Fighting against Google Penguins and Pandas

Do you know I’m running some websites without making SEO daily or weekly. I just used a little SEO tweaks in the process of layout design. I never had an issue with Google Search and the page views and visitor increase day by day until one dreaded day. Google Search has updated with Penguin and Panda then my website fall down, one of them was almost disappeared on Google Search Results. Here’s my story, full of panic, with a lot of failed attempts to “fix” the site and a “recovery” from ugliness creatures on the internet.

When Google updated Panda and Penguin, I read the news but skipped it because I believe that my websites hasn’t any problem with Google. Until the end of that month, I received a notices about the payments has issued. After that, I check my Adsense account then unbelieved with my eyes when I found an extreme drop in Adsense revenue from one particular website that was making below average. Of course, the page views and visitor will be drop like that.

In this post, I will tell you how to fight against and recover my website from Google Penguin and Panda updates. I’ve founded some ways on internet to recover the website from Pandas and Penguin then put them into practice but I’ve recognized it’s not work like their said. So I finally reached a decision: stop do what others have done, re-analyze my website then fix it. It takes me about one month to read the documents and fixing my website, after that, the page views and visitors has recovered as before.

Identifying the problem

I wrote a list of problem which I found from my website:

• Too much internal anchor text used heavily in a “list” format at the bottom of deep pages to related content.
• Integrate with social media
• Too many spam or similar spam comments in posts
• Some keywords had more than 5 anchor text and internal links
• Thin posts and duplicate content need to delete
• Website sitemap had poor links and garbage information
• Broken links

Fixing the problems

Like you see above, I got the list of possibly culprits. It would end up taking me 3 months of casually fixing up components of the website before it came back.

Internal Links Optimizing

I’m using a WordPress plugin to automatic generate a small list of 4-5 links below full-page of post content, some of them optimized for the keyword that I was targeting. I guess it’s a cause then I remove the keyword and decrease relate post list from 5 to 3 links list and using another plugin to make a small opt-out pop-up with recommend link when the reader scroll to the end of post.

Integrate with social media

Now, all the posts has integrated with social media in full content and adding the website’s author information to Google Search result

Clean spam comment or similar spam content

I’m only using Akismet plugin as anti-spam tools to fight against spammers and it’s not work like I want. Too many spam comments and similar spam content appeared on past post. I decided to replace WordPress comment system with Disqus and mass checking and delete all spamming comments which approved by Akismet.

Thin post and duplicate content

Because that website start as a personal blog then shift from one kind of undertaking to another. That’s why I got a lot of thin and duplicated content. Delete them is good solution.

Sitemap and broken links

I’ve changed permalink structure more than three times, it makes too many broken links and they still exist in sitemap. I manual clean and fix broken links then update the sitemap file. It’s take me more than a month to make it done.

Conclusion

My website takes 3 months to back again like before. My list of possibly culprits may not be all of your problem but it’s can help you find the ways to recover your website if it happens like that with you.