Panda Update or Farmer Update Freaking People Out

Ever since the Panda update has been rolled out, a lot of people have lost rank and are freaking out. Some sites needed to lose rank while others such as this site that specializes in Hawaii Vacations, got sucked into the backwash of the Panda update and lost a lot of solid rank that they’ve had for a long time.

I know that this site produces original expert content on Hawaii because they’re friends of mine and I wanted to help them figure it out.

Here’s my take on the Panda update: I believe this updated has tied everything that Google has been preaching and trying to get across to webmasters for years…Panda is the culmination of all the basic rules that you’ve seen in Google’s guidelines…these things being site structure, content, usability…the basic rules of SEO haven’t changed since the beginning, since before SEO even had a name.

While looking at my friend’s site, I noticed a lot of things that were going on that shouldn’t be going on…all of the things are unintentional as they are not trying to game the index like so many people do. For all you site owners that have legitimate businesses online and that caught in the wake of Panda…STOP asking why big well known corporate sites weren’t affected. Those "big sites" get treated much differently than the "mom and pop" sites…they can and do get away with a lot of things that you can’t. Why??? Because they have trust and authority in their fields…it’s well known that they are not fly by night sites…"mine isn’t either" you say? While that may be true, you’re not as well known as Amazon or Expedia or any other well known sites like that! It does you absolutely no good to compare yourselves to those sites so stop it!

Here’s what you can do though:

• Look At Your Site Structure – Do you have everything thrown in the root or is the site organized in a logical manner that the user will understand easily and also that the search engines will easily understand how to classify each section or page. Or will they have to wade through a bunch of information that they don’t need while trying to find what they’re looking for!
• Navigation – Is your navigation easy to use and easily found?
• Look At The Files On Your Server – When you log into your FTP, do you see a bunch of old files and test pages that your “web developer” was too lazy to remove when they were done testing? I’ve found that a lot of developers are lazy and sloppy…all those test pages and old pages that are left on the server, are most likely being deemed as duplicate content. Start cleaning up the server, but don’t just delete, you may have other sites linking to those pages and they may still be indexed in search engines. Always 301 redirect old pages to their most relevant new page…if they have no relevant new page, just 301 redirect to the homepage.
• Website Content – Do all your pages have unique content on them, or are they blank with images only? At the bare minimum, there should be at least 250 words on each page that you want to get indexed and maybe rank for. The content should be unique and relevant to the page…I’m bashing the word unique into your skulls because it’s important!
• Back To Website Structure – Some people call it Siloing, some call it SEO Site Structure, or SEO Directory Structure, they all mean the same thing and it’s how your sites should be set up. Don’t just throw all your pages in the root…especially if you have a lot of content that can be put into a proper directory structure. You can see an image I created that represents a proper SEO directory structure. An example that is used quite often is that of a Marble Company. Say you have a big bin full of all kinds of marbles, different colors and stripes and every other type of marble you can think of. A person enters the store and asks for blue marbles…you or the customer (Search Engine or User) has to dig through all those marbles just to find blue marbles…there are thousands of marbles in that bin, so the customer (user) may just give up and go somewhere else to find their blue marbles. It’s the same thing with search engines and users on your site…if search engines have to crawl through a bunch of garbage like java scripts that should be externalized and styles that should be on a style sheet, or if they have to crawl through a bunch of pages and other content just to find the blue marbles, they’re going to split because it’s too hard to find the content (blue marbles). You would have had a conversion if your blue marbles were in their own bin and the same goes for the red marbles, green marbles, cat eye marbles and so on. That way the customer comes in, gets what they want right away, you get the conversion, they get their marbles and everyone is happy. All the marbles on your website would be under the main category marbles…maybe you also sell yo-yos, all the different types of yo-yos would be categorized the same way. Entiendes Mendez?

The moral of this story is, Clean up your websites, create a proper SEO Directory Structure, make sure you have original relevant content on each page of your website and add unique and relevant titles and meta tags on each page…don’t let anyone tell you that the meta description tag or meta keywords tag are useless so don’t add them…while the meta keywords tag may not be used by search engines like Google, it is used by a lot of smaller engines and it doesn’t hurt to have it, so use it. I’m not sure what idiot said the meta description tag is useless, but remove all of them from your website and see what happens!! ‘Nuf Ced ’bout that one!

Really the Panda update or Farmer update whatever you want to call it, is about site maintenance…don’t be lazy!