What is Google Panda?

Google’s mission is help their users to find sites that match or anticipate their needs.

They promote sites that give value to their users, whether’s that’s useful information, something entertaining, or even just a page that very clearly offers what the searcher searched for quickly.

In 2011, Google introduced an update to its search results ranking algorithm that actually demotes sites that don’t provide any value to their users. We call this update Panda.

Panda’s job is to filter the search engine results, trying to make sure all the sites Google indexes and ranks favourably provide value to their users.

It does this by looking at the content and user experience of a site: what it says, what kind of pages or blog posts it has, how relevant it is to what users search for to find it, how it’s put together, how user-friendly it is, and so on. It updates regularly, keeping the search results free of low value sites.

If your search engine rankings have been unusually low lately and you’ve exhausted the most likely causes – having too many dodgy links, for example – there’s a strong chance you’ve been knocked by Panda for having low quality content. That includes:

• Low-grade, badly written or lack of content
• Duplicate content on your own site
• Content plagiarised from other sites
• Inappropriate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Doorway pages and thin affiliate pages
• Intolerably slow site speed
• Poor user experience, including broken links
• Security issues

What we can do

Sometimes there are quick fixes to Panda but in most cases the causes are rooted deeply in the site structure and content, making the changes more complicated and drawn-out. The ‘art’ to recovery is proper identification of the cause and we always recommend this as a first step. Therefore the first step is always: Issue Diagnosis.

It's not always easy to identify the exact issue causing the problem. Without the correct diagnosis you can't proceed with the right remedy. We've worked with businesses that have previously assumed they had a link-related issue and cleaned lots of links only to find out that in fact their problem was content-related. Our Issue Diagnosis service takes an informed look at your analytics, the technical aspects of your site, its content, and bespoke reports to give a watertight appraisal of the issue.

Essentially the process involves a set of audits that cover:

• Traffic trends in Google Analytics
• Website change history
• Site hierarchy & architecture
• Keyphrase focus & rankings
• Technical performance & optimisation
• Content
• Design & UX
• SEO best practices
• Browser compatibility & compliance

Plus, and very importantly, we will also review the top non-penalised competitors. This gives us a ‘control’ to compare your site against.

You will receive a set of spreadsheets and supporting reports that outline all the issues, which ones are likely to have contributed to the Panda penalty. Once we’ve established the cause, we can create an actionable, cost-effective plan to fix it in time for the next feasible Panda update. And we don’t stop there: we can then make recommendations for future work to protect your site against further penalties. We’re the penalty recovery specialists, and we’ve helped dozens of businesses restore their lost rankings so they can move forward stronger than ever.

Are you ready to recover from a Panda penalty? Give us a call on +44 (0) 3301 333480 or make an enquiry by filling out our contact form.