7 Tips and Tricks on How to Cope with the Latest Google Panda Update and Algorithm

I haven’t posted for a very long time. And, by this, I really mean, a very long time. Almost over a year! I have been quite busy and with online marketing duties and promoting some of my company websites like www.littleitaly.in, www.cees-edu.org, www.elock.com etc. I dedicated my “blogging time” for content promotion of these websites. However, recently after being influenced heavily by the Inbound Marketing Blog at Hubspot, I thought, maybe, it was time to come back and blog about the things I normally work on.

Over the past couple of weeks, quite a few people have asked me about the latest Google Panda Update and to be honest, I had never gotten into the nitty gritties of the latest algorithm development from the search engine giant. Google currently holds the number one position when it comes to PPC ads, display and banner ads, including the overall search engine and organic search market due to its display ads, adsense and adwords network. Over 65% of people use Google.com for searches and queries. Over the past few years, lot of content farms, black hat seo practitioners and extremely low quality content providers have been able to put many low-grade websites stand out and be displayed on top of the search engine rankings. This led to many high-quality, deserving and relevant websites rank lower in the search queries (mainly, because they did not have hundreds and thousands of articles on their website, built around a single keyword).

To stop these blatant search engine black hat techniques and in order to make relevant websites feature in relevant search queries, Google worked on a new algorithm and launched the latest Google panda update or search algorithm in February 2011. You can read about this on the official Google blog for understanding what this update is all about and the changes done. Since its first version, the Google panda update has constantly updated and is now in its 2.4 version.

Image Source: www.zhimmer.com

This Google panda update algorithm has been launched to identify and berate content content and content farms, which were gaining top search listings with very shallow or minimal content on their websites. It is also aimed at discouraging content copying, aka, scraper sites which have very less original content on their websites. This update, according to estimates has affected almost 12% of the entire US search results.

So, how can you or your website cope with this recent Google panda update? I have jotted down some tips and tricks below, on how to cope with the latest Google panda update and algorithm.

1. Heavy Templates: First and foremost, cut down on heavy templates. Use templates for your website (if you are using a CMS), which are minimalistiic in design and offer great space to publish more relevant content or content blocks related to your products or services. Simply putting in a block from the available template (like a calendar, most commented posts etc) is not going to help you in any way to optimize the website and fare better in the searches. This activity will help you in staying afloat during the next versions of the Google panda update

2. One keyword, one relevant article: For the Google panda update, its all about relevancy for Google and the people who search. If your information is not relevant then it should not feature in visitor searches, only because you have written hundreds of article on the same keyword with minimal content. Instead, focus on identifying the most important keywords and building articles with relevant content around them. For example: if you are using the keyword “Green Buildings”, then it makes much more sense to write articles like “How to get a certification in Green Buildings”, “How are Green Buildings important to the environment” or “Importance of Green Buildings to the construction industry” etc, instead of writing tons of articles on “what are Green Buildings” and repeating almost the same content, over and over again. Remember, no one likes to beat around the bush. Get to the point with correct and relevant content.

3. Do Away with Keyword Stuffing: Do not bombard your article of 150 words with 25 instances of your keyword. The optimum instance of one keyword in any article is eight. Stick to it, and you will be getting relevant visitors to your article and website. Better still, if you really do need to put in more keywords then do this.

• Use the keyword in alt+text of the image (and yes, always, as much as possible, accompany an article or content with relevant image and reference source)
• Use the keyword in the URL of the article or the content page
• Use the Keyword in the Title of your article or content page
• Use the keyword in the Page Title, Meta description and the keywords option, available in your publishing tool

Watch this video by Matt Cutts on the Google panda update:

4. Do away with useless ads: Do you know that people are on your website to get some information? If you do, then you are among those website owners who focus on relevancy! If you did not, then, I urge you to cut down on the space you have provided to all those PPC and display ads on your website. A simple tweak in your Google AdSense account should do the trick (more on this, later). Anything more than 20 – 25% webpage space, dedicated to displaying ads is a strict no-no. It kills relevancy of the content and your website, to the incoming search term. Ads are meant to enhance visitor experience with value added information and not cause irritation. So, moral of the story? Do away with unnecessary ads and focus on getting more content published in that adspace.

5. Do away with empty content: The Google panda update also focuses on identifying pages with empty content and removes it from the indexing bot. Hence, dont keep any pages with empty content on your website. Its going to hurt your rankings, and not going to help in any way as well. Worse, please do not link it to other pages on your website!!! Do you really plan on murdering your search rankings?

6. Do away with auto-generated content: – Instead, opt in for good content writers who can give you planned content, for the keyword you want to rank high for! Investing time in content writing and SEO is the key to get found on Google and other search engines as well. So whatever you do, do not ignore these basic aspects.

7. Why are you copying my stuff? – You think, “Oh, what the heck? I need content for my website. I will just go ahead and copy it from some related industry blog or website! That ought to solve my content writing woes.”  Think again. Is Google really that stupid? The latest Google panda update takes care of all this and more. It can, in a matter of seconds, find out if you have copied content from some website or blog and made small changes to it. Do not EVER, blatantly copy from other websites. Instead, you can refer to a website and build upon a point or probably, give credit to the website for the original content. Most of the times, it is highly recommended that content should be original. However, you can always build upon existing content and add value to it! If you feel that content from your website is being copied, then use Tynt.com. Tynt is a publishing tool as well, which gives you great insights for content copied from your website, social shares etc. I use this tool for the CEES website to track sharing and content copies. And, best of all, its free!

So there you are! These were my very personal 7 Tips and Tricks on How to Cope With the Latest Google Panda Update and Algorithm! As you can see, content was, content is and content will always be the king!  Well, at least for Google 😉

Do you know of any such tips and tricks? Feel free to share it with me!