Is your website optimised for Google (Google Panda update tips)

We were recently asked to look at a website that had lost a major amount of traffic, to see if it could be fixed. On viewing the site it soon became apparent that the “Google Panda Update” had hit the site hard.

The Google panda update was aimed at removing low quality sites from the top of the search engines. For example websites that appeared just to be a website full of poor quality links or adverts, or seem to serve very little in the way of new or unique content have been affected.

Other factors that have an impact include a high percentage of duplicate content, high page bounce rate, low visit times, low or bad quality inbound links etc etc.

If a large enough percentage of your site is penalised, then even ‘good’ pages on the site will be affected. Google have said “low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.”

If your website has been hit, the only choice you really have is to improve your website. Here are a few tips.

• Don’t link to websites with poor or bad quality content. Review your outbound linking strategy.
• Review your content. Ask yourself if it is useful or relevant for your audience.
• Google is putting more emphasis on social content. Do you have a social content promotion strategy, and is it carefully monitored?
• Check out pages with a high bounce rate. Why might people be jumping off the page almost immediately…does it not represent what they are expecting?
• If you have ads on your site, could it be that you have too many. Again look at it from a users perspective. If they can’t see the page content easily because of the ads…then you have too many ads.
• Does you site have duplicate content? Give your website a spring clean.

There are of course many other things you can do to help, but these tips are a good starting point to get you back on course.