Google Panda Update – How to avoid getting penalised?

In an attempt to weed out shallow and low quality content from its search results, Google made a change to its algorithm at the beginning of 2011 which is now called the Google Panda Update or Google Farmer Update.

Release dates for Google Panda

• Panda Update 2.4 (international, all languages affected) - August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.3 - July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2 - June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.1 - May 10, 2011 (about 4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.0 (all English websites affected) - April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 1.0 (first release, US only) - Feb. 24, 2011

In February when Google introduced the Panda algorithm, it was only applied to US sites and that affected nearly 12% of search results. In April however, Panda was run against all English websites and sometime soon it will be applied to all languages.

Sites which get penalised by the Panda update are likely to see a 50% drop in traffic (and revenue) and if your website has been tested positive for filtering/penalisation, then your whole website will suffer as the penalty is sitewide rather than only to specific areas.

How does the Google Panda algorithm work?
The algorithm is concerned with quality and you would therefore need to look at your webpages and analyse them properly. Here are a few things you will need to look at:

Is the content shallow or well written by an expert?

Is the information trustworthy (something you would recommend to your family/friends)?

Do you have lots of duplicate content on your site (many articles around the same topic with different keyword variations)?

Do you have unique and original content (more value than competing webpages in the search results)?

Does your website look professional and not cluttered with adverts?

As you can see, pretty much everything about it revolved around the content side of things. There’s a tipping point for the ratio of low quality/high quality content on each website and if you go beyond that, then you’ll be affected by the Panda Update.

How to get your rankings back after being hit by the Panda Update?
If you’ve been the victim of the Panda update, then you will need to re-assess the quality of your website carefully. There’s no easy way to tackle it and it’s a painful procedure but you will need to weed out all the shallow content that’s bringing your whole site down. Here are some things that you can try:

• Eliminate duplicates on your site (use canonical tag or remove them completely from your website if they are useless pages)
• Add more unique and helpful content to existing webpages which lack text
• Offload and transfer low quality content to another domain or sub domain
• Check existing articles/content to see if the info provided is really helpful or just there to rank in search engines

Now, this is not something that can be done overnight and it will take a lot of your time but people who really want to avoid the Google Panda penalty will definitely see improvements after doing these corrective measures.

Note that the Panda Update is run manually and therefore depending on when it is re-applied to Google index, you might not see any changes in your rankings for a while.