7 Tips To A More Panda Friendly Site
The recent Google Panda update has made ‘doing the basics’ even more important than ever. It’s getting tougher and tougher to rank well and that means that you really have to pay attention to all of the little details. Below you’ll find 7 suggestions to improve your site after these Panda changes.
Many have suffered from the Panda update, but others, like ourselves, have seen an increase in traffic. So what gives? What is the secret to getting more traffic? Well, like always, it’s not a simple single item that likely is causing the impact for you – either positive or negative. Google is monitoring hundreds of factors which all have an impact on your site rankings. That is very important to understand because so many people think that just ONE THING has pushed them over the edge, etc… when it is much more probable that several different things about their site need to be reassessed.
Monitoring your site and keeping up with what’s going on with each page can be a challenge – especially if you have dozens or even hundreds of pages. But page level SEO (rather than just paying attention to the homepage) is very important. One of the key factors of why this site does so well in terms of SEO is due to that page level authority. Monitoring each of your pages on your site and getting them links and pagerank will ultimately benefit your entire site as a whole. Think of each page as a mini-SEO campaign – complete with its own target keywords – and you’ll develop a mindset that will propel your rankings forward.
Building Authority
Getting links to your inner pages and getting them ranking is one of the keys to getting authority for your site as well. The more inner pages that you have ranking the more authority your site will be granted. Authority is a great thing to have, albeit a bit “abstract” to define. But having authority can do many things for you – near instantaneous indexing of your content, rankings on pages that you have not even performed linkbuilding for, being found on many more long tail keywords – all are indications of having strong authority. But in concentrating on your inner pages you need to make sure you don’t have a bunch of little onsite SEO errors on those pages. The little stuff matters and doing it right, while not difficult, can be a bit tedious.
Quickly Finding Onsite SEO Page Level Errors
We recently reviewed a new tool that is extremely affordable and does a great job of helping with this page level analysis of your site. Traffic Travis can be used to quickly pull up a listing of all of your sites pages and then inspect their link counts, their PR and even the onpage SEO warnings. Now, whether you do this manually or via a tool such as Traffic Travis is not relevant, but you need to be paying attention to these page level details one way or the other.
Now, on to some basic things you can do to assess your site after these Panda updates and see if there is room for improvement. The general rule of thumb is that you need to think like Google and that means you need to concentrate on creating a quality site and a quality user experience.
There are dozens and dozens more suggestions that we have and we are putting them all into an eBook that will be available next week, but we wanted to give you a quick preview here today of some of the biggies. Obviously a 50 page blog post doesn’t make sense, so we’ll save the majority of the ‘meat’ for the eBook, but this should help to get you started and next week we’ll dive into much more detail in the eBook.
- #1 – Do you have enough unique content? This is the #1 problem most people are facing. Compare your pages to those of your competitors and assess the amount of textual content you have on those pages. If your competitor has 200 words, write 350. And make sure it is 100% unique content that you do not use anywhere else.
- #2 – What does your “above the fold” view of your site look like? You may want to consider narrowing your header images, removing header banner images and pushing more content onto the top of your site. Google is getting picky about this as well.
- #3 – Check your number of outbound links. If you’ve got more than 60 or so, take a look if you can reduce it. This is one thing we’re going to be doing on our site as well as we have too many footer links at present.
- #4 – Don’t do anything gimmicky. There are lots of techniques that trigger spam warnings and you need to make sure you’re not doing them – even accidentally. Such as hidden text on the page, text hidden in images, links that are disguised and so on.
- #5 – This is related to #1, but look at your overall content length. For one, try to increase it. If you have mostly 250 word blog posts, try to increase that dramatically (at least on some of them). You’ll find on our site we have many posts over 2000 words – great Google eye candy. Also make sure to vary your content size. Don’t do all of your posts as little posts – mix it up – some small, some average, some larger.
- #6 – Look at your overall content footprint. How many quality unique pages do you have in the Google Index? If it’s less than 100, you need to get busy. More is better – more equals more authority, more equals more relevance, more equals more long tails – more unique and quality content simply means more rankings and more traffic.
- #7 – Check your domain registration. This is a small tip, but every little bit helps. If you have a money site that you are committed to, get it registered for 5 years or more in the future. If you’re just ‘testing the waters’ you may not want to spend that money, but if the site is making you money and something you intend to keep, show your commitment by extending your registration.
Well, there is a lot more to come in the next week, but these are some of the basics. Next week we will be releasing a new eBook that goes into detail into these and many, many more tips for getting your rankings up in this ‘post Panda’ SEO world. It will also talk about some of the scenarios that we have seen that Panda caused and what to do about them.
If you want to make sure we cover a specific scenario that might have affected your site during or since the Panda update, please post a comment here and tell us all about it in detail. You don’t have to post the URL if you want to keep your website anonymous, but tell us what happened and what you have observed and we’ll make sure to get it into our latest revisions for the eBook.
See ya in a week…
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On May 10, 2011 Jack wrote:
Mike and Troy, sounds like the Panda update favors unique high quality content. Have your seen any affect on the “weight” or effectiveness of links coming from linkbuilding networks like Linxboss, BMR or others where content may not be seen by Google as useful or high quality.
On May 10, 2011 Jason wrote:
I used to lead all competition in my niche. My site took a HUGE hit on February 11th. After some research on the site, I found that a number of sites had scraped my 100% original content and put it on their own…and these sites were outranking mine! It really hurt, like a 75% drop in traffic. I rewrote all my content and my rankings have been slowly coming back, but still nothing like they were. I probably need to continually update my content to get my rankings back, but this update killed me.
On May 12, 2011 andrew fearnley wrote:
good solid advice, looking forward to the ebook.
On May 12, 2011 Troy wrote:
Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of that Jason… Sites that have been devalued because of someone else stealing your content. If you can, please reply with your site so we can take a look at it and give you some more detailed information. Our comments are NOT auto-approved so we will delete your site/domain name from the comment before posting it to protect your privacy, but if we knew the domain we could give you some more guidance… without looking at it, anything I say would be idle speculation.
-Troy
On May 12, 2011 Troy wrote:
Yes, high quality unique content is definitely the winning combination. In the first couple weeks of the Panda rollout this site spiked up 40% in traffic – that is a testament to what we do here and the quality of the content. You’ll also notice that we do long, in-depth posts and we believe that is also very important. But we also do a mix of content (have smaller announcement posts as well) and rather frequent posting plus user activity via comments like this, etc… All of those things are increasingly more important post Panda.
No, we have not seen any reduction in effectiveness of BMR, Linxboss or others. Some of the content networks (not any reviewed on this site that I’m aware of) have become much less effective due to indexing rates, but in general we’re still seeing solid results. The main issue is not the “value” of the content but rather whether or not it even gets indexed now (post Panda). The effectiveness of some of the lower quality networks has gone down because their content is no longer getting indexed and thus not producing any backlinks for their clients.
One network, the old veteran Unique Article Wizard, is having very good results – if not better – post Panda and they’re putting a lot of work into expanding and improving their network. We need to freshen up our review of UAW because it is probably the #1 network to be using now – post Panda…
-Troy
On May 13, 2011 Joshua wrote:
Based on Jason’s comments, I am guessing Panda left the door wide open for people to take your quality content and use it against you?
On May 13, 2011 Joshua wrote:
It appears all of your commentary is completely related to on-page factors… Is that on purpose? Any off page factors that we should be aware of?
On May 13, 2011 Troy wrote:
Hi Joshua,
Well, *usually* the scrapers don’t screw you up, but yeah, Jason got screwed for sure. Usually what happens is that Google recognizes it as being initially from your site and gives you the first credit on it so to speak, but it’s not a perfect system for sure. But that problem has been around for awhile – nothing new with Panda specifically, it’s just that Panda flushed it out more because of the added sensitivity to content.
-Troy
On May 13, 2011 Troy wrote:
Hi again Joshua,
No, this post is just a partial list… there’s several offsite factors as well… I’m preparing a full eBook that will be available covering this topic in much more detail. Look for it soon…
Thanks for stopping by,
-Troy
On May 20, 2011 ken wrote:
Okay, so how does this Panda thing effect article spinning, and article submission software-I need both but it seems like this is not such a good idea anymore isn’t article spinning “non-original content”? Please advise-very confused.
On May 27, 2011 admin wrote:
Hi Ken,
Those topics are covered here in our Panda ebook:
http://articlesubmissionreview.com/feeding-the-panda
On July 12, 2011 Jer wrote:
Any idea if this will have an impact on articles such as the ones posted on Ezine that can be posted on other blogs and websites?
On December 15, 2011 Newbiexpose wrote:
I’m very newbie and i don’t know how to make building backlink and increase visitor for my blog, i’m happy to visit here. thanks for share
On February 6, 2012 Lawyer wrote:
My site is just a few pages so it is hard to follow all these rules but I will do what I can to be more “panda friendly.”
No outbound links…no gimmicks..but static content – should I create more content one more consistent basis?
On February 7, 2012 Troy wrote:
@lawyer
Yeah, you definitely need a lot more content. It used to be that you could get away with just a few pages of content but anymore the big G is really looking for “authority” and that means lots of rich and unique quality content. I would say that the new “threshold” that you need to get to is at least a 100 posts of content and have a good 20 to 30% of them BIG posts – 1000+ words…
Thanks for stopping by!
-Troy