With the advent of Google Panda, many bloggers found that their carefully cultivated Google search traffic and earnings came down. What was behind this? Google make some changes to their search SERP algorithm in March-April 2011, with the idea of weeding out poor content sites from its top results. If you are a blogger whose site has been affected by the well-intended Google Panda update, here are 15 tips on how you can regain lost traffic.
1. Update Content Quality
Google Panda frowns heavily on plagiarism at any level. It’s ok to perhaps quote a paragraph or two from a well known article but total copy-paste efforts will be discouraged. Publish original content that’s been well written, with proper spelling, grammar and syntax. Include an automatic spell checking mechanism on your site to help people upload good content. You have the ultimate editorial control over what gets published on your blog; make sure that user content does not affect your search ranking negatively.
2. Avoid Too Many Ads
The rule of the thumb should be fewer Ads per quality content. Space your Ads out on your webpages and avoid the cluttered look. It’s understandable that you use Ads to generate income; however, too many Ads give the impression that generating income is what’s important to you. This fact alone can bring down your site ranking enormously.
3. Encourage External Links
Google encourages web integration and so should you. It’s understandable that you want more incoming links, but that does not mean you don’t give out external links. Don’t hesitate to place an external link but don’t sell Do-Follow paid links! While you’re at it, check if you are getting too many incoming links from sites of low quality. You could be penalized for that as well.
4. Avoid Stuffing Keywords
Some bloggers love to stuff their content with keywords. Sometimes the keyword density is as much as 50%! Of course, Google Panda, in its effort to weed out sites with bad content has put paid to heavily keyword-stuffed sites as well. Use keywords and key-phrases diligently by integrating them naturally into your content.
5. Clean Up Broken Links
Use a tool such as the Xenu Broken Link Checker to clear up broken links. Broken links won’t affect site performance but will represent a nuisance to your users when they click them. Google Panda doesn’t give preference to websites that have broken links in them.
6. Cut Down The Number Of Tags
Remove tags that have a 0 post count. As much as possible, restrict your tags to 4 or 5 for each post. If you must retain single post tags, rationalize the posts as much as possible, perhaps by clubbing such posts with other tags.
7. Eliminate Pages Of Poor Quality
Check your entire site for any copy-pasted content, poor navigation, design, spam comments and so on. If you are not able to remove all low quality pages, at least get them off the index. Check for redundant tags, unnecessary keywords and keyphrases while you’re at it. Doing just this can vastly improve your site rankings.
8. Distribute Content Through More Alternate Channels
Another way to get around the Google Panda algorithmic changes is to create additional channels for content distribution. If you haven’t started yet, it’s time to begin social networking. Create profiles on Facebook, YouTube Twitter and so on. Provide clearly visible Share buttons in your blog posts to make it easy for people to share your content on various networking sites.
9. Stick To At Least 300 Words Per Post
Google Panda will not prioritize paged having very less content. If you want your blog site to be taken seriously, make sure your content pieces are at least 300 words long.
10. Optimize Webpage Loading Speed
If your webpages take too long to load, you will lose readership and that’s basic SEO. Now, it’s basic Google Panda as well. If your webpage takes more than 5 seconds to load, you’ve lost the game in the running. According to the Google Websearch team, the speed at which your website loads is taken into serious consideration for site ranking purposes.
11. Clean Up Your Website
Turn the vacuum on and run it over all your webpages. A thorough housekeeping will help you clean up the annoying Not Found URLs. De-index them or else remove them from your site, to ensure they don’t get into the Google Search Index.
12. Don’t Encourage Spam Comments
People post all kinds of comments and it’s up to you as blog owner to moderate them. Spam comments take away your site’s credibility and now, will bring down your site’s ranking as well, going by Google Panda. If you post spam comments on other blogs just to earn backlinks, stop doing it now.
13. Revaluate SEO & Link Building Tactics
Do a thorough evaluation of how you’re applying SEO for your blog. Pay specific attention to link building; if you’ve been exchanging links with sites based on their higher Google page ranking, stop it now. Build links only if the other site contains content that might be relevant to your readers.
14. Keep Content Relevant
When people use a particular keyword to search for content and your site pops up, they expect to find content relevant to their keyword. If you use keywords randomly just to get ranked no matter what users search for, you’ll find your blog experiencing a high bounce rate. That apart, your blog could earn a low clickthrough rate from Google search results. Note that these red flags can get you penalized by the Google Panda Farmer algorithm update.
15. Watch Where You Publish Content
Google Panda is busy cracking down content farms, which means sites that contain “shallow or low quality” content. Publish your content only on valid sites that post quality, original content. You could tarry yourself by associating with low quality content farms, so be sure to avoid them.
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David is a freelance writer and landing page optimization expert and writes mainly about 
