2011 is the year of “Panda”, more than 10 updates happened and many of the large and small websites got hit by Panda effect. Google rolled out Panda to get rid of content farms who produce content at cheap cost and push to internet where no one is interested in reading those articles. Lot of start-ups mushroomed in last 2 years who just want to acquire content and push it to search engines and do some SEO to get their pages rank well, the days are gone now panda is a progressive algorithm and getting better and better everyday.
What is Panda?
Panda is ranking factor introduced by Google to get rid of junk websites from their index. It will not directly effect pagerank but will send out signals to Google’s master algorithm about the websites performance, quality and user behavior. It is something like out of 10 points if your website scores more than 6 or 7 points it indicates that the content in your website is not useful for the readers and the score will be calculated based on many factors like Manual reviews, user behavior, bounce rate, quality of the content, Social Media and speed of the website.
Here are some of the strategies recommended to be adopted in 2012 to avoid Panda effect:
Speed of the website:
Website loading speed will become the major factor in 2012 to rank better in search engine results, user’s have more choices on every topic/product nowadays and can’t wait more than 4 seconds to load the website which leads to huge bounce rate and automatically it effects your website rankings. Google introduced PageSpeed last year and given access for developers as well to develop products on top of it, it will give you recommendations for your website on how to load your website faster. Apart from PageSpeed you may also look at Pingdom load time analysis tool.
IBEE Solutions recommendations for increasing the speed of your website:
- Host your website in India, Now IBEE Hosting is hosting all its customers websites in India, contact sales at 040-44254242 for more details.
- Use CDN for hosting images and JS files or use public APIs for hosting JS files
- leverage browser caching using .htaccess
- Hire an experienced website designer / developer to audit your website
Website Design and Coding:
You may have multiple options or sources to get your website designed or developed but getting your website designed with professional web developer matters to Google, it is now not tolerating poor coding sites and bad navigation websites, this will lead to more bounce rate even though your website is related to those keywords. Having more bounce rate will indicate Google that your website visitors are not satisfied with the content on your website.
Social Media Strategy:
By just having a fan page in Facebook and twitter account you can’t get your website ranked well in Google, you need to engage more frequently with your Facebook page fans Google now started indexing Fan pages and its comments, the same applies for twitter as well. The more signals Google receive from Social Media the more your chance to increase your webpage authority.
Quality of the content:
Gone are the old days to hire a content writer and write some 250 words per article and push it to search engines with basic SEO efforts. Now Google is analyzing pages on the basis of how descriptive and narrative the content is published. An image or video describing the event/article will be plus to rank your article in search engines now. Panda somehow become very strong in identifying websites that grabs content and automate it, it banned many websites in last one year it is not advisable to use any plugins or custom to grab the content and push to search engines, it also identifies rewritten content as well so better be out of these old techniques and start producing genuine content with useful information.
