Recovering from a Google Panda penalty is challenging, but not impossible. If you’re one of the numerous bloggers and webmasters who’ve been filtered by Google Panda, it’s time to reclaim your rankings and traffic How I recovered from a Google Panda penalty.
Since its initial release in February 2011, Google Panda has impacted hundreds of thousands of websites. Google’s ranking algorithm penalizes low-quality websites that don’t provide value to users.
Restoring traffic to your website can be a tricky journey, but you need to prove to Panda that your site has good content and is user-friendly.
Identifying a Google Panda update became more difficult in 2013. This is because Google stopped confirming or announcing Panda updates.
Google has integrated Panda into its indexing process, and all future releases will be phased in.
Here is Matt Cutts’ announcement at the 2013 SMX West conference.
A few weeks ago, I shared with you a case study showing how I recovered a website from a Google Penguin penalty . Today, I want to show you how I recovered another website from a Google Panda penalty.
Here is a screenshot showing Panda recovery.
Google Panda is fundamentally different from Google Penguin.
While Google Penguin analyzes websites for off-page over-optimization, Google Panda looks for problems in your content.
Google Panda targets websites with the following problems:
- Duplicate content
- Low-quality pages with little content twitter database that do not offer real added value to users
- Websites with a poor user experience
- External links to bad websites
- Pages with too many advertisements
- Content farm websites
- Poor grammar and spelling
- Too many broken links
Before I start the case study, let me tell you a little about the penalized website.
I bought this website some time ago from a guy who published very short articles with lots of images. At the time, I was mainly concerned with the domain and not with the poor content.
Shortly after purchasing the website, I started publishing very long articles (most of them over 3,000 words) and received some great feedback from my readers. After a month, the website had about 70% thin content and 30% new and great content, which ranked very well.
It was no surprise that the long articles performed much better than all the others combined.
Then the inevitable happened. The Google Panda update took place, and my website was filtered out of search results.
Typically, when your website gets penalized, you enter a period of denial, thinking this can’t happen to you because you didn’t do anything wrong. However, that wasn’t my case.
I immediately knew this penalty was related to the low-quality articles on my site, written by the previous owner. These posts averaged around 300 words, reaching 500 in the best cases.
Even worse, the same topic was covered too often, making my website look like a content farm.
Remove low-quality content
It’s not just about what Google thinks head of channels, amazon education radu burducea of your content. You need to examine how users interact with your articles.
To get a clearer idea of my content, I go to Google Analytics and sort all my pages by their pageviews. Click on Behavior – Page Content – All Pages.
For all pages, I analyzed the average time on page, bounce rate, and exit rate. These three metrics can indicate whether readers like your content or not.
I created a table of the lowest-performing posts and then removed the pages that had very little traffic and little content. After all, I could have covered the same topic again, in a more detailed guide that wouldn’t affect my overall rankings.
On the posts I had doubts about, I also analyzed the number of comments and social media shares they received.
Ultimately, I removed more than 50% of the articles from my website. As crazy as it may sound, these posts were useless and offered nothing new to the user. This is exactly what Google Panda is looking for, and also the main reason I was penalized.
The traffic to the articles I removed accounted for nearly 15% of the total visits my site received before the penalty.
It goes without saying that removing content from your website can cause other problems, such as broken links.
Fix issues reported by Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools should be your best friend. Regardless of the penalty you’re facing, it’s crucial to keep track of all the errors and suggestions provided by GWT.
Here you can identify broken links on betting email list your website, crawling or indexing errors, duplicate meta descriptions or titles, and many other problems.
To find 404 links on your site, click “Crawl” and then “Crawl Errors.”
Below you’ll find a table of links to nonexistent pages on your website. To find out where you’re linking to 404 pages on your site, click on the link and then click the “Linked From” tab.