How to be better prepared for Google’s next Panda update
Living in California, we’re always taught to be prepared for the Big One. Being prepared is our only defense to the inevitable. However, the next big earthquake can still be 100’s of years from now (crossing my fingers it actually is) but on the internet everything changes quickly, as we learned a few months back with Google’s new Panda update.
Here are some helpful tips on how you can be better prepared for Google’s next Big One AKA “The next Panda Update”.
1. Google Targets Web Scrapers
If your website relies on any web scraping technology, you can expect to be hit. So clean out the garbage and tight down on only good content.
2. Good quality content will not be affected
Make sure you’re writing interesting content, something that has your viewers coming back to your site. Share quality graphics, pictures and useful information. You want to make sure people are browsing your site and getting a good experience from it, not dumping it right away and moving on to another site. Just give people what they want and you should see good results J
3. Excessive WebPages
A lot of times we get out of control with the excessive pages we have on our site. Take a look and ask yourself… “Do I really need so many pages on my site?” These pages can be poor quality ones and will bring down the ranking of your site. Simply merge other pages, eliminating the worst ones and create a better looking page.
4. Is your site trustworthy?
Would you leave your kids with a babysitter you just met, that works out of a cheap motel? Probably not, or at least I hope not!! Well that same concept applies to websites and the trustworthiness they portray from their page. When you visit a website, you want to make sure it has trustworthy material and that you feel assured any info they have from you will be safe. Make sure your site is giving off the right trustworthy confident image and not a sketchy one that keeps people away.
5. Double Trouble
Make sure you’re not duplicating anything on your site. Sometimes this is accidental but can give you a big headache down the line if it isn’t taken care of properly. Having duplicate content can really hurt your rankings, so when cleaning up your site make sure you’re not duplicating anything and if so, clean it up!
6. Bounce Rate
Look through Google analytics for pages with high bounce rate. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.
When will the next major Google update happen? Nobody knows for sure but one thing is abundantly clear, search engines are getting better at determining quality. Stop focusing on tricks and tactics to rank your website and refocus on making your site the best it can be and you will be well positioned for future changes. Keep yourself informed and up to date with all the new changes and the next time around you shouldn’t feel too much of a shake.
Could someone explain why bounce rate matters? What is better, someone spends 10 minutes on a page and bounces or someone spends 10 seconds on 10 pages?
If someone is bouncing around your site pages every 10 seconds and not sticking around on one, it can signal that they’re simply not finding what they need on your site. It’s better that they spend more time on one page. Thanks for reading my post! Hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks. Looks i have to delete some of the pages from my sites
Not really necessary. you can always setup robot.txt so all the SE robot wont find duplicate contents.
Great post, but I have one question for you:
When you provide information (don’t sell goods or stuff like that… only Google adsense ads), why is the bounce rate crucial.
For instance, on my website I provide release date info. Users usually search on google for ” release date”, find the info they’re looking for and then leave. Why would this be a bad thing ?
I think you are right for things like blogs etc you can expect a higher bounce rate. The key would be to try and be lower than others in your same niche.
Too many pages huh? Uh oh. I have a lot of pages on one of my site. I wonder what is a lot. I do have some pages with not much wording and a lot of pictures. I wonder if I should work on combining those. And I’m feeling really lazy too. lol
You know a high bounce rate can also mean they found exactly what they were looking for, then split.
I do think its all about content – and content leads to natural backlinks.
Too many pages is an interesting thing. I’m a super small site… 40-50 pages, and slowly growing, but google’s SEO guide talks about 240 for small site. Which tells me I have a massive amount of work to do.
One thing I’m interested in is how does Panda take into account +1?
Dont worry about the number of pages. I would take that to mean up 240 pages is still considered a small site. Worry about making really high quality pages vs producing a lot of pages.
I was fully prepared for the Nov update of Google, When my friends were scratching their heads, my sites position actually improved! What did i do to achieve this? I took the entire SEO operations in my hand. Stopped commenting just for the baclinking purposes, I started using commenting in the blogs where i thought i can participate and have a good relationship with the posters.
The mantra was not to do anything that will hamper my relations with the blog owners. My page rank improved and Alexa by 2.5 mill!