Conquering the Panda Effect
After going through the previous chapter, you
must now be aware that you need to make radical changes to keep Google
happy. Since Google controls the search market, you’ll have to play by
their rules. In this chapter, you will learn about various SEO
techniques that will help you overcome the Panda hit. Keep in mind, the
process of recovering your lost ranking can be slow, and weeks may pass
before you see any major improvements.
The following techniques have been developed around Google’s guidelines mentioned in Chapter 2, but there are still a lot of other tweaks that you should incorporate as well. Depending on your problem, you may need to implement some or all of the following solutions. The list is as comprehensive as possible and covers quite a few items, but is still nowhere close to the 200 different signals that Google analyzes for every website. The items covered below display the widest effect on the search ranking of your website, and hence it is not considered important to go beyond these items.
{Hi|Hey} there.
The curly brackets are called delimiters. Every opening delimiter has a corresponding closing delimiter, just like brackets. The pipe character is used to separate various synonyms.
As you can see, two variations of the above sentence are possible. When you use the software on an article, it creates a text file using the syntax shown above. You can select various words and phrases, and the software puts synonyms of those words between delimiters as shown above. Using different synonyms, the spinner can produce a large number of variations of the base article.
Remember, Panda updates favor websites that offer unique and original content to users.
Now, if your whole website is interspersed with copied or spun content, then you should consider rewriting all of it. You may also consider moving spun content to another domain where they are grouped together. This will increase the overall quality of your website, and only that particular domain will be affected (though it is recommended to get rid of them completely).
It has been seen that if you publish content from a plethora of authors of varying competence levels, breaking your site into subdomains can be of great assistance. Domains with better quality content will receive higher SERP ratings—as it should be. This will also prevent your entire website from getting bogged down due to the lower-quality content.
The robots.txt file contains information for the search engine crawler bots about which pages should be excluded from indexing. This feature has become even more important after the Panda update, because if you have old, outdated, or copied content, you should exclude those pages from getting crawled. This will save you from getting penalized because of those pages until you figure out how to go about fixing them.
To gain these benefits, there are a couple of things you can implement, the details of which are listed below.
Try to make your site easier to navigate. This is simply a part of good website design, which has gained even greater importance since the advent of Google Panda. Having an organized and interlinked website will earn you many SEO points. Interlink your posts. By that I mean, if in one of your articles you refer to a topic or product about which you have written an article long ago; then include a link to that older post. People might be interested in reading more, and it’s a good practice to coerce visitors to stay on your site. Also, while you accomplish this, balance the use of anchor text on your pages; you’ll learn more about this shortly.
Use interlinking not only in your text, but also in images. You can use alt text for images and produce anchor text-like results. The whole point is to make navigation of your site as easy as possible.
This observation can be similarly applied to a webpage. When a user visits your webpage, the first thing he’s going to notice is contents of the top half of the page, depending upon the browser and his resolution settings. There’s a big chance the user will not scroll down to fish for relevant content if the top of your page is filled with ad banners and irrelevant text. Google has took care to give greater preference to the content value on the top of the page while determining the authority of a website.
Using different advertisement networks for your website can also be useful. Make a point to keep the ad-to-content ratio close to zero for above-the-fold space in your web pages. As mentioned before, what you place above the fold is of great importance when it comes to Google’s search-ranking algorithm.
Places to find these outbound links include nested menus and submenus and on a Wordpress blog -posts, categories, blog roll links and more. It is just a good practice to remove all useless links from your page. Also, take care to mark paid outbound links as NoFollow.
Next, include outbound links to authority sites on your website. Now you may argue that this means you are directing your traffic to other sites without any benefit. However, this will increase your own authority in Google’s eyes. It is a good practice to share traffic and give credit to sites in your niche that have more detailed content than your site. You can also include Wikipedia links, as it holds information in any niche. This indicates you are playing fair, are not trying to hoard traffic, and appears more natural. It also creates a good user experience in the sense that you are really trying to give the best possible information to the user because let’s face it—no website has all the information.
If you have copied an article or a story from another site, be sure to give due credit to the original site by including a DoFollow link to that site. There’s a good chance that the user will read the content on your site and recommend your website to his or her friends. The amount or frequency of these links have to be decided solely by you on the basis of what you have learned so far, taking into account your niche-specific competitors’ sites.
For example, if the main keyword is summer school, you should use variations such as all about summer school, the best summer school, everything about summer schools, learn about summer school, etc.
It is best to evaluate your standing against your competitors in your niche and take a note of the amount of anchor text they are using. This can be easily accomplished by using various online tools such as SpyGlass.
It should also be mentioned here that the overall value of anchor text has been reduced by the Panda update. Gaining leverage through massive link building using anchor texts might not be a good idea now—it can even work against you. Panda penalizes all spam practices; reducing the value of anchor text, which are a great source of spam, is part of its job.
The bottom line is to make your link-building efforts sustainable in the long term. Also, links that have existed for a long time carry more weight in Google’s eyes because their credibility increases with time. Link building is a slow process, and it should be done regularly. Never rest on your laurels, because SEO is constantly changing. Panda was just one of the 500 algorithm updates that are slated to be released in 2011. Therefore, you have to plan your actions so that you can deal with whatever the future might throw at you.
If the above tweaks do not solve your problem, then you should be practical. Find out which sites are copying your content using Google search or Copyscape premium. If they are ranking above you in Google search for that article, then you have a problem. It means they have copied your content and have managed to trick Google into believing that they originally created that content and you copied it. You can try contacting the webmaster of that site and ask him to take the content down on ethical grounds. If that fails, you have no choice except to remove that article from your own site and rewrite it. This is a hard choice to make, but it is better than getting penalized by Google for copying.
Also, Facebook pages now rank higher in Google’s search results. Therefore, it is highly advised that you promote your business through Facebook. Even though social networking outbound links are NoFollow links, they can still be useful in popularizing your website and your business.
Social bookmarking sites allow users to share articles and websites with their friends.
Even though these sites, just like social networking sites, are NoFollow, it is still worth it to promote your sites on these platforms. These help to build up your reputation and credibility in Google’s eyes. Apart from these, you can try linkbuilding on private blogs comments, forum comments, and various other websites.
Source Link:www.whatisgooglepanda.com
The following techniques have been developed around Google’s guidelines mentioned in Chapter 2, but there are still a lot of other tweaks that you should incorporate as well. Depending on your problem, you may need to implement some or all of the following solutions. The list is as comprehensive as possible and covers quite a few items, but is still nowhere close to the 200 different signals that Google analyzes for every website. The items covered below display the widest effect on the search ranking of your website, and hence it is not considered important to go beyond these items.
Module 1: Content Related SEO
Article Spinning
Article spinning is rewriting an article with the intent of keeping the general content intact, but changing the wording so as to offer a slightly different perspective of the topic to the reader. Spinning can be done manually or with the help of software. Spinning is performed so that you can post the same article on different sites and avoid the duplicate content penalty that search engines impose. The most popular syntax used by automatic article spinners is as follows:{Hi|Hey} there.
The curly brackets are called delimiters. Every opening delimiter has a corresponding closing delimiter, just like brackets. The pipe character is used to separate various synonyms.
As you can see, two variations of the above sentence are possible. When you use the software on an article, it creates a text file using the syntax shown above. You can select various words and phrases, and the software puts synonyms of those words between delimiters as shown above. Using different synonyms, the spinner can produce a large number of variations of the base article.
What not to do: sub-standard article spinning
It is no secret that spun articles produced through software are not up to the mark in terms of quality. Spinning only makes your content appear unique to the search engines when in reality, it is not. Now that Google is becoming better at detecting duplicate content, it is even more essential to use the best methods of article spinning. If you use software for your spinning, no matter how sophisticated it is, some of the spun articles are bound to be meaningless. Manual intervention is needed in most cases, because the software can swap synonyms, but it cannot detect the context of the article and use the appropriate word in correct places, nor can software restructure sentences. Restructuring has to be done manually if you wish to produce quality content. Honestly, eliminating spinning altogether is the ideal scenario!What to do: quality copywriting
Here are some tips to guide you through quality article spinning:- Always use differently spun versions of your title. Since the title of an article enjoys special importance from Google, using different titles will help.
- Always spin the first sentence on your own. This means rewriting the first sentence completely by changing the structure of the sentence--not just swapping synonyms for certain words. Googlebots consider the first sentence of an article to be a summary of what the content of the article is; therefore it is better to have as much variation as possible in this first sentence.
- Similarly rewrite the paragraphs, one by one. For starters, summarize the paragraph making it short while retaining the crux. Then use that to write different variations of those sentences. This might look tiresome right now, but after you get into the habit, you can manually spin an article with little effort.
- If you have a bullet list in your article, change the order of the bullet points within the article.
- Finally, use as much variation as possible in selecting your anchor text. You’ll learn more about anchor text later in this book, but for now, remember to mix this up as well.
Remember, Panda updates favor websites that offer unique and original content to users.
Now, if your whole website is interspersed with copied or spun content, then you should consider rewriting all of it. You may also consider moving spun content to another domain where they are grouped together. This will increase the overall quality of your website, and only that particular domain will be affected (though it is recommended to get rid of them completely).
It has been seen that if you publish content from a plethora of authors of varying competence levels, breaking your site into subdomains can be of great assistance. Domains with better quality content will receive higher SERP ratings—as it should be. This will also prevent your entire website from getting bogged down due to the lower-quality content.
Article Length
What to do: vary article lengths
This is best explained through example. Let’s say you have web pages with 1000-word articles, which would mean a greater number of keywords and long tail keywords. If it has various subsections with heading tags (H2 and H3), this would be likely to generate greater traffic, as Google assigns higher values to headings. The lengthy posts help you to build up your site authority, but the best thing to do is to have a good mix of both short and long articles. Again, quality is the most important factor here, and yes, it is quite possible to attain high authority through small posts. But if you are pressed for time and you want to see results quickly, the longer, well-written posts are your best bet.What not to do: fix article lengths
Take care to make your posts look different from each other, so as to define a better site footprint. Forcing articles to be of a fixed length or of similar length (all short articles, or all long articles) makes articles and your website look unnatural. Variation is the key.Website Footprint and Indexing
The number of pages you have in the Google Index is often a strong indicator of authority and you want to evaluate your site in that regard.What to do: perform a site evaluation
Always remember to perform a site evaluation according to your niche and other competitive sites to get an accurate picture of where you stand. You can check the number of indexed pages using site: www.domain.com search in Google. From there, you can get a clear idea of how many pages you have indexed. The total number of pages is mentioned in the sitemap.xml file. Similarly, you can check out the competition in your niche using the same method. Doing this is important, as knowing your competitors well is always a plus. This will help you to select your keywords, and in the long run, will help you to ease ahead of your competitors in SERPs.Relevant Content
Google Panda loves fresh content. It is important, therefore, to keep your site filled with content that is new and relevant to today’s users.What to do: update your site on a regular basis, make use of robots.txt files for outdated content
You need to spend serious time thinking and charting out a working plan as to how you are going to manage this. If your sitemap is massive, then you need to do this methodically and spend a lot of time. If this is too much work for you to do on your own, consider buying content from freelancers if it is too much for you to do on your own.The robots.txt file contains information for the search engine crawler bots about which pages should be excluded from indexing. This feature has become even more important after the Panda update, because if you have old, outdated, or copied content, you should exclude those pages from getting crawled. This will save you from getting penalized because of those pages until you figure out how to go about fixing them.
What not to do: have outdated content on your website
If you have a lot of outdated and useless content and you don’t update your site frequently enough, you’ll see your traffic count toppling. Google search is becoming more and more dynamic, and you are probably going to lose your rating as soon as your content becomes old and loses its relevance. Keep in mind that the days are gone when you could have created a site, forget all about it, and still be able to score that sweet AdSense money. Panda has changed it all.Keyword Density
In layman’s terms, keyword density is the number of keywords that occur in an article per 100 words.What to do: keep your keyword density low
People have long been speculating over what an appropriate keyword density should be, ranging from 1 percent to almost 5 percent or 6 percent. But, in post-Panda times, it is advisable to be on the safe side, and keep your keyword density to a bare minimum. The best practice is to write without worrying about the keyword density, making it sound as natural as possible. But since keywords help the crawlers in identifying and indexing your article under the appropriate category, you may find it helpful to employ at least a 1 percent keyword density. This makes the discovery of your article easier when users use that keyword phrase to search.What not to do: have keyword-stuffed content
Why? Because, Google has started considering keyword-stuffed articles spam, which, actually, is not too far from the truth. For example, if you implement a 5 percent keyword density in a 200-word article, it would mean it has ten occurrences of the keyword. This takes away the authority of the article, and converts it into a spammy text written just for the search engine crawler bots. Such text fails to provide to users the experience Google is looking for, and therefore slashes the ranking of such websites.Module 2: On-Page SEO
This module deals with SEO techniques targeting your website’s look. Believe it or not, the way your site looks is also a big factor in deciding the authority of your site. Content is key, but if you want that extra edge over your competitors, then you are going to have to pay a lot of attention to the intricacies of designing a web page. You have to be able to look at your site through Google’s eyes and make some big decisions, move around a few things, and simply make your site better to look at. Panda loves a clear, concise, user friendly, and clutter-free web page. This will also make sure visitors keep visiting your web page for more.To gain these benefits, there are a couple of things you can implement, the details of which are listed below.
The Power of Wordpress
Wordpress is a powerful way to create your website because of the sheer amount of plugins it has to offer. Wordpress installation is recommended on your domain because of the numerous inbuilt SEO benefits it offers. After installing Wordpress, you can make use of a variety of cool plugins such as All in One SEO, Easy Privacy Policy, XML-Sitemap, WP Super Cache, and many more. Take care to configure your permalinks to display the actual title of the on-page content in the URLs instead of numbers.Sitemap and Site Navigation
The sitemap, as the name suggests, is a map of your website. This is basically a list of all pages on your website, which serves two vital purposes:- It helps your site visitors in navigation, and
- Search engine bots find your site easier to crawl if it has a sitemap, and so your site will get indexed more effectively. Two types of sitemaps are popular: HTML and XML. It is advised to have a HTML sitemap because of its user-friendly nature.
Try to make your site easier to navigate. This is simply a part of good website design, which has gained even greater importance since the advent of Google Panda. Having an organized and interlinked website will earn you many SEO points. Interlink your posts. By that I mean, if in one of your articles you refer to a topic or product about which you have written an article long ago; then include a link to that older post. People might be interested in reading more, and it’s a good practice to coerce visitors to stay on your site. Also, while you accomplish this, balance the use of anchor text on your pages; you’ll learn more about this shortly.
Use interlinking not only in your text, but also in images. You can use alt text for images and produce anchor text-like results. The whole point is to make navigation of your site as easy as possible.
Image Tagging
Always give relevant alt tags to your images, as it helps search engine bots to identify what that image is about, and visually impaired (colorblindness or hypermetropia) visitors will be able to read the description of the image instead.Utilizing Space
This technique works similar to a newspaper design. The top half of the front page of a newspaper is considered to be more eye-catching than any other portion. For this reason, it always bears the most important of headlines and the top news of the day.This observation can be similarly applied to a webpage. When a user visits your webpage, the first thing he’s going to notice is contents of the top half of the page, depending upon the browser and his resolution settings. There’s a big chance the user will not scroll down to fish for relevant content if the top of your page is filled with ad banners and irrelevant text. Google has took care to give greater preference to the content value on the top of the page while determining the authority of a website.
What to do: place quality content above the fold
Among other things, you should decrease the height of your site header, freeing up valuable space. Make sure you have lesser ads and a greater quantity of truly relevant content on the top half of the page. By taking these steps, you will realize that Google is right about this, and also it makes for a far better user experience, which is ultimately what you should strive for.What not to do: place too many ads above the fold
Reevaluate the relevance of every item in the header and get rid of ad banners or buttons that are outdated, useless, or are just not important enough. Keep to a minimum the amount of flash animated ads and banners, as they take up a lot of screen space. Too many of these ads make your site look like a spam site and should be avoided. It’s always better to gain traffic rather than to place a few more ads.Advertisements
What to do: improve site design to better accommodate ads
It has been noticed that the content-to-ad ratio on a webpage has become an important factor after the Panda update. Placing large blocks of ads above the fold might not be a good idea anymore, as Google now penalizes websites for this practice. Many websites that had a plethora of ads around that content, taking up most of the screen real estate, have plummeted in the rankings. Such websites do not provide a good user experience, and the content is hard to locate. Come up with a good site design with pre-assigned space for ads—don’t just place them randomly all over the page.What not to do: have too many advertisements on your site
If you have many advertisements on your web pages, it is advisable to reduce the number to a respectful amount so that the content stands out through the advertisements. It is far more useful to have a good SERP ranking than it is to flood your site with ads, earning short-term cash. In the long run, flooding your site with ads will cause Google to lower your site’s ranking, decreasing your traffic, which will in turn decrease your income from your advertisements.Using different advertisement networks for your website can also be useful. Make a point to keep the ad-to-content ratio close to zero for above-the-fold space in your web pages. As mentioned before, what you place above the fold is of great importance when it comes to Google’s search-ranking algorithm.
Outbound Links
Outbound links are links that take the user to another web page. This is not a major SEO factor, but it is a factor all the same.What to do: have an optimum number of outbound links
There is a recommended optimum number of outbound links that is neither high nor low. Though it might be an uphill task to define the optimum number, among the best places to look are the sites of your competitors in that niche. In general, 100 outbound links on a single page is considered too many, and they tend to get their quality diluted.Places to find these outbound links include nested menus and submenus and on a Wordpress blog -posts, categories, blog roll links and more. It is just a good practice to remove all useless links from your page. Also, take care to mark paid outbound links as NoFollow.
Next, include outbound links to authority sites on your website. Now you may argue that this means you are directing your traffic to other sites without any benefit. However, this will increase your own authority in Google’s eyes. It is a good practice to share traffic and give credit to sites in your niche that have more detailed content than your site. You can also include Wikipedia links, as it holds information in any niche. This indicates you are playing fair, are not trying to hoard traffic, and appears more natural. It also creates a good user experience in the sense that you are really trying to give the best possible information to the user because let’s face it—no website has all the information.
If you have copied an article or a story from another site, be sure to give due credit to the original site by including a DoFollow link to that site. There’s a good chance that the user will read the content on your site and recommend your website to his or her friends. The amount or frequency of these links have to be decided solely by you on the basis of what you have learned so far, taking into account your niche-specific competitors’ sites.
What not to do: include all DoFollow outbound links
DoFollow links affect PageRank calculations, and if your site is full of such links, Google will consider you a spammer. However, do not mark all outbound links as NoFollow, because that will raise a red flag too. This is called PageRank hoarding. This is a small issue and doesn’t have much value, but still should not be neglected.Affiliate Site Links
Google hates sites that are made just for bearing affiliate links and AdSense. According to Google, such sites do not care about providing value content to the user and they exist just to generate ad revenue. Because of this, sites that have a bunch of affiliate links have seen a ranking drop after the Panda update.What to do: include quality content about the subject matter
There are still a few things you can do that will help you to hold on to some of those affiliate sites. Always include quality content about the subject matter. Give up trying to use AdWords for affiliate marketing, because Google’s Panda update will penalize you heavily for that.What not to do: have too many affiliate links
As mentioned above, having too many affiliate links is unnatural. It makes your site look like it exists just to earn money through such links. With Google becoming stricter about affiliate marketing, it is better to stay on the safe side and reduce the number of affiliate site links.Miscellaneous On-site Tips
Since this is supposed to be a comprehensive guide, I’m not leaving out things that have only a marginal impact on your ranking. Since each of these factors add up, you should pay attention to each detail, even the details that have a lesser impact when viewed alone.- Appear as a real person to your site visitors. If your niche has such scope, share your physical address and your real phone number on the contact page of your site. This gives a strong signal to the users—and to Google—that you are not out there to spam them and are genuinely interested in providing quality content.
- However tempting it might seem to you, under no circumstances should you try to fool Google using hidden text. If you are unfamiliar with this term, hidden text is a block of text containing niche-relevant keywords that spammers hide on their site by blending them into the background and substantially decreasing the font size. Panda has increased Google’s ability to spot this, and your site can be severely penalized if you’re caught. This is not worth it at all.
- The loading speed of your webpage also plays a role in your site’s ranking. Although this is a small and seemingly insignificant factor if looked at by itself, it should be mentioned nonetheless. You can check your page-loading time by entering your domain name on the website pagespeed.googlelabs.com. Google will give you a score out of one hundred, along with a few suggestions for improving the speed of your site. You should aim for a score of at least 70.
- Do not try to fool Google by copying text from other sites and using it as an image so that Googlebots cannot read it. This is a spamming practice and is quite predictable, from which you need to keep yourself away.
- It has been noticed that Google has found a way to detect unethical practices such as placing links and text off the page so as to fool the crawlers and users. Such links cannot be found without looking into the code of that webpage. Where these practices have worked in the past, Google’s latest update penalizes such sites severely.
Module 3: Off-Site Post-Panda SEO
This section deals with off-page factors that affect your search engine ranking. SEO-wise, this is the most important part of this book. This section will teach you how to capitalize on the Panda update by building back links, optimizing your anchor text, and saving your content from being copied elsewhere.Back-Linking Essentials
Back linking has always been vital to the success of any SEO endeavor. And by back linking, I do not mean spamming. The Panda update has shown us that trying to trick Google is no longer the way to go about SEO. All the back links to your site should seem natural, and not as if they have been forcefully introduced to boost the rating of your site. Having only high-authority back links may also looks suspicious, so the best path is the middle path.Anchor Text
It is advantageous to get people to link to your site from another site. Take into account anchor text. Anchor text is the visible clickable text in a hyperlink.What to do: mix up your anchor text
The best strategy is to use as many variations as possible of the main keyword.For example, if the main keyword is summer school, you should use variations such as all about summer school, the best summer school, everything about summer schools, learn about summer school, etc.
It is best to evaluate your standing against your competitors in your niche and take a note of the amount of anchor text they are using. This can be easily accomplished by using various online tools such as SpyGlass.
What not to do: don’t overuse keyword rich anchor text
It is a general practice to use keywords as anchor texts while doing offsite back linking. Before Panda, this was an effective technique, although it is not exactly White Hat SEO to create 100 percent of your anchor texts as keywords. Today, this practice will make Google view your site as spam. It is considered unnatural to have such a keyword-rich anchor text, instantly noticeable by Googlebots, which in turn send out alarm signals, thereby penalizing your site.It should also be mentioned here that the overall value of anchor text has been reduced by the Panda update. Gaining leverage through massive link building using anchor texts might not be a good idea now—it can even work against you. Panda penalizes all spam practices; reducing the value of anchor text, which are a great source of spam, is part of its job.
Value of .edu and .gov Links
It is believe that Google Panda has decreased the value of back links coming from government and educational sites. The primary reason behind this can be the amount of spam that these sites accumulated because of people trying to gain back links from these sites. Although the value of back links coming from these sites is less frequent than before, I’ll still advise you to get links from these sites simply because they are high authority sites. You might have to create an account and post comments in relevant threads, promoting your site. This practice almost lies on the fringe of acting like a spammer, so make only relevant and high-quality posts.Authority Sites
It is self-explanatory why back links from high-authority sites matter so much. First, they are not easy to get, and if you did manage to attain such back links, it means you have valuable content on your site that Google will respect. Apart from the .edu and .gov sites, there are plenty other authority sites that you can use, even if the links are NoFollow, because all links carry some value and contribute to boosting the authority of your site.What to do: build links from high-authority sites, including social networks
Link building on sites such as YouTube and Facebook is easy. On YouTube, you can easily create a profile and place a link back to your site. Maintain this profile by regularly adding vides and comments. This basically builds your social credibility as well as popularizes your website. The same thing is true for Facebook. Create a page for your business and keep updating it regularly. These efforts are bound to be rewarded by post-Panda Google and you will see a ranking boost soon. Additionally, you can try getting back links by creating press releases. These are bound to be picked up by a multitude of sites, which will carry a link back to your site.The bottom line is to make your link-building efforts sustainable in the long term. Also, links that have existed for a long time carry more weight in Google’s eyes because their credibility increases with time. Link building is a slow process, and it should be done regularly. Never rest on your laurels, because SEO is constantly changing. Panda was just one of the 500 algorithm updates that are slated to be released in 2011. Therefore, you have to plan your actions so that you can deal with whatever the future might throw at you.
What not to do: don’t have all your links from authority sites
Be careful while doing link building, because having 100 percent incoming authority links is suspicious in Google’s eyes, just because it is not natural. Mix up your links well, and perform link building on low-authority sites too, so that Google cannot detect what you are up to.Safeguarding Your Content
This is a tricky subject. It is considered next to impossible to be able to prevent others from copying your content. Due to the anonymity the internet has to offer, a good number of people resort to unethical practices. They can either visit your website directly and then copy and paste your content on their site, or they can subscribe to your RSS feed and pick up your articles there. Sure, you can sue them if the matter is serious enough, but in day-to-day life, it is simply impossible to fight a copyright battle over someone stealing a few articles from your website. What do you do in such a case?What to do: disable right click, disable text selection, or contact the webmaster
First, you can disable the right click feature on your website. This will prevent them from easily swiping your content and images. I’m not saying that it will be impossible to copy after that; it’s just that people will eventually stop copying from your site because of the hassle. Another thing you can do is to disable the left-click text selection on your page.If the above tweaks do not solve your problem, then you should be practical. Find out which sites are copying your content using Google search or Copyscape premium. If they are ranking above you in Google search for that article, then you have a problem. It means they have copied your content and have managed to trick Google into believing that they originally created that content and you copied it. You can try contacting the webmaster of that site and ask him to take the content down on ethical grounds. If that fails, you have no choice except to remove that article from your own site and rewrite it. This is a hard choice to make, but it is better than getting penalized by Google for copying.
What not to do: deliver full content over RSS feeds
It’s even easier to get your content copied through RSS feeds. One solution you can implement is to deliver only a part of your articles over RSS feeds, and then include a link back to your site. This is the last thing you should do, and only when you are suffering way too much because of content copying.Social Networking in the Post-Panda Era
As mentioned before, Panda has increased the value of social networking sites in Google searches. Data that Google obtains from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter is now used for leveraging search results. Google’s latest addition of the +1 button on its search results pages reaffirms this belief, as now Google can collect social data directly from users.Also, Facebook pages now rank higher in Google’s search results. Therefore, it is highly advised that you promote your business through Facebook. Even though social networking outbound links are NoFollow links, they can still be useful in popularizing your website and your business.
Social bookmarking sites allow users to share articles and websites with their friends.
Even though these sites, just like social networking sites, are NoFollow, it is still worth it to promote your sites on these platforms. These help to build up your reputation and credibility in Google’s eyes. Apart from these, you can try linkbuilding on private blogs comments, forum comments, and various other websites.
Source Link:www.whatisgooglepanda.com
