- http://www.SEOmoz.com
- http://www.wikipedia.com
