Zack Williamson

Post Panda SEO Tips

If your site was negatively effected by Panda, I suggest also checking out my article titled, “How to Recover from a Panda Slap Down”

1. Greater Emphasis on On-page Optimization Post Panda

• Google Webmaster Tools is a great place to start, you should spend hours in there following the suggestions and fixing reported errors.
• Clean code, use W3C.org’s free online tools to validate your CSS and HTML
• Decrease load time, Web Page Analyzer is another free SEO tool that will help you do that.
• Crawlability: To many people’s surprise, I no longer suggest the use of sitemaps for post Panda SEO. Instead, make sure that the bots can naturally reach every page on your site without having to force Google to index it with a sitemap.

2. Written Content must be “high quality”

• Spinning appears to be dead. Your written content must be truly unique.
• Article length 500 words+, no fluff just facts and valuable information.
• Requires independent investigation to post content that cannot be found on other sites.
• Written by expert or enthusiast.
• Post Panda, Google is much more critical on misspelling and grammatical errors.
• 2% keyword density is now too much, instead use synonyms.
• Definitely visit “High Quality Content” to see Google’s guidelines.

3. Use less ads and affiliate links

• Less ads is more and can actually increase your page RPM (formally ECPM)
• Cloak or hide affiliate links by using Action Script, Java, link shorteners or my favorite, redirects.

4. Use Graphical Content

• High quality, large images should be used, no longer are small files that load quicker better. sacrifice load time for image quality.
• Google now reads text in images so don’t steal images with text or edit them if you do.
• Use keyword variations in image file names, titles, alt tag and descriptions.
• Give all images unique, SEO friendly URLs. This provides more unique, relevant and optimized pages to be indexed.

5. Like is the new link: Post Panda SMO

• Get as many friends and followers as you can.
• Show regular activity on all networks, post updates, comments, add pictures etc.
• Use social media integration on your website with Facebook connect, Plus one, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon and more.
• Use APIs that will syndicate and auto post content across social networks.

6. Post Panda SEO Link building

• Use high quality content to get links, blog post, article submissions, guest posts, contributions to journalistic or educational sites.
• Black hat can still be used for indexing, don’t expect it to pass Page Rank.

7. Keep Content Fresh

• Rewrite or append to existing content.
• Allow user generated content like comments.

8. Study User Behavior

Googlebot being the robot that it is, can’t actually form an opinion as to the quality of you content so after Panda, Google is putting a stronger emphasis on the visitors’ activity to help them determine if your content is really worth a damn. Spend more time looking at your Google Analytics.

• CTR.
• Bounce rate.
• Time on site.
• Do anything you can to make people click and stick.
• use flash, video appealing graphics like this little video of Professor Puppet talking about Post Panda SEO

Find more specifics about each one of the 6 Panda updates…

Panda Update 1.0: Feb 24, 2011
Panda Update 2.0: Apr 11, 2011
Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011
Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011
Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011
Panda Update 2.4: Aug 12, 2011
Panda Update 2.5: Sept 28, 2011

Feel free to add to the list or ask questions in the comments below