This article is all about Google updates and how they can harm your business. Your online business depends on your website receiving quality traffic that converts. However, getting high search engine rankings has become harder in the past five years, especially after Google rolled out the Panda update in 2011 and Penguin update in early 2012. The SEO playing field was changed with these two update. Lots of websites lost their high rankings and businesses lost incomes overnight.
If your site was affected by the two Google updates, all hope is not lost. Google provides guidelines that can help you know what may have contributed to your lower rankings. The guidelines mainly revolve among four many things: content, off-site links, user experience, and on-page SEO.
If your site was affected by either Panda or Penguin update, the guidelines below will get you started to recovering your site’s rankings.
1. Content
Content has long been the lifeblood of Google search. Time and again, Matt Cutts has insisted on providing quality content to improve the user experience on websites. If you were hit by the Panda update, check the quality of your content. Here are some steps we recommend you implement on content:
- Remove all scraped or duplicate content on your website
- Write high quality articles on your website
- Write longer articles. These are better than thin, flimsy articles
2. Off-site Links
Link building has long been the major way that Google uses to determine where to rank websites on search results. However, it is no longer a race of who has the most links, but also quality of links. If your website was hit because of off-site links, do the following:
- Remove any spam and low quality links e.g. those from spam sites
- Improve your content interlinking
3. User experience
Believe it or not, having a high bounce rate on your website can be costing you valuable traffic. User experience is one of the things that were introduced in the updates when it comes to ranking websites. To improve user experience at your site,
- Remove clutter from your website to make it load faster
- Provide quality content that will make visitors want to stay more on your site
- Have a well-laid out design that is appealing and trustworthy
4. On-page SEO
Google Penguin update was mainly about over-optimization of keywords in articles. At the same time, penalties were instituted on sites that built massive links with the same keyword.
- Remove any keyword stuffing in your on-page elements such as Title tags
- Use different anchor text when building links and rotate them
- Avoid over-optimizing articles for keywords that you are targeting
Nice post and yes all the points are true and yes agree with content is the big matter for Google now others are secondary.
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Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.