Google Panda Updates – How To Survive If Your Site Has Been Panda Slapped?

Do you know that the latest update in Google's algorithm might lead to a 50% drop in non-paid (organic) visits to your business website? This surely sounds scary for all online marketers! Called Google Panda Updates, this latest change in Google algorithm search is targeted to wipe out the presence of all sites from Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) those cater ‘low-quality' content besides offering a whole bunch of promotional stuffs. This may turn catastrophic for medium and small-sized businesses operating online and banking hugely on SEO to promote their goods and services.

Before going any further you might ask - why is Panda introduced in the first place? Well, reasons may be quite a few, but experts opine that the chief motive behind this new Google algorithm update is due to the shady linking practices which are widely prevalent among online marketers. To get a good ranking for their respective sites, marketers would go to any length even breaching copyrights and moral integrity. Contents were copied at large from one site and published online on sites with little or no permission. Besides duplication of content there were widespread spamming activities which affected Google search engine.

The first attempt from Google to counter the situation dates back to 2009 when Google's caffeine update helped to improve its indexing process to some extent.  Hot on the heels of this recent Panda Updates from Google a new ‘Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+ extension' for users termed ‘Personal Blocklist' came to aid those who were getting frustrated with spam sites. This new facility helped users to block those sites from appearing in Google search results. Google Panda Updates is the newest addition to the line of counter-measures taken already by the search giant to hit back on purveyors of inferior content.

In spite of experts at Google claiming that only sites with ‘inferior quality content' and those which are "low-value add for users" being trashed by the new algorithmic updates, there are chances of sites belonging to medium-sized and small-enterprises, who are fully dependant on online traffic for their survival, getting injured by the panda onslaught!

So, the question arises - what would you do if you find your site been slapped by the Panda? Well, honestly there's nothing much you can do if it's already happened! But there are ways you can adopt to survive the panda attack, to some extent, and regain your web presence.

• The first symptom of your site getting slapped by Google Panda Updates is the significant decrease in page rank listings followed by fall out in the number of web traffic.
• As a counter measure Google suggests that you evaluate the whole content of your website, analyze page-by-page, and identify weaker sections and pages with ‘low-quality' content and replace with fresh contents that are meaningful and fully contextual to the page topic. That way your site relevance could gain improvement.
• If your site is a voluminous one, with a large number of pages and hence the possibility of duplicate content of your own copy, you can either try to improve, remove them, or totally block the respective pages from Google search using robots.txt.
• Another trick to escape the vigilance of Google Panda Updates, in case of duplicate pages, is to add "rel=canonical" tags to the pages concerned.
• The catch is to improve any part of your existing site that will ensure a more connected experience for the user.
• To improve web traffic, opt for social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Try using these social media platforms to direct traffic to your business site and build up your brand presence. 

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