Tips on adjusting to Google’s Panda algorithm change

Google scared a lot of web masters when it unleashed the Panda, an update that made a massive impact on the web. A full one out of nine searches in the United States were affected and a full 12 percent of the web’s sites were also affected. Google’s spokesperson Matt Cutts, familiar to many who do link building and Search Engine Optimisation, has stated that the change is one Google feels good about.

It is aimed at what are referred to as ‘content farms‘, sites that post massive amounts of content that Google feels is poor in terms of its quality. For those who want to be able to make sure their site survives in this new era of changes that are affecting all of us, there is good news: it is not that hard to be able to keep your site ranked well. In fact, if you think about, your site stands a very good chance of actually rising in the rankings if you are not practicing any shady tactics. In the past, those shady tactics would have been almost required if we wanted to see good results. Now, however, we can get good results without having to resort to less than quality links that we used to have to buy in massive quantity just to compete.

Things that you need to keep in mind for this Panda algorithm change are really not so complex as you might think. If you know about the Terms of Service used by Google’s Adsense program then you do have a very good idea of what needs to happen. First off, avoid all of the spammy links that can pump traffic your way which is just not relevant to the site you have.

That is going to cost you and it should be avoided altogether. Keep those links of high quality and you will get further ahead. The next factor is going to be the quality of the content itself. It is better to focus on the ‘less is more’ concept and focus on high quality, rich content about a topic that you have or can hire expertise on. In addition, avoid giving off the appearance that you are merely posting content to get traffic for ads. Make ads sparse and they have more impact to the visitor. These 3 points are paramount, but you also want the title tags of your page to match the content so don’t ‘trick’ Google. Finally, keyword stuffing, is out of the game and will definitely raise a red flag.

If you have been doing SEO for any length of time, you can see that these are all common sense issues. If you keep your sites clean and effective for visitors you should be just fine. In fact, you might just rise above those with unscrupulous methods.