5 Tips to Secure and Recover your Website from Google Panda and Penguin Updates

The Definitive Guide for small business owners to Website Audit after Post Panda/Penguin Scenario

 

Highlights:  Safety and recovery Guidelines for Google Panda and Penguin affected websites. Ways and tips to make your site Panda/Penguin updates proof| a useful guide for keeping your website as per Google’s Content related policies.

 

Small business websites could easily come under Google Updates threat very oftenly due to excessive optimization, overly web designing issues, and lack of the fresh new and unique content! Read this article if your website have come under Google Algorithm updates.

The helpful tips given here focus on non-SEO area of a website. Specially, in terms of, content, website speed, user experience, and the web design.

 

 

So, for a small business website,  it’s best to-

Keep running a regular blog on your small business website so that you could produce fresh and unique content on your main website. Include this blog in your main business website, like this: www.yourbusinesswebsite.com/blog and make the latest blog posts visible on the front page of your business website!

 

At the start of any online marketing/SEO campaign, you got to make sure that your website is up-to-the-mark, and meets all the requirements of a successful website. Otherwise, you might end up wasting your money and time at the end.

Thus, it is highly recommended to perform an in-depth audit of your website beforehand to make sure your website is ready to rock the web sphere. Google Panda and Penguin updates have been rocking the headlines in webmaster communities recently and you could easily see the sign of fear and uncertainty among the bloggers community for the simple reason that it could destroy your online business within days if your website or blog gets badly impacted by their algorithm changes and updates.

 

This article will work as a checklist for both the PRO SEOs and new business owners to learn and understand how to perform an audit of website after so many Algorithm Updates Google has bombarded us with.

 

So here we go:

 

 

#1- Web Meta Data

 

Meta Data is perhaps the most important thing in any website as far as Search Engines is concerned. Meta Data tells Search Engines what specific page is all about and how it should treat it. Some of the most important Meta Tags are:

• Meta Title
• Meta Description &
• Canonical Tag
• Schema Tags

 

Meta Title is what users see in SERPs, so it should not only be creative, eye-catching & self-explanatory, but it should also contain your main keyword that you are targeting in your SEO campaign. Having your keyword in Title still plays a vital role in ranking a website in Google, despite of all these Panda & Penguin updates.

 

Similarly, Meta Description should have a call to action, along with interesting and eye-catching text; this will increase your CTR in SERPs, resulting in more traffic.

 

As you can see, these meta data can either make or break any campaign you are running to market your website online, so you better audit them before anything else and fix them up.

 

 

 

#2- Website Content

 

Content is King, Queen, and All! After-all, it’s the content around which we create a website and not vice- versa . and After Google Panda Update it is highly critical to have only unique and highest quality content on your website.

 

Therefore it is very important to double check your website content, and make sure there is nothing on your website that can be considered as low-quality or duplicate. Keep in mind, Google doesn’t only penalize websites on the basis of duplication, but it penalizes websites with low-quality or thin content as well.

 

So, make sure that you are not creating content just for the sake of content in your website. It has to be informative, and teach something new and fresh to the users, so just rehashing/rewording already published content won’t just cut it anymore in the Online Marketing world.

 

 

#3- URL Structure & Canonicalization

 

To stop content duplicacy and keep the urls clean and readable– URL structure of any website is equally as important as its content. You must make sure that you set the URL structure of your website with utmost care and all the URLs are properly optimized for the best SEO.

Inserting your main keyword into URLs can do wonders to your SEO and keyword`s rankings, similarly adding special characters in URL structure can have significant negative impact in terms of SEO. Hence you should always use a clean and simple URL structure with no special characters.

Users should be able to understand what the page is about, when they see the URL. This tip is very useful for Web SEO rankings as well since the urls carry a great value for any web page.

 

Furthermore, canonicalization is something that you cannot ignore in this modern era. Google pays very close attention to duplicate content now within the website, and by not having canonicalization setup, you will risk being penalized by Google.

In case one page on your website has two URLs that can point users to it, than Google will consider those two URLs to be duplicate of each other, hence it is critical to place Canonical URL in this scenario, which will tell Google that which URL is the REAL ONE and should be used for indexing in Google.

 

 

 

#4- Website Speed

 

For faster web loading and quicker browsing experience– Website Speed is another important factor that was not much important few years back, but now after so many Google Panda or Penguin Updates it has become a major player in deciding whether a website will rank high on Google or will simply die in the dust.

The reason to this is the facts that Google wants only those websites to rank high that provide the best user-experience, and by having a fast loading website, what you are actually doing is providing ultimate user convenience. This is a very important tip considering the overall web experiences by the end users and search engines.

 

Not only does Fast Loading Speed help you gain more Google Love, it makes your visitors to like your website as well and stay longer. According to a study, users have a tendency to close browser tab if a page is not loaded within 3-5 seconds, hence you might be losing a lot of potential customers by having a slow loading website.

 

Now what makes a page load slowly? This question is critical and understanding its answer properly can improve your website`s chance a lot in Google. Some of the well-known factors that make a page load slow are: excessive graphics, slow server, bad code, lots of database queries and a lot of others. Some factors can be fixed by designers, but for most part, you will need your web developer to be on his toes, as only he can fix the server side issues, and clean up the code.

 

The importance of Site Speed can be understood by the fact that Google has itself offered a Free Tool to test the Page Speed, known as Page Speed Insights. This is a very effective and efficient tool that can help you drastically decrease the Page Loading time on your website.

 

 

 

#5- Usability

 

Website architecture, responsive web design, and end user experience– This is our last, yet most important factor which you MUST take care of before going on with marketing of your website. You must make sure that your website is built for Humans not Bots. The website must be convenient, easy-to-use and fun to navigate for the users.

If your users are not satisfied with either the design or functionality of your website, and they are bouncing back frequently, you will never get long-term success online. Your navigation should be up-to-date and navigating from one page to another shouldn’t be a headache for the users.

Furthermore, you should implement A/B Testing Method on your website to find out the best possible page settings you should have for optimum user experience and interaction.