Panda Slapped? How To Recover!
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Panda Slapped? How To Recover!
Article courtesy of Snap Printing
In an apparent nod to its environmental friendliness, search giant Google has named its two most recent algorithm updates Penguin and Panda.
Penguin has been credited with attacking web spam while Panda is more comprehensive and pervasive, handing out site-wide penalties against low quality sites. Penguin, therefore, has been getting the most attention and is the subject of our discussion. If you have been slapped by Panda, then please read on to review some important recovery tips that you can begin to implement today.
Social Media
Your social media presence is now a factor when Google looks at the importance of your website. Google looks for social signals that demonstrate site interaction with tweets and posts to sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn factored in.
If you do not have a Facebook page that is tied in with your website, then start one. The same can be said for Twitter: establish an account that links to your home page. It is not clear how much interaction is required regularly and you clearly do not want to get into bad habits of tweeting or positing everything and anything that comes to mind.
Google+
We are looking at Google+ separately as it is a rather new player in social media. It will soon become a dominate one because Google requires people to sign up for it if they use Gmail, YouTube and other Google services. With Google’s hand in so many areas, this requirement means that its own social network will boom.
Although Google Authorship is a separate matter, there is a strong tie in between this step and establishing a Google+ presence. Google spells out what it wants here, steps for you to take that can raise your online visibility. You need to provide a recognizable headshot with your profile, a consistent byline and one that matches your Google+ account and a verifiable email address. Expect that your Google+ participation will become a “weightier” manner as Google improves Panda moving forward.
Web Content
Few of us want to admit that we have been serving up less than stellar web content. This comment is not directed at websites with no other purpose than to serve up thin or poorly written material. A big component of Google Penguin is site quality, therefore a few thin content articles including copies of press releases, very short articles and unrelated information may be penalizing your site.
Webmasters are more like generalists, handling all matters for their site including writing content, optimizing pages, linking to other sites, updating platforms and much more. One area of mastery that you must attain is web content. And that means culling through your work and looking for problems. Repair those broken links. Fix captions with your photos. Replace thin content with more robust information. Remove duplicate content. Amend grammar issues. Avoid black hat SEO. Visit your Google webmaster tools and take care of problems that Google has flagged including crawling and indexing information. Find out if Google has found malware on your site.
Other Factors
Your search engine optimization efforts need to be reviewed as well. Perform keyword research for the terms that are related to your pages, using the Google Keyword Tool to accomplish that. Optimize your keywords by using the appropriate heading tags, keyword density, image tags and blog post titles, the latter consuming no more than 65 characters including spaces.
You should link between related pages on your site and link out to related high-quality websites, doing the latter with no expectancy of a link in return. If your WordPress theme is dated, invest in a robust SEO theme such as Genesis or Thesis to lift some of the burden off of your shoulders. When you have the right theme in place, you can pour more of your attention into building strong content than concentrating on other matters, such as SEO, to the expense of your work.
Site Recovery
There is no magic bullet for fixing websites that have been slapped by Google Panda. Nor can anyone claim how quickly you can recover. Some people are of the mind that Panda penalties are permanent, but those individuals are mistaken or simply have not made much of an effort to tend to their websites.
References
Google: Link Your Google+ Profile to the Content that you Create —
Search Engine People: How to Recover After the Google Panda and Penguin Update?
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