Post Panda/Penguin SEO Strategy for Bloggers

Post panda SEO
  • Save
Not in the distant past (2011) when Google Panda rolled out, many Bloggers expected it like just another Google algorithm change, but honestly, it changed the Blogging industry big time.

Every professional Blogger has to re-work on their strategies. I have already shared a guide on how to recover from Google panda and for people who are badly struck with new Google Panda algorithm, I also offer personal Panda recovery consultancy.

One thing, which people have talked about after Panda updates is, SEO is not relevant and now it’s dead and believe it, SEO is not dead and it never will. SEO is basically a quality guidelines and set of rules a Website and a Webpage should follow to meet Google SEO guidelines.

What is SEO In Post Panda World:

Before 2011, SEO and domain value used to be an important factor but it never used to be ranking factor for complete domain. After panda updates, many things changed and one of them is domain level penalty. Earlier, few shallow and low quality pages only impact particular posts and not complete domain but now in post panda SEO world(Post Penguin now), this has changed. Few low quality posts on your pages may impact the complete domain ranking and you will notice no traffic on your recent posts and traffic drop back to back. Instead of thinking Google to fix your site SEO, you should be thinking what is one thing that you did wrong, which impacted your site. I’m sharing panda SEO guide for people who are starting a new website or blog now and want to make sure Panda updates will never impact their blog.

Post Panda SEO Strategies:

I’m not including basic SEO steps which you should do, as I expect you to take care of all basic SEO optimization tips. I tried to link to as much as relevant post to get things done but if you still have any questions, feel free to ask via comments.

Content Quality:

Let me start with the basic of SEO and that is your quality content. If you are writing a post which is not very useful, doesn’t cover complete information and doesn’t contain proper Keyword, related Keywords and so on, chances are your content might not be seen as quality one. One easy way to do is, simply search for your target Keyword and see if your post contain more values than existing post on the web. If not, it’s time to cover all missing points and make your content useful.

I know many of your might hate SEO and feel like it’s useless, but post panda world you need to develop a proper content generation strategy. Keyword research should be an essential part of it. You can use Mind map tools initially and SEMRUSh to create a list of such Keywords which are related to your domain, and then work on it. Do keep in mind, it’s not only about good content but it should be great content.

Needless to say, Onpage SEO optimization is going to play major roles and make sure your content contains LSI word.

Also take care of other factors like Typos, Grammar and level of reading (Readability), which also started affecting ranking of pages and domain. Another tip which I can give you is start with Video blogging and try to add videos or slides into your post, which will make it more meaningful and useful.

Becoming more Social:

Google plus your world is the best hint which you should get from Google directly, about getting more social. Now there are tons of Websites and it’s always a good idea to get mention on as much as social media sites. But from my experience, I have seen getting more social on sites like Google plus, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and Facebook will help you more. Out of all this, Google plus is something which will impact your search engine placement a lot. Especially, if you are getting hundreds of Google pluses, you can imagine what will be the reachability of your post in a social group.

Site SEO Structure:

Earlier we know more pages we have in Google, better it is for us. But considering SEO post panda, it’s important that only important pages of your blog is indexed. Else your pages might land into supplement results. Instead of using Robots.txt, I would suggest use noindex tag. Try to keep only those pages indexed, which actually helps readers and search engine both.

Add proper meta title, description and also take care of site navigation and structure. Put all important links in your navigation bars, which will also help you in Google site links to important pages of your site. Apart from that follow all traditional SEO tips like Submitting Sitemap, add robots.txt and so on.

Outbound links:

We have already discussed about importance of outbound links and I have been constantly talking about the same. I have already given one example of bad outbound links in my earlier post on Blog comments. When you are linking to relevant and useful pages from your blog post, it increases the quality of your page and it’s seen as more valued page from SEO perspective. Also, from reader perspective adding outbound links to useful pages helps a lot. If you are not so experience with this, try using Zemanta plugin.

Make your site Social:

Your strategy is not to get only social media share, but make your site social too. Keep your site presence everywhere  for example: Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and any other social media site which is relevant to your niche. For example, a Fashion, health and Facebook niche blogger can target site like Pinterest. Add relevant widgets on your site and for newbies, here are some guide which you can refer to get started.

Quality link building over quantity backlinks:

Google recently taken down all the private blog networks and links going out from it. If you are new to private blog networks, in simple word a person/company creates 100 or more blogs on different niche and start back linking which ultimately end up creating a link farm.

Now, you may not ignore our 101 tips to create quality backlinks, but also I suggest to focus more on quality of backlinks. When you are getting natural backlinks from relevant domain, it’s always a good and the best link. As I mentioned above, quality content is the best weapon which you have for post Panda SEO and quality stuff will help in getting quality links to your site. Needless to say Social media share also going to boost your ranking at great level.

Focus on your Analytics:

Google ranking factors depend on many metrics and having Google analytics or any other web stats program is going to help and analyze your pages. Pages, which are not performing well, you can always edit it and optimize for better performance.

Especially monitor pages which have a high bounce rate, low avg. time on page and high exit rate. Use content strategy and develop related content associated with it. Follow my bounce rate guide to decrease bounce rate and let the reader stick to your blog.

Duplicate Content Strategies:

Google is now very strict about duplicate content and I found them little dumb when handling duplicate content from the real blog and a copied paste blog. My suggestion is to follow a strategy which will help you to fight those Auto RSS blogs. Here are few things which I do and you should: Use RSS footer plugin and keep your feed as partial. Learn how you can report copied pages to Google and remove them from Search.

Well, this is not all but start looking into all the factors which Google has implemented lately for example: Page layout algo, Page speed algo, private blog networks and so on. Traditional SEO of your site remains the same but now the major difference is the quality of your pages along with quality of over all domain. Here is an interesting guide from hubspot, which talks about things to avoid in post panda SEO strategies.

Honestly, it’s impossible to lay down all the strategy in a single post but I have tried marking all those important factor for SEO post panda, which everyone should start considering. I will keep updating new Panda SEO strategies and changes which you should bring on your blog to beat out panda. You can subscribe to my Email newsletter for instant updates.

Also, let me know what strategy you are following for SEO post panda world? If you find this post useful, don’t forget to give us Google plus and share it on Facebook.

Was this helpful?

Thanks for your feedback!
  • Save
Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

17 thoughts on “Post Panda/Penguin SEO Strategy for Bloggers”

  1. Raman

    Hi,

    Well, I have been trying out to understand Google Panda and Penguin, by reading more and more and this is helping me a lot. I know Google Panda is all about Quality Content.

    Although, It would take some time for me to understand, How to avoid any penalty from Google Penguin. It is bit complicated for me, they say, Only natural links are safe, but After reading articles, including this one, i get bit confused.

    Anyways, Will try experimenting a bit.

  2. Reene Smith

    Hello,

    Well, I have been trying out to understand Google Panda and Penguin, by reading more and more and this is helping me a lot. I know Google Panda is all about Quality Content.

    Although, It would take some time for me to understand, How to avoid any penalty from Google Penguin. It is bit complicated for me, they say, Only natural links are safe, but After reading articles, including this one, i get bit confused.

    Anyways, Will try experimenting a bit.

  3. Siya

    Hello

    Well, Google has made it difficult for newbies like us, with these algorithm updates. I am really trying hard to learn to comply with these updates, after one of my blog got hit from last panda update and I guess Penguin is also coming.

    So, reading a lot about these updates, so I can remove the risk of penalty from my blogs.

    Is there any special thing, which I can follow?

    1. Heena

      Hi Sia,

      In order to save your onsite blogs from getting hit by any Google updates you need to take care of the following points:

      1. Do not copy content from anywhere else. Create unique and valuable content for your blogs and make sure that even your onsite blog does not create any internal duplicate content issue.

      2. Do not use so many external links in your blog’s body section. Having a decent number of external backlinks is fine, but if you will use so many backlinks on a single blog then it will give negative impression of your blogs to search engines.

      3. Have a decent amount of content on your blogs pages. Don’t draft very small blogs or articles that are very short and having no sense from user’s or search engine’s perspective.

      4. While using outbound links on your blogs, make sure that the anchor text is a bit long tail and also most relevant to the linked page.

      5. Even after posting your blogs, give it regular check with online duplicate content checking tools like SiteLiner and CopyScape respectively, to make sure that your posted content is not creating any internal duplicate content issue or it is not getting copied by anyone else.

      6. Do not do keyword stuffing in your blogs.

      7. While creating backlinks for your blogs/website, make sure that you do not create so many backlinks on a single keyword (money keyword). Also make sure that your backlink anchor text looks genuine and relevant to the linked page theme.

      8. Create your backlinks on the most relevant websites that have high domain authority.

      9. Do not create backlinks on heavy ads site or adult content sites.

      10. Check all your latest backlinks on regular basis to make sure that your backlinks are not creating any spam activity issue for the site.

      Additional tip for blog – If you are copying a quote or something as it is from any other website, then mention the resource link in the blog itself, to get prevented from duplicate content issue.

  4. Ronnie

    Being a newbie, I have been learning about Google’s Updates, specially Panda and Penguin and trying to move up keeping these in mind.

    Because I have read it many times online, that Panda and Penguin hate manipulation, If I am not wrong. So, I am trying to do work like these Google Algorithms want me to do. And that’s why reading a lot about these on daily basis.

    Any specific advice regarding these algorithm, which can help me?

  5. Anubhav Gupta

    Hey harsh

    Amazing points you shared with us to post with panda updates. i’ll gonna follow these tips on my blog with keep in mind about Google wild animal.

    Thanks for post
    Anubhav

  6. Richard Gilbert

    You cant beat good quality content with only natural links. Great post Thanks for sharing

  7. Ingo

    Nice guides here Harsh! Most of them still work well after penguin update. Always remember that quality and natural are want Google loves 🙂

  8. Rohit

    Is there any another way to find wheather our blog is affected by Google Panda 4.0 exept google analytic and webmaster my blog traffic is reduced to half but as the traffic of my blog started to decrease from 23 july and still the graph showing down slope is my blog is affected by google panda or any other reason really confused

  9. amod

    hi harsh,
    i want to work on my SEO skills is there some books or nything that I should start reading and thn try out practically on my sites/blogs???

  10. Sachin

    That’s right Harsh, you put it the right way as quality content and quality backlinks are more important. Another thing is ‘Outbound’ links should be relevant and not leading to spamy and useless site.
    In last week of feb 2012 I published a new blog with ‘Keyword in domain’ and written 6 to 7 post till date and created backlinks through social networking and book-marking site; the results are fabulous! That blog is #4 for targeted keyword in Google India and on 2nd page in Google. I did the same what you put in this post!

  11. Srivathsan G.K

    Hate the thing that Google is making users, webmasters to force use their Google+ network in the name of Socializing. We are becoming slaves !

  12. trisha

    I think this is really a wonderful post and ultimately we can understand that the entire game is based on content. In fact, great content!

  13. Latief

    I always believe that SEO is not Dead, Google try to fight the spammers that spamming search engine and make search engine more human 🙂
    I have few articles that rank better than before, positive panda effect!

  14. Aakash Goyal

    if we have a great tutorial that is not playing well with search engine then should we noindex the post or remove it from blog ?

    1. heenaahmad

      Hi Aakash,

      If you have such tutorial which is knowledgeable and useful from user’s perspective, and it is also unique, but not playing well when it comes to search engines, then I will suggest not deleting that post. Because you have already made efforts in creating that content, but just creating content and adding it to your blog, is not going to convert your goal. So, instead of deleting your tutorial, create it’s high quality backlinks and promote it online for the topic it is relevant to. It will help you to give you better results from search engines.

  15. jayaar

    It is obvious that the purpose of frequent monitoring in the name of ‘panda’ is to maintain the standard of the blogs. After all, Google has to retain its credibility. If we are particular about giving reliable and unique information, there is no need to worry about ‘panda’.
    Harsh, your article stresses on the vital points that we are supposed to follow to satisfy the search engines.
    Great article and very useful to all bloggers.
    Thanks for the cogent presentation.
    Regards……..

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top
1K Share