Blog

Website owners who have faced the wrath of Google’s Panda know just how hard that update and penalty can hit a website’s traffic. It can cost page rank, customers, and even cost you trust that you have built up with those who purchase your products and services. If your website was hit by Panda, you may be trying to figure out how to recover the penalties you were hit with. Here are seven things you can do to help your website regain its former glory.

Step One: Update Your Content

The update known as Panda hit websites the hardest that had poor quality or repetitive content. If you want to be able to recover from this penalty and your website has less than stellar content, take the time to improve the content all across your website. You should make sure that all of your content is informative, offers value to those reading through your website, your content comes in different sizes and varying lengths, totally unique from all other websites (nothing duplicated), well written using proper grammar, and comprehensive in its approach. This will help your customers realize you know what you are talking about and begin to rebuild the trust that this hit may have cost you.

Step Two: Correct 404 Errors

These can happen to any website, even to those with the best intentions. If your website contained any of these errors, correct them. This goes to show that you are working on the consistent maintenance of your website and that you really are working hard to give your visitors exactly what it is they want.

Step Three: Set Authority Pages

You want the pages of your website that get the most traffic to be your top priority for correcting. These will be the most authoritative pages for the time being, and you want to make sure the customers that have been going to those pages still have a reason to come back. Fix those pages right away and leave the other pages until later.

Step Four: Set Useless Pages to ‘Nofollow’

Once you have determined the pages that are going to be your authority pages, you should set the rest of your pages to ‘nofollow’ so that they are not being indexed or adding to the penalty that your site already got hit with. As you manually correct each page, you can remove this setting and let the page be ranked with the rest of the website once more. We often like to set these type of pages as “noindex” and “nofollow”.

Step Five: Reduce Lag Time

The more disruption your website has, the harder the penalty may have hit it. This means that if you take steps to speed up your website, it may help you move past part of the penalties. The things that often slow your site down the most include animation and flash elements. Instead, use static images that are as small as you can get away with and consider using infographics. This will give your visitors something of interest to stop and look at without slowing down your website more.

Step Six: Fill In Your SEO Sections

If you are worried about the rank of your website, chances are that you have some type of SEO program on your website. This means that you can go through and add a lot of helpful information to your content to aid your visitors and ranking. Make sure to fill these in correctly and fully. You may have received part of your penalty because of the inaccurate or partial information, so if you ensure that each bit of data is accurate and complete, this can help remove that portion of your penalty.

Step Seven: Analyze Your Competitors

When you lose a page rank, one step that holds a lot of potential help is looking over the websites that now fill your former rank. Look at their websites and see what it is they do differently than your website did. This can help you notice errors your website may have that could also help you move up from your current penalized status.

Each of these steps has the potential of helping you regain your former page rank. However, if you take the time to look at each of them, you may not only regain your old rank, but you could even surpass it. Taking the time to make your site the best benefits you and the consumer equally.