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What to do after a major Panda hit has been a hot topic for months. Web site owners can deploy major strategies to recover from a Panda hit by studying the webmaster pros. One recovery strategy involves fleshing out repetitive boilerplate language on original content web sites.
Matt Cutts, Google’s chief headhunter in charge of destroying spammy web sites, had warned web site owners that his team would seek out web pages that had poor or duplicate content and content that didn’t deliver quality material to visitors. Those sites that failed would be penalized.
The launch of Panda in early 2011 saw that prediction come true. Panda devastated thousands and thousands of web sites. Some web site owners saw traffic fall by 80% and more. Millions of dollars in Adsense revenue had been lost. Cutts has unleashed new iterations of Panda about every six weeks, so the carnage continues.
How do web sites recover after a Panda downgrade? The consensus states that there is no magic elixir to assure that a web site recovers from a Panda downgrade.
One solution is to hire a top SEO company to audit the web site. This, of course, brings to mind the question of what is a “top SEO company.”
Asking Google itself on how to get back in its good graces is a second solution. The answers from Google, unfortunately, are cryptic, contradictory and confusing.
There’s a third solution that costs little money and provides solutions that web page owners can try for themselves. This third solution is to study the webmaster blogs.
These people are on the front line of interpreting both Google and Panda signals. These people are pros, who have been in the Google ranking game for years. Finally, they are willing to answer questions, and they relay important hints of what works to overcome a Panda hit.
First, it’s important to realize that Panda is not a new Google algorithm but a new ranking factor added to Google’s entire algorithm.
Before the release of Panda 2.2, Cutts warned that this iteration would detect scrapper sites, which are copies of other web pages, and punish them by degrading their SERPs. Web thieves stealing original content and pasting it on their web sites has been a continuing plague for years.
Webmasters discovered two important facts about Panda’s downgrade of web sites with duplicate content. First, the scraper web sites were indeed being punished by Panda. These sites lost SERP and were appropriately downgraded.
On the other hand, some sites with original content were also getting slapped with a Panda downgrade. These sites were slammed by Google for repeating the same content on page after page in their own web sites.
This discovery relayed an important signal to every web site owner.
By omitting duplicate content, whether its boilerplate instructions or standardized blurbs about the web site, and writing new original content, the web site would show recovery in SERP. With this discovery, webmasters were able to compose a web theorem: Even though the bulk of the content on a web site may be original, any repetitive content may result in a site-wide penalty and subsequent downgrade.
The webmaster pros tested this theorem and found it generally true. Get rid of all duplicate content.
If a web site is hit by Panda, the first task of the owner is to comb through it for any duplicate content, even if it is original. Do it quickly, too. New Panda iterations are released every 4 to 8 weeks. The site needs to be reworked before the next Panda evaluation.
To recover from Panda, study what the webmaster pros say, and then apply that knowledge to the web site.
Jen Silva works for ChooseWhat.com and writes articles related to how to register a domain name and reviews on Free TurboTax online tax service.
