How to Survive Google Panda Updates

Intro: I wrote this article 3 years ago, but the information is still useful, so I decided to publish it on my blog. Well, it is useful for those who are still of the safe side and free from Google Panda penalty.

On the 24^th of March Google tweeted about new Panda rolling out. They stated that only 1.6% of search results were affected. If it is truth or not, it is really hard to tell, but the only thing we know for sure is that lot of websites lost their rankings.

Webmasters call this update ‘3.4’, but nobody knows for sure what’s the real number is. In fact the number of the update is not as important as the question about how not to get bitten by Panda next time it will be rolling out.

Panda is one year old already so we can now tell more about its behavior and its tastes in order to give you more insight in what factors of your website might trigger new algorithm penalties.

1. Low unique content ratio

During the pre Panda period lots of webmasters used to save money on website copywriting by scrapping quality articles from other websites. Today you must avoid publishing content which has already been published and index by Google. If you are still going to do it, either make sure unique content will still be dominating or put a canonical URL to the article source.

2. Duplicate internal content

Duplicate (or near duplicate) internal content is in common with online stores where the same items might appear under different categories several times. If that is your case, you should do everything possible to avoid duplicates within your website’s pages:

-                     Adding more unique content to the pages where duplicates exist

-                     Implement correct pagination

-                     Adding canonical URLs of the most important page to the pages where duplicates exist

3. Duplicate content within your network

If you have couple of websites (e.g.: yoursite.com, yoursite.net, yoursite.co.uk) and each of them has a large portion of the same content, then you should fix it immediately because it might be signaled as spam to Google. You avoid this you should remove all duplicates and substitute them 100% unique text content.

       4. Low text to ads ration

Lots of webmasters earn money by placing Google Adsense ads on their websites adding few text content. If you put too many ads and little unique content on the page you are too under the risk. If you want to survive the next Panda update, you should either remove some of the ads from your website’s page or write longer articles and ad unique images.

5. Server response codes

You should regularly check your website in order to make sure you don’t have broken links and when the user enters a page which doesn’t exit, server responds with a 404 code. If your website has dynamic pages, then you must ad canonical URL to every page, otherwise each link pointing to your website with a nonexistent URL will put that page into Google’s index which content of some of page creating internal duplicates which were discussed in the point 2.

Building Panda-friendly website is not difficult. The only thing that you must remember that new algorithm loves unique content and website engines that work without errors creating space for positive experience for your users.