0 SEO For Panda

SEO For Panda

One disclaimer first: I would never recommend one “optimize for Panda.” It is shortsighted to try to rank pages based on a single algorithm change, no matter how profound. 

What has worked in the past continues to work, as I can bear witness to on behalf of our clients. That said, I think any web team who’s been hit by Panda would strongly disagree with Amit Singhal when he quips, 

“…focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what [you] think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals.”

Websites are in fact forced to make strategic changes based on the latest algorithm change from Google. It’s unfortunate, but it’s a fact.

Still, the message to focus on creating a stellar user experience is spot on. It can sometimes be hard, however, when a company’s lifeline is cut off and revenue plummets.

Matt Cutts told Wired in that famous interview that, "...our most recent algorithm does contain signals that can be gamed." And Amit Singhal agreed: "There is absolutely no algorithm out there which, when published, would not be gamed."

However, to rush headlong into attempting a reverse engineering of Google’s algorithm would be patently foolish. As would any attempt to spend precious time and resources optimizing solely for Panda. Instead, let’s explore some potential areas that we suspect are important with this change.

I've written about SEO for Panda before, and included some tips for rescuing sites from the gaping maw of traffic loss. Before we get into the details here, let’s go back to the Google's Singhal for this gem:

"Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?"

This is the core issue for most sites, along with saturation of advertising and lack of unique content. Beyond that problem, which can be profound for sites that have taken the easy street with SEO over the last several years, here are the major factors we’re seeing with Panda.

1. Affiliate links and ad units: Ensure the ratio of affiliate links to non-affiliate links is not too high. These can be a trigger. Advertising, too, is a factor and you’ll want to ensure the content to ad ratio makes for a good user experience. When in doubt remove advertising from some positions, especially above the fold, or where returns are nominal compared to your primary placements.
2. Low-quality or thin content: Remove these URLs, but carefully. It should be done deliberately and methodically, especially if there are thousands of URLs or more. Using a robots.txt file, robots meta noindex tag, or returning a 404 and placing that content on a separate sub-domain or domain, are the specific tactics to employ. Do not annotate this low-quality content with link canonical tags or attempt to 301 it elsewhere.
3. Canonicalization: If content is being syndicated, or is sourced from elsewhere, or if it has significant duplication on-site or off, tactics should be put in place to send strong canonical signals. Use of rel canonical annotations, on-page messaging, and even meta noindex, follow are all potential candidates here.
4. Site speed: Beyond only a good user experience, site speed was announced as a ranking factor well prior to Panda. Focus here because we suspect this to have more importance now.
5. Quality: This is the hardest part. Sites must make the effort to contribute value to the web, in the form of frequently published resources, information, guides, images, videos, or whatever. Sites serious about SEO need to commit to an editorial schedule and continually produce here.
6. Social signals: Facebook shares and likes – the former of which appears to influence rankings – Twitter activity, Google +1 use (coming soon) and quality links from social are of paramount importance.
7. Search result pages: Google has long publically stated that they dislike search results in their search results. However, search results have long worked in Google, to a greater or lesser extent. With Panda, it seems the dial has been turned up a bit on search results, and we’ve witnessed one site in particular suffer here.

One Potentially Troubling Change

Panda has given rise to meta noindex. This is potentially a troubling issue for SEOs. Does anyone remember nofollow and PageRank sculpting? After announcing that it had the potential to help with SEO, Matt Cutts reversed his advice and now recommends a site almost never use nofollow on their links.

Meta noindex is similar. Long has it been a handy tool for SEOs needing to keep content out of the search indexes, while still allowing it to be crawled and pass equity to other pages. This is still how it behaves. 

However, with Google now advising webmasters to use meta noindex (among other options) its usage will proliferate across the web, dramatically changing the landscape. Perhaps that’s a good thing, but I don’t think anyone has the ability to really predict how it will change things, and how its use may be recommended or discouraged by Google and Bing in the future.