Have you noticed a sharp drop in traffic or a noticeable tumble in your search engine rankings? If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, then there’s a chance that your website was hit with a Google Panda penalty. But don’t worry, it’s not a lifetime sentence—a few smart fixes will get you back where you belong.
With the recent Panda algorithm update, the content you are posting to your website is informative not to purely manipulate search engine crawlers to avoid dire consequences. Google handles an estimated 2 trillion searches a year, so your SEO (search engine optimization) must comply with white hat techniques.
What is Google’s Panda Algorithm?
The Panda Algorithm update focuses on how Google ranks quality web pages while limiting (dare we say punishing) spammy, keyword-stuffed content. Those websites that abuse keyword stuffing, even unintentionally, received major penalties dropping their rank from SERPs. Google’s Panda algorithm places greater value on the quality of the content and web user’s experience first and foremost. This recent update reduced the visibility of spammy websites in SERP, ensuring Google continues to deliver the tightest search engine results that people actually want and need.
Why Did Google Penalize My Website?
How Google’s Panda algorithm works isn’t 100% clear, but here a few possible causes. The most common reason for a penalty stems from a failure to produce original, useful content. When a website carries a high bounce rate coupled with short visitor sessions, Google assumes your webpage doesn’t align with a user’s search intent, or what they expected to find. Click-bait titles, irrelevant content, or boring content does more harm than good. Although utilizing a blog to climb Google rankings, the website should focus on quality content rather than churning out thin content every day.
Push Back Against Your Google Penalty
You can fight your Google penalty on three fronts. First, eliminate poor content. There’s a chance that you have old pages on your website affecting your search ranking. If you implemented keyword stuffing in the past, review all your pages and rewrite the copy on those pages that perform badly. Second, optimize your mediocre content. The simplest method involves adjusting the form of your posts and pages, so visitors can easily skim the text before they choose to read the page in full. Utilizing headers and bolding words can grab a web visitor’s attention. Furthermore, you may need to expand your word count to satisfy Google.
Additional Strategies
By organizing these paragraphs clearly, a web visitor can quickly scan and determine if the copy merits deeper attention. Google crawlers also scan text and focus on similar aspects of a text’s structure. In addition, focusing on keywords and a balance between clear, concise phrases impact rank. Be sure to utilize synonyms, and place keyword phrases close together. You want to organize your content, so it flows organically from point to point. Although these markers will help, at the end of the day, your content’s natural appeal and ability to keep your visitor on site will give the best results in reducing your penalty.
And the third way? Actively produce outstanding, original content. Not every post needs to be a standout article, instead, mix it up by adding videos or podcasts.
Avoid a Google Panda Penalty with Premiere’s SEO Services
For the DIY website owner, trying to fix a Google Panda Penalty is pretty ambitious. It’s not something you should try. You want to engage a professional agency with experience correcting such problems. By consulting with digital marketing companies like Premiere Creative who specialize in SEO copywriting and Google penalties, you can ensure your website will be engaging and that you won’t get penalized. Contact us today and give us a call at at (973) 346-8100 to learn more about Google’s Panda Penalties and how to recover from them!
