Learn the right way to Panda-proof your content
If you think that Google has rolled out enough Panda updates during the previous year, then you may be surprised to know that this year will witness a lot of the same directive from the search engine giant. In its constant battle against spam rank, Google will most likely continue its efforts in bringing content farms and websites with duplicate and/or poor content down to their knees.
So, how can you protect your content from raising the Panda's fury? Here are some practical suggestions that can help you Panda-proof your content.
Eliminate duplicate content. Duplicate content can literally obliterate all your SEO [3] efforts and sink your website overnight. That is how serious Google is in eradicating duplicate content on the net.
To address such issues, you can remove duplicate content and return a 404 error or a 301-redirect, use a robots.txt file or a Meta robots tag to block search spiders from crawling the page where the duplicate content lies or use canonical tags so that the non-canonical pages will not be indexed by the search crawlers. You can likewise use Webmaster Tools (Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center) to manually remove a page or an entire directory from the index.
Remove low quality content. Pages with low unique page views and high bounce rates should be removed or consolidated with more useful content since Google sees them as low quality content. You may likewise add internal links pointing to high quality content on your site to improve user engagement.
Add quality content. You can earn Google's trust by keeping your content fresh so get on with it before it's too late. To make sure you get Google's approval, create articles that contain valuable information and are interesting and credible enough to be considered link-worthy. For best results, consider uploading informative videos, list-style articles, infographics and personal interviews. These types of content can help differentiate your content from anyone else's and help you generate high quality inbound traffic [4] as well.
Beef up your content. Google hates thin content such as those seen in most ecommerce product pages. However, since these pages are instrumental in providing site usability, deleting them altogether is not a viable option. In such cases, you should opt to add valuable content, video, audio and/or user reviews on the page. Make sure to keep an eye on your word count as well.
De-optimize your content. If your articles were written primarily for the search engines, you should consider de-optimizing it. Don't leave it as it is or you will risk raising the Panda's wrath.
There is no stopping Google from rolling out yet another Panda update but you can protect yourself from being hit by following these simple yet effective tips.