5 ways to avoid being penalized by Panda
Google’s first Panda update was released this past February. Since then, there have been four more Panda updates.
There are some things we’ve learned from Panda’s original update. Most notably, a real focus was shown on the need to generate and publish high-quality content that provides value to the consumer.
For magazine and newsletters publishers moving onto digital platforms, it should be easy to present high-quality content since they’ve been doing it for years. Most successful online publishers have an array of evergreen content they can easily break apart and publish online.
However, not all content-based websites have this luxury. And others are looking to make profits from advertisements – not high-quality content. Many of these sites focused on using SEO to attract visitors, but didn’t really succeed in providing value to the reader.
How to avoid being penalized by Panda
As an SEOmoz article by Cyrus Shepard reminds us, “Panda is a site-wide penalty.” If your pages are breaking enough of the algorithm’s rules, your entire site will suffer.
The list below comes from SEOmoz and includes five website mistakes everyone all content producers should avoid if they don’t want to be penalized by Google.
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#1: Heavy Template Footprint – You do not want a template that has a low ratio of original content. You also don’t want to have too much duplicate content. As SEOmoz states, “if 95% of all the code on your page matches another page, then it’s flagged as a duplicate.”
#2: Empty Content – Pages that appear to exist only to link to other pages are reported to be cause for penalization.
#3: Overlapping and Redundant Articles – According to Shepard, “each page of your site should address a specific topic, instead of addressing a slightly different variation of a keyword phrase.” In these instances, it’s easy to see how these websites are catering to search engine optimization and not human readers. There is little value for people within these types of webpages.
#4: High Ad Ration – Although Google wants websites to use advertisements, you can be penalized for having too many ads and not enough valuable content. Placement of your ads also should be considered. If you have all ads above the fold with no content present, there is a possibility for a penalty.
#5: Affiliate Links and Auto Generated Content – Shepard sums it up quite well by saying, “if a machine built your pages with minimal human intervention, Googles wants to devalue you.”
Have you seen an impact from Panda, good or bad? I’d love to hear about it in the comment section below.
And for more helpful information about the Panda updates, take a look at this article from SEOmoz.
