What is a Panda SEO Diet

2:08 PM October 3, 2014

If you are like a lot of companies your Panda woes just got a little worse with Googles Panda 4.1 algorithm update. This update was focussed on thin and bad content. Thin content is defined as content that doesn’t offer anything of real value to the reader. So if your website has a lot of these pages, then most likely you were hit and you are feeling the affects of the reduced ranking.

Google is looking for high quality authoritative content that readers will enjoy and want to share.

One factor in determining if a page of content is thin is to look at your time on page in Google analytics. If your time on page measure is low, then most likely you don’t have anything significant or interesting for the visitors to read, keeping them on the page.

The best and simplest way to make a quick change is to review all your website’s pages for thin content.

You should do this in two ways:

1. Manually look at each and every page on your website and see if it doesn’t have a lot of actual text for a reader.
2. The next way is to look at your Google analytics and see which pages have high bounce rates and or low time on page.

How to put your website on a Panda SEO diet, 8 tips.

Here we will outline 8 steps you can take to put your website on a Panda diet in the hopes of improving your sites ranking.

1. You should “noindex” pages with no content.
2. Canonical pages that are duplicates such as /archive and /category pages on your blog.
3. If the page receives no traffic in your analytics, remove it and write a 301 redirect to a new page for the URL.
4. Fix pages that offer value but have high bounce rates. It obviously doesn’t offer much value in the readers eye if they hit the back button or navigate away right away. (Google see’s this)
5. Each page/URL should only have one unique title.
6. Avoid similar pages. In other words have only one page for each of your websites topics. Consider moving two pages of thin content into one page.
7. Inner link more pages on your site.
8. Clean up spelling, grammar and punctuation and make sure your content is easily readable by humans (don’t write for search engines, Google is getting good at detecting this).

Depending on the size of your site and how much content you have will determine the workload you have in front of you. If you are not sure how to do these steps I mention above, don’t do them and hire an expert who does. Now is not the time to try cutting corners. If you were hit by Panda and your rankings dropped, it’s time to call someone.

If you need help putting your website on a Panda diet, give us a call 1-800-658-0113 or drop us a quote request and we will get back to you right away.

If you own an e-commerce website and your ranking drop has killed your business, then you are in need of emergency fix and re-index of your site. If this is you, please use our Urgent Support Request form and we will drop what we are doing to help you out.