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Google Panda Guidelines
As explained in Wikipedia, Google Panda is a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites“, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. Google has posted a guidance listed 23 points on creating high-quality sites, https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html. It’s all about your website’s quality.
What is the impact of the website’s quality?
In pre-panda algorithm, a ranking always based on:
[Keyword Relevance] + [Off/On-Page Optimization] = Your Rank [Old Ranking Factors]
With the Google Panda in place, each website has a quality score determined by Google to determine if you have a High-Quality site or a Low-Quality site.
[Quality Score/100] X [Old Ranking Factors] = Your Rank
The impact is so huge where you need to work XXX times harder if you have low-quality site. This means that you need to spend huge efforts in off-page optimization to reach the same ranking.
Next, we shall find out how Google determines a quality score. Based on various resources from the SEO experts, the quality score is set as below:
[Static Elements] X [Quality Checks] X [User Experience] = Quality Score
How to improve quality score?
Step 1 – Code Quality
- Remove broken code (html errors, broken divs, etc.)
- Remove obsolete code such as <u>, <center>
- Use CSS stylesheet instead of using <font size =2>
- Recode your page if you are still using Frontpage 2003 to build it.
Step 2 – Site Structure
- It is important to:
- Keep your user on your site longer
- Helps users find your content and shows that your site covers the whole topic.
- Helps Googlebot crawl your site.
- Helps Google determine that your page is highly relevant to the search query.
- Group relevant topic and provide sub-navigation link to those articles/pages.
Step 3 – Static Elements
- Write your own original Privacy, Contact, About and Term of service page.
- Many webmasters like to copy the content from somewhere without doing major modification as they assume that is the standard content. How can Google rank a website high while the webmaster itself not able to write its own privacy and term of services page?
- Include full address, contact email, contact phone number and a Google map in your contact page. This increases the trust of your website.
- Change the year of the copyright footer. E.g. change to 2006-2016 and not 2006+ or just 2006.
Step 4 – Thin and Duplicate Content
- Always create high-quality original content on your website.
- Do not create overlapping, duplicate, or redundant post on the similar or same topics with different keywords variations for SEO purposes. Find out the right way to choose keywords here.
- Minimize “thin” content on your website. “Thin content” refers to a page with very short content less than 200 words. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have it. It won’t kill you if you have a few pages out of a hundred pages.
- Disable/No-Index Tags, Tag Clouds, Archives which creating duplicate content within your site.
Find out more about other SEO tips.