Are your website presence and search rankings heading south? Panda 4.0 could be the reason.

Have you noticed a drop-off in traffic to your website?  Or, when you search for your site, the result rankings are less than impressive – particularly in the last month or so?  Are you worried that as a result, you could be losing valuable website business – and ultimately contact with your current and prospective client base?

The reason could be down to Google’s latest algorithm update, Panda 4.0.  This algorithm determines which pages will feature in search results as well as ranking positions based on content quality and relevance of a website.  This is all part of Google’s efforts to push poor quality websites with spam content right down the search rankings.  Which on the face of it is a good thing!

Unfortunately, Panda 4.0 – along with other recent algorithm changes – has affected many sites that are clearly not spam but still don’t manage to pass Google’s ‘quality filter’.  All of these sites experienced a deep decline in visibility as well as a steep drop in SEO rankings.  In extreme cases, they’ve needed to be completely redesigned to continue to work.

Here are some good basic principles that will help you stay on the right side of Google Algorithm updates:

• Content is king – make sure you write great content and that any data included is from a trustworthy source.
• Remove any low-quality or duplicated content – is the amount of useful information a little thin on the ground, or will the reader gain real value from what you choose to share?
• Are the topics driven by genuine reader interest, or does the site generate content by guessing what might rank well in search engines?
• Are there any spelling mistakes or other errors? A lot of spam will contain spelling or syntax errors.
• Are the images relevant to the content?  If not, they should be.
• Improve your technical SEO – do the words on the page match the ‘keywords’ in the search query?
• Revamp internal linking structures and navigation paths to ensure the user is able to easily travel through your website without being bombarded with advertising banners or third party offers.
• Create more mobile friendly pages or go responsive.
• Avoid dealing with any risky affiliate marketing set ups and remove any rogue risky pages and subdomains.
• Make sure your site is optimised for loading speed – slower loading is associated with the more ‘bloated’ spam pages present within ‘low quality’ websites

If you have noticed that things aren’t what they were when you review your latest analytics reports – then take a tip from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.  Keep the points outlined above in mind as you focus on developing high-quality content, merge and develop content on ‘thinner’ pages and remove any low-quality content that may be the cause of your dropping search rankings.