Google panda algorithm update started in Feb, 2011 and was rolled out across all countries by April 11, 2011. Panda or farmer update is supposed to weed out websites with low-quality content or duplicate content. True, some of the worst affected sites are ezinearticles, suite101, buzzle, hubpages. The same names that were the favorites of SEO specialists have now become taboo.
But the Panda or Farmer algorithm has also affected good-quality, original content sites like ours. Our website, http://www.outsource2india.com suffered more than 50% dip in traffic and significant drop in rankings after April 11th. We have always been conscientious of the content that went online outsource2india; original content that would be of interest to our visitors. And yet Google considers us a content farm.
Ideas on what can be done to overcome the Panda algorithm update- traffic drop
1. Google webmaster tool – Go through and rectify any and all suggestions given by Google, like crawl errors, sitemap errors, HTML suggestions, loading time suggestions.
2. Run Xenu Linksleuth to fix any broken links, 404 errors that you website might be throwing up.
3. Modify robots.txt to include any unnecessary blog files or outdated pages.
4. Beware of your hosted wordpress blog files. Plugins can be hacked easily. Outsource2india suffered a pharma hack which took some time to rectify. And we fear that is one of the reasons why our rankings went down. Remove foreign codes, unnecessary plugins. If possible, move the blog to WPengine, which is the paid version of WordPress.
5. If you have not been active in the social media arena, start Facebook and Twitter accounts immediately. Google would be using your presence in these media as one of the factors to rank your websites.
6. Start off on top social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon. But everything in moderation. Don’t overdo it, and then cry when these sites go the ezinearticles way.
7. Try to remove your articles from the article submission websites that have become the dirty word after Panda update. Ezine has not increased the number of words in the articles to 400 and doubled the review period in an effort to increase the quality of content.
8. Take care of duplicate content. If you have taken content from other websites, remove it. If you think, other websites have taken content from you, take a premium account of Copyscape that will help you search for websites that have copied content from you. File a DMCA complaint with Google. Be patient; this is a time consuming affair.
9. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en&start=1480 – Write about your website on Google webmaster central. There is a disclaimer that individual websites cannot have manual exceptions, but the feedback would be used in tweaking the next update.
10. Submit your site for reconsideration. And be optimistic. Google manually brought back the rankings of Cult of Mac, a popular blog, after reports on dropping traffic to the blog. The big white elephant might start considering smaller sites too.
Good luck. And do let me know if these worked! I am trying them too….
Online Marketing thoughts 