Did you know that a stagnant website is likely a victim of the Panda?
Since the introduction of the Google’s Panda algorithm update in 2011, many sites have found themselves lacking new, organic traffic. Panda was designed to inflict penalties on sites that contain “thin content”, usually by demoting most of its active rankings by a certain percentage (which tends to result in about a 25%-75% loss in organic traffic – particularly longtail.)
The Panda algorithm targets “thin content”, meaning that it crawls your entire domain for auto-generated content, duplicate content, misspelled content, and unsubstantial content. “Thin content” is also defined as pages that contain less than 100-200 words of unique content. Having too many of these types of pages on your site is dangerous. The Panda penalizes your entire domain, not just the “thin content” pages.
The “quality score” of your site suffers considerably when too many low-quality content pages get indexed. When Panda catches a high number of low-quality content, your whole site suffers the consequences (even your unique, high-quality content pages.)
So how do you stop being a victim of the Google Panda?
- Evaluate your site content page by page and identify “thin content”.
- Add unique content (appropriate images, YouTube videos if applicable, etc.) and then go out and acquire fresh links to that page. No amount of link-building is going to fix a site that has been squashed by the Panda since the problems are located onsite.
- No-index or delete your tag pages, otherwise you risk Google indexing them which you DON’T want to happen.
- Find out if the domain has any duplicate content on there at all and get rid of it. This is absolutely crucial to get out of the domain wide Google Panda.
- Make sure that only VALUABLE pages are indexed in Google. If there are any low quality and thin content pages ranking in Google, it really hurts your domain. Either get your junk pages rewritten or noindex the page or simply delete the page altogether if it truly isn’t helping anyone.
There are just a few other important things to address. Sticky can conduct a full Panda assessment of your site and help your recover if your site is still stubbornly not ranking in the search engines. We love hunting Pandas.
