Since the release of Google Panda over a year ago, the search engine optimization world has never been the same. Lots of content farm websites are penalized along with online portals filled with “thin content”, and even few high authority sites are not excluded from the rage of Panda’s beastly search algorithm update.
The first wave of penalties hit top online portals on the first few months after Google Panda was released. Among these top websites are hubpages, squiido, daniweb, and a lot more. There are also numerous macro sites which were ravaged mainly because these types of websites have low content quality and provide very poor user experience.
How to know if you are hit by Google Panda
There are lots of search marketers who are always the last to find out that their websites are being hit. This is one of the reasons why necessary recovery solutions can’t be implemented immediately. Below are tips and ways on how you can quickly find out if your website is being penalized by Google Panda.
Check your website traffic using Google Analytics – The most common sign that you are hit by the Google Panda update is the sudden decrease of traffic on your website. Use Google Analytics or any website tracking software and study the trend of traffic changes. If you’ll see a sudden drop of traffic especially those ones from organic search, then your website is being penalized.
On the other side of the coin, the Panda update has also caused sudden increase of traffic on websites which have passed its standards. So, if you see an increasing traffic trend, this means that your website is penalty-free and is trusted by Google.
Check your target keywords ranking – Another way to determine if your website has been penalized is by checking your keywords SERP (Search Engine Result Page) ranking. If you’ll see a sudden drop of ranking in a specific set of keywords (i.e. from rank 2 – page 1 it has dropped to rank 32 – page 3) then that is a very bold sign that Panda is combing your website. Remember that this doesn’t necessarily happen to all your top ranking keywords. Base from experience, the penalty can be keyword- specific.
Check the consistency of the landing page of your keywords– Google Panda penalty can be site-wide, keyword-specific and page-specific. There are times that only a page of your website is penalized through its optimized keywords. For an example, you are optimizing page 1 for the keywords “first page” and page 2 for the keywords “main page”. You’ll instantly know if you are hit by Panda, if page 1 will rank for “main page” and page 2 can’t be found anymore in search engine result pages. This can happen because Google’s search algorithm find page 1 more relevant for the keywords “main page”.
There are still a lot of things to learn about Google Panda. Here at One SEO Company, our SEO Services are always up to date with search engines’ latest algorithms most specifically with Google Panda. We always aim to cater services that are up to date with the most recent changes in the search industry to provide our clients top-notched search engine optimization campaigns that guarantee higher conversions and consistent increase in lead generation.
