Panda Hit Content should be Improved, Not Removed

The old saying ‘content is king’ is something that is often repeated by webmasters and marketing experts, will tell you, content alone is not good enough – the content needs to be high quality, otherwise you will see SEO problems.

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Why You Should Fear the Panda

The GooglePanda update was a search-quality focused update that removed or penalized websites that had a lot of duplicate content or low quality content, and there have been several refreshes since the algorithm was first rolled out. There were a lot of websites which were generally high quality that got hit by Panda penalties because one or two of their pages didn’t pass the standard.

It’s easy to understand why a lot of webmasters, when faced with Panda penalties, had the kneejerk reaction of removing the low quality pages, hoping that this would be enough to help them recover from the penalty. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to work, because Google would rather see webmasters fix their poor content than remove it.

Recovering From a Penalty

What Google wants to see is an improvement in the quality of the website’s content. Gary Illyse advises webmasters to look at their site from the viewpoint of a searcher. Use search analytics to find pages which are ranking for a query, but that don’t satisfy the searcher’s needs, and make those pages better. That will likely be thin content pages. You need to not just add more words to the page, but to make those words useful. Good content serves a purpose – it answers questions or helps a user do something.

If you need help you could always talk to a professional seo services london company who can come up with content for your website.  Clear and precise content is vital and you should make sure you know whether it is for on or off page.  Off page is not about the company and is purely to build power.   All too often, webmasters fill their sites with fluff and extra pages that contain just a small amount of text, hoping to ‘cover their bases’ when it comes to every query that a user might have. While there is some wisdom to offering a lot of different landing page options, it is better to make a few high quality pages.

Take this chance to flesh out the pages you do have, and don’t add more without good reason.