If you are from outside the US and have noticed the rankings dancing all over the place, you’re not alone. Whispers in the search community say Google’s Panda Update (or Farmer Update to some) is being rolled out today world-wide. This should certainly put things in an uproar.
In Case You Missed It: What Is the Panda Update?
A short time ago, Google tweaked its algo. No big surprise there. The search giant is rumored to make thousands of these tweaks every year. What is a little different this time, however, is that low quality content is in the crosshairs. As a result, many of the popular content sites such as article directories and ‘resource sites’ took a huge hit in the SERPs.
The important thing to note here is the definition of ‘quality content’ in this instance. When Google looks at content, it sees anything someone may find valuable as quality. Since this is so objective, it’s almost impossible to compare one resource to another, so don’t get caught up in thinking yours is better than someone else’s (even if it is). Instead, Google is aiming mostly at keyword stuffed pages and duplicate content. If your site is made up of purely scraped or reposted content, chances are, it didn’t stand up.
“What Can I Do If My Site Was Affected By This Google Update?”
The first step is to go through your entire strategy. Look at each element of your site and marketing campaign and decide what, if anything, the search engine could have been considered low quality or “cheating”.
- Fix your content. If you’ve been taking a short cut, or the easy way out, stop. Decide how best to provide value to your readers, and start coming up with ways to do just that.
- Examine your linking strategy. If you’ve only been using article marketing to build links, for instance, your site’s rankings could have dropped simply because the sites you were using suffered with the update. The solution? Diversify. If you choose to build links, you should always use a variety of strategies and sources.
- Check your URLs and site structure. If Googlebot can reach the same content through several URLs (ex http://example.com, http://example.com/, http://www.example.com, http://www.example.com/, http://example.com/index.php), it will see those pages as being duplicates. There are lots of ways to solve this problem, but the two main solutions are to add entries in your robot.txt or make use of the canonical tag.
- Take your time. Don’t make too many changes too quickly. Google needs time to register and evaluate the changes you make to your site. If you don’t give it time to assess each one, you might lose anything you would have otherwise gained.
- Don’t panic too quickly. Google is still tweaking and altering this update. Other sites are also working feverishly to keep their heads above the water. This translates into a major upheaval. Give things time to settle down — you might fall initially, but you could quickly gain ground, and maybe even come out higher in the SERPs than you were before.
- Some sites were incorrectly hit with this update. If this is you, let Google know, so they can look into it for you.
If you would like more information on the Panda (Farmer) Update, how it might work, and how can avoid it, check out these links:
- SEO Guide For Surviving Google Panda Update
- Google Panda Update Shifts Estimated $1 Billion In Revenue To Large Publishers
- Google Panda Update: Lack Of Consistency On Quality?
- Complete Guide To the Google Panda Update: 50+ Articles & Resources
