Are you confused about what Google’s Panda Update really does and how to avoid being penalized by it? If so, you’re not alone. Many sites, large and small, saw traffic plummet after Panda hit, and quite a few haven’t recovered. To avoid the Panda penalty, you need to understand what it really is, what it does and which content sins it penalizes.
First, Panda attempts to view websites the same way humans do, and it was “trained” to do so by tweaking the algorithm until it could replicate rates made by actual human raters. Second, Panda penalizes your whole site for having too many low-quality pages. This means that even if you have a lot of excellent content on your site, you could still doom the site to obscurity by having too many pages with:
- Too much template content: If you use templates to design your site, make sure your unique content makes up the majority of the page.
- Redundant content: Recycling all the same information into many articles with only slight tweaks to target variations on the same keyword phrase is a Panda no-no.
- Too many ads: You probably dislike wading through a flurry of ads to find the real information on the page. Your visitors feel the same, and so does Panda.
- Too much machine-generated content: This is popular with affiliate sites, but not Panda.
- No purpose beyond linking to other pages.
Cyrus Shepard covers these common mistakes in more detail, along with offending screenshots, in Beating Google’s Panda Update — 5 Deadly Content Sins. If you’ve been hit by Panda — and even if you think you haven’t — check out your site, looking for these types of pages. Fixing them can only improve your visitors’ experience and Panda’s view of your site.
