Discovered Google Panda Hit on your Online Store? Here are Next Steps to get over it!

03 Jun 2014

Mike Patel

Discovered Google Panda Hit on your Online Store? Here are Next Steps to get over it!

As we promised, we are here with the suggestions on how you can overcome the adverse effects of Panda on page rankings of your Online Store.

Google Suggest:

“If you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

Putting the practical approach here:

Find the pages and page types hit worst on your site.
Isolate differences between those hit and those not.
Test changing those factors on hit pages but use this method of analysis with caution because the pages hit most might not be the pages earning you the penalty.
Make a list of your different types of pages. E.g., forum, quality article, low-quality article, light category, quality category, product, blog post, etc. Put the list in a column in a spreadsheet and start building a table.
Add columns for relevant factors like ‘lots of ads’, little content, some dupe, all dupe, etc and also the number of pages and % drop in Google US organic visits. Fill in the values for each type of page.
Look at how much of your site (% of pages) is taken up by your lowest quality pages and improve that.
If you are scraping or otherwise copying other site’s content, replace it with quality original content or test removing some (or even all) of those pages (and adding 301s from them to relevant pages higher up your site’s hierarchy).
If you have a large number of pages with dupe (of your own copy), weak or almost no content, improve them or remove (and 301) them or block them from Google with robots.txt.
If you have lots of pages that dupe your own copy (e.g., as happens with some content management systems and on a lot of eCommerce sites that build new URLs for ‘faceted’ pages) then add rel=canonical tags to the ‘duped’ pages. This stops Google seeing those pages as dupes.
Edit any ‘over-optimized’ pages.
Improve anything that might make the user’s experience better.
Offer users more when they first enter a page. E.g., images, videos, attractive text and pages linking to your best, related editorial content.
If possible, make your content’s language more accessible and more real?
Promote your content on social media including Twitter and Facebook.
Build your brand awareness across the web wherever you can.
If you’re sure your site is ‘Google clean’ and worthy, let Google know about it but don’t expect this to have much effect.
Make as many of these changes as you can at once in the hope of shaking off the penalty quickly. With editorial content improving, you can then add back any marketing you are missing, in steps, checking to see you don’t get slapped again.

With Google Panda creating havoc in the air, don’t miss out our next article on “What are the factors that would make your Online Store Vulnerable to Google Panda?”

We appreciate your patience. Meanwhile, you can reach ioVista for consulting on how you can escape Google Panda Slap on your Online Store!

Mike Patel

Mike Patel is a digital marketing enthusiast, innovator and President of a leading Digital and E-commerce Development Agency in Dallas, Texas. Mike holds a BS, Computer Science degree from Wayne State University and is a key player in the E-commerce development and digital marketing industry since 2004. The scope of technology in his extensive experience of more than 15 years ranges from Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) management, E-commerce SEO, Google Shopping Ads and more.

Discovered Google Panda Hit on your Online Store? Here are Next Steps to get over it!

Google Suggest:

Putting the practical approach here:

Get in Touch

Popular Posts

Start Your Free Website & Platform Assessment.