How to become Panda friendly!

We have been approached once again about the Panda update from Google  from clients wanting to know how they can avoid Google penalising their sites or to stop their sites from losing page rank.

Our general advice is not to panic, site owners who look after their site, enter into a natural looking link building strategy and get a decent copywriter to look at their site content should have nothing to fear – for the rest of you here are a few tips to help you.

Content:
This is now KEYAVOID duplicate content completely and avoid any automated copy or content services. 
Ensure all content is fresh and as new as possible.
If you want to distribute news items to other sites then ensure you post to your site first at least a week before you release it to other sites.
If you do have a lot of duplicate content then consider using robots.txt to prevent similar content from being indexed by the major search engines.
For those of you have do have the same content under different URL’s, use the link rel="canonical" tag to tell Google that they are the same (read here for more help on this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html)
 
Title Tag:
Ensure that you have different Title tags for all your pages; ensure that the content of the pages matches the Title used.  Keep your Title simple.

Description Tags:
As with your Title tags, ensure that they are unique on all pages and that they match the content of the page closely. 
 
Inbound Links:
Avoid linking farms and other low quality links to your pages.  This has become a major concern to Google as there has been an explosion of site getting unnatural links that can only come from a mass link building exercise.  Remember links to your sites need to look natural.
Never pay for links. 
 
Your plans
Focus on the quality of your content, and ensure that your visitors have the best experience when they get to your site.
It’s possible that in the near future Google and other major search engines mat start to look at use stats to determine what sites fair well in its results; if for example, Google has two similar sites (one with a bounce rate of just 13% and the other with a bounce rate of 86%, I know which one Google will choose to rank higher!)

If you need help with your website copy, then talk to us, we are ready to help you.