Bassem Ghali

As we all know, Google’s ultimate goal is to deliver the top relevant content and answers to searchers’ questions. Google says “This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.”

Google have recently announced their latest major update to Google core ranking algorithm to target poor quality content websites and reword those websites that have quality, relevant and frequently updated content.

The new Google update is quickly named as “Google Farmer or Panda Update”. SISTRIX has published the top 25 losers report. Based on 1 million keyword database, which were checked before and after Google update.

Who could be negatively affected by the new Google Farmer / Panda Update?

All types of websites (ecommerce, blogs, shopping, comparison sites, etc.) who have one or more of the following issues:

• Poorly written content (Poor content on one part of the website could affect the entire website)
• Non-informational / non-useful content
• Non-unique (Scraped, aggregated or syndicated) content
• High ad to content ratio
• Poor design and usability

What should you do if your website was affected by Google Farmer / Panda Update?

The following advices could also apply to those webmasters who weren’t affected by the update and want to make the most out of Google latest update to increase their organic ranking:

• Evaluate your website content and group them into (useful / well written and poor / not so useful) content and remove the poor quality content
• Build more content for Google searchers needs. A good place to start is by creating or improving the FAQ section on your website, create a post for each question and list all relevant details and facts
• Improve user experience on your website by paying more attention to the overall template design, navigation, ad to content ratio, top exit pages and bounce rate.
• Increase brand awareness, searchers who had a positive experience with a brand are more likely to click on that brand if it showed up in Google search results
• Focus on social media engagement by frequent updates to your social media channels, enable sharing and bookmarking buttons on your website, promote your social media accounts on your website and offer RSS feeds for your different categories of content
• Expand your search engine optimization efforts into other Google search channels, such as Google images, blogs, news and videos
• Improve internal linking to your top quality content which could be your product pages, good articles, latest news or simply your catalog of photos
• Enable User-Generated Content on your website,  (UGC) such as comments, discussion groups, blogs, wikis. This will simply increase the value of your content to users from Google’s perspective
• Stop any sneaky (gray or black) SEO activities such as link farms, keyword stuffing, gateway pages, hidden text and the list goes on. Good rule of thumb: if you wonder if Google would find what I’m about to do spam or not, most likely it’s a spam

If you think your website has been unfairly penalized, go to webmaster discussion forum where you can provide Google with more details on your specific situation. However, Google don’t promise any quick fix or immediate action!

1. Grover Rohner Says:
   June 20th, 2011 at 12:24 am

   There is a significant panic all around site owners and web optimization providers related to Google Panda update. Then again There’s no doubt that that Google update only “flushed” rankings from Spam and web directories and autoblogs. White hat search engine optimization and quality content is not affected at all, I do think it is precisely the contrary and good news for everyone who practise white hat SEO.

2. Evita Says:
   September 12th, 2011 at 8:36 am

   I got whacked by Google Panda myself …

   I have been looking for ways around the Google Panda update and I’ve done a whole bunch of experimenting on my own sites.
   Here are a few key points to look for:

   1) minimize bounce rate on your sites
   2) delete/nofollow/noindex thin and low quality pages of content
   3) increase Click Through Rate in the search results (E.g use crazy call to actions and things inside your page titles)
   4) give more increased value on your web site (increase visitors onpage time)
   5) interlink your web site through optimized anchor texts
   6) make use of a privacy policy, about us, contact us, Google maps location, SSL, address/phone number, images, sub-tiles, paragraphs, bullet points etc etc (virtually all “achievable” added quality elements you can think of)
   7) Obtain additional quality inbound links with effective anchor text variation.

3. Mellissa Oligschlaeger Says:
   December 10th, 2011 at 8:34 pm

   I wanted to let you know how much I treasured discovering your web site today. I would consider it a good honor to operate at my business office and be able to use the tips discussed on your web-site.

4. Daron Mccure Says:
   December 12th, 2011 at 2:54 am

   There are too many SEO tips on this post, so we should choose the main tip and try to do it best!