Imagine the situation: you wake up one day, take a cup of coffee, and refresh your email to see what’s new. And right after that, you see this:
Seems like the nightmare for webmasters, right?
If you’re already seen this, then your website got the manual penalty from Google. And this is a Google Panda penalty.
What should you do next? How to recover your website? What do you need to get Panda off from your website?
There is two news for you. The good news - you can recover your website and even get better ranking results after that. The bad news - this is not a regular “automatic” filter, so you can’t recover just for 48 hours, and you should take much more efforts to lift the penalties.
Panda Manual Actions: What Does it Mean?
Let’s start from the basics: Google Panda is a major change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", in particular, "content farms", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.
What does “thin content” or content with “no added value” means in the meaning of Google Webmasters Guidelines?
It means the content that Google tell to avoid on the websites. It includes the next types and techniques:
- Automatically generated content - in other words, spinned content with text spinners (most common example).
- Creating pages with little or no original content - it means that you didn’t any research and you haven’t ANY useful information that may help users and differ you from all other websites with similar content.
- Doorway pages - pages on the website (or whole website) that redirect or move users to the money site.
- Scraped content - content created with no added value and gathered from different sources. It means, for instance, that you copied 300 words from the source 1, 300 words from the source 2 and 250 words from the source 3 = 850 words of scraped content.
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value - participants in Amazon, eBay, Clickbank or any other affiliate programs that just copying information from the original source, create clunky content and putting no efforts to create engaging content for users.
- Abusing rich snippets markup - in other words, keyword stuffing in the Schema markup or providing inaccurate data for the search engines and users.
- Keyword stuffing - very high keyword density on the page or website.
- Poor content - bad spelling, a lot of grammar mistakes, clunky and gibberish content.
These points are the most common mistakes made by the webmasters, which are cause violation of the Google Guidelines and in most cases are the cause of the Panda manual penalty.
As usual, in the “spam problems” message you’ll see no explanations about what exactly was the reason for manual actions. You’ll see only “thin content” issue and from this time you should find this content, fix or delete it and send your website to the reconsideration.
What to pay attention for?
We highly recommend you to pay attention for the next points when you’ll getting the manual actions off your website:
- Check your meta. Titles and descriptions should be unique and describe the main content purpose, without keyword stuffing.
- Check your keyword density. Don’t overuse and spam the keywords.
- Check your text parameters such as uniqueness, grammar and spelling mistakes, sentence constructions and stylistic.
- Check if your content has added value. For this point, check the first top-10 SERP results for the same keywords and see, whether your information differs from it and has information that would be helpful and useful for your users.
- Check information about the content creator. Here you can aware that you have About me page, information about who you are and your authoritativeness.
- Check website structure - it should be clear and simple for all users.
These are the main points you should consider before you’ll try to get Panda manual actions off your website.
