How to secure your rankings after Google's latest update

Google's Panda update caused a ranking drop for many websites. Google has a very long official discussion thread about this topic. The discussion reveals things that you can do to make sure that your website gets its rankings back.

The update is not just about content farms : - 

Google's new algorithm targets low quality websites. It seems that Google defines a low quality website like this:

• The website does not have enough content to be useful (shallow content).
• The website has poorly written content.
• The content of the website has been copied from other sites.
• The content of the website is not useful.
• With Google's latest update, it is not enough to have unique content on a website. It also doesn't help if there are many unique words on your web pages. The content has to be useful to your website visitors.

Even high quality pages can be affected

The low quality content on part of a website can impact the rankings of the entire website:

"It's important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site's ranking as a whole.

For this reason, 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."

Things that you can do to make sure that Google does not penalize your site

There are several things that you can do to make sure that Google does not penalize your site:

Improve the poor quality pages on your website. Ask yourself: is the page useful to my website visitors? If not, improve the content of the page to make it more useful.

It is very likely that the overall user experience is important. Check the usability and the design of your web pages. Your web pages should be easy to navigate and they should have a professional design.

Check the ads/content ratio on your web pages. If a web page mainly consists of ads then it is likely that Google considers it low quality.

Don't try to cheat Google with shady search engine optimization methods. Focus on optimization methods that are beneficial to webmasters, website visitors and Google.

Search engine optimization is not about getting high rankings for every possible keyword. It is about getting high rankings for the right keywords and about meeting the expectations of the website visitors.

If you have high rankings for the right keywords, your website will deliver many new customers to your business. If you give Google what they want, your website will get high rankings and more sales.