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 the 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.
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About the Author Adam
Adam is the founder of Adam SEO. He started his SEO journey in 2005 and officially ventured into offering an SEO consultancy service in 2011. He helped numerous companies in Malaysia and Singapore to get targeted traffic and increase their website visibility through SEO marketing.