I have come across a few Websites that were downgraded by Panda 4.1 last month. More than a few, actually. And some people have sought me out asking for free advice. Well, I don’t have much time for free one-on-one advice but here are some tips for Panda 4.1 victims. Do with them as you will.
Ignore All Claimed Recoveries Dated Before December 1, 2014
Some people may have figured out how to recover from Panda 4.1 but their ingenuity won’t be revealed until 1-2 iterations down the road. So anyone who lost and recovered traffic since Panda 4.1 began rolling (it is a multi-week release) has not yet had an opportunity to see if their changes work.
Yes, there are many opportunistic bloggers out there writing “how to recover from Panda 4.1” articles but no one actually knows how to do that. These articles either repeat the same lame advice that you have been seeing for years or, worse, they are giving bad advice.
There are no reliable “Panda 4.1 recovery” articles available yet. That is because no one who was affected by Panda 4.1 has actually recovered.
Again, if you think you have recovered from Panda 4.1 before December 1, 2014 you are wrong. You recovered from something else.
Disassociate Your Feelings from Your Goals
A lot of people who struggle with Panda downgrades steadfastly refuse to move away from the kind of Web design that brings on Panda downgrades. You have to be dispassionate about this. No matter how much you love your Website’s layout, the Google Panda algorithm is concerned about presentation. That means what you put on the page, not what you think the page looks like.
All the encouragement you receive from online friends and sympathetic bloggers isn’t going to change your Website. You have to be cold and brutal with yourself. You have to believe yourself when you look in the mirror and say, “What I am doing isn’t working and I need to make a permanent change.”
Living in the past doesn’t help. Excusing your inaction by pointing out that you haven’t changed your Website design in five years doesn’t fix the problem. You now need to change the Website.
Reduce Page Clutter
Page clutter falls into three categories:
- Advertising
- Self-promotional widgets
- Superfluous imagery
Page clutter is not always the problem, but I rarely find anything else causing a Panda downgrade.
It’s not about “thin content”. “Thin content” can run to thousands of words on a page.
It’s not about “unique content”. “Unique content” can be pretty useless, especially if it’s hard to get to.
It’s about user experience and user experience has NOTHING TO DO WITH ENGAGEMENT. Too many people continue to follow up “user experience” with buzz expressions like “bounce rate”, “social shares”, “user comments”, “feedback”, “click-through rates”, etc.
User experience is what the visitor sees on the page. User engagement is what the visitor does on the page.
Look for Duplicate Phrases
Normally I say “duplicate content can occur within the page” but a lot of people don’t seem to be getting the memo. If you are using the same words over and over again (especially if you excuse that with nonsense like “keyword density”) then you need to look at how many times you say something and why. If you didn’t care about the keywords would you really write them that many times.
Keywords pop up in all the wrong places these days, like:
- Hx elements
- Link anchor text
- Image captions
- ALT= text
- Pull quotes
You hit all these pressure points with keywords in your page content because you’re following formulaic SEO advice. Search engines do pay close attention to how words are used on the page but what you don’t get is that SEO copywriters and Internet marketers are outnumbered by normal people just writing whatever is on their mind. Your copy looks forced, contrived, and out-of-place when compared with how people on the rest of the Web write copy. And search engines look at all that.
When it comes to repeating expressions on the page “a few is good” but “many are bad”. If you’re using important words dozens or hundreds of times on the page, rewrite everything (including navigation anchors if you must).
Better yet, cut as much of that off the page as possible (especially navigation because flat site architecture is anything but optimal).
Time Is Rarely on Your Side
A very successful affiliate marketer once asked me what I thought he should do with a Website that he believed had been downgraded by an algorithm. I replied, “If it were my site I would redesign it and move on”. That’s what I do: rebuild sites, get lots of traffic, and move on.
He decided not to do that and a few weeks later his site began performing well again. What did he do? Nothing. Whatever broke the traffic chain fixed it for him.
Most of the time when people come to me with Panda problems they are frustrated, angry, and they believe they have tried everything in the book. And yet when I tell them to start over from scratch the majority of those people don’t take my advice. To this day there are some multi-million dollar Websites that continue to underperform because they look almost exactly the way they did when Panda hit them. They didn’t want to redesign the sites (with an eye toward reducing page clutter and duplicate phrases).
Time may one day reward them for their patience but after three years you’d think some people would be tired of waiting.
If you don’t know why your traffic took a nose dive you have two options: CHANGE EVERYTHING or DO NOTHING.
Doing nothing sometimes works. I have never seen a site fail to achieve something by changing everything. But changing everything means you have to change the monetization model. That is really, really hard for a lot of people to do.
“But I created this site just to make money!”
That, my young padawans, is why you fail.
In organic search engine optimization you must first be useful. Then you can monetize.
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I got here by following a link from a post on SEO Theory, which I read regularly. Informative post as usual, although I have a minor stylistic bone to pick.
The phrase “young padawans” was used in the second to last sentence. I’m all for more Star Wars references in blog posts in general, but the final sentence begat by the immediately preceding sentence “forget its Star Wars heritage”.
According to the Yoda Speak Generator, the more appropriate structure for the final sentence should have been: First be useful, in organic search engine optimization you must. Then monetize, you can.
I should update the article as you suggest, but I like your comment so much I think I’ll leave the point as you make it. Thanks. 🙂