Shortly after Google’s algorithm changes many websites have witnessed a fall in page ranking and traffic. Many content farms update their website with cheap content by reproducing or rewriting cheap quality content which were copied from other websites just for the purpose of search engine traffic and ad revenue and hence not providing any valuable information to the users. Google’s intervention and change of policy have drastically affected the websites like Mahalo, ezinearticles, Suite101 and more. However if you are updating your site with valuable original content you will not loose much. Google panda update has reduced the potential traffic of thousands of smaller websites and in particular blogs also. As always WRITE FOR USERS NOT FOR GOOGLE.

How exactly can you find out whether your website is affected?

Google has confirmed that change in its algorithm has tumbled tons of websites and as pointed out by statistics, approximately 12% of websites has been influenced by this move. So, how will you find out whether your website is included in that list or not? You need not call any tech savvy for discovering this stuff.

One easy way is, go to trends.google.com and log in using your mail id. You will know the fate of the website and the impact of panda update by typing the URL of the website in the box provided. While searching use the “last 12 months” parameter. Another way is to analyse your analytics data for the last 3 months.

Below is the Google trends for wisegeek.com which is one of the worst affected website. See how the graph is going down in the recent few days.

Check for the number of keywords for the last 3 or 4 months in your web analytics. See whether it’s dropped or not.

Popular websites like labnol.org has been worst hit by the panda update. It has lost almost half of its Google’s traffic by this new intervention. In this regard, Sistrix has released a comprehensive list of the worst hit websites due to the innovative benchmark of Google’s search engine. List of worst affected websites below:

Tips for lifting your lost poise

Having lost your potential visitors you are left distressed because of content farming update from Google. Now it is essential to boost the traffic and restore the page ranking. So let us find out what can be done for improving the traffic and build up the lost empire as before.

Now the hottest topic of the day is finding out the ways and means for fixing the problem of website traffic. A number of sites have already started musing over this issue by having discussions and more chats for finding out a solution.

The fact is it is not so easy to regain the lost traffic and as many others think it cannot be achieved overnight. You have to work hard to recover the rankings and it will take some reasonable time.

First step is to find out what exactly you have lost? Find out from the Google’s trend how badly is your website affected and drag in some statistical data regarding the percentage of lost traffic. Do some homework to find on what basis Google has downsized your website.

Find out whether the low ranking was due to the content of the article or it was due to the particular keyword. Improve the standard of your content by sticking on to the value. First accept that if you have lost more than 60-70% of the traffic then nothing more can be done for bringing it back. In case your loss is only 15-25% then something could be done for improvising the site.

Some tips are given below for fixing your problem:-

• Rationalize the most important pages which caused the problem
• Delete the unwanted pages which were created by using cheap content farming techniques
• Proper use of Nofollow tag and Canonical tag
• Hire genuine writers who could do wonders to rebuild your traffic
• Restructure the site with improved content by keeping users in mind

Above all, you should remember one thing. Google’s server will again list out your site in the first page, if your content and quality is genuine. So do not try to cook the content. Take time to analyze the issue. You can also write a feedback to the Google mentioning the changes you have made. Wait patiently for some time and follow the results.

Expand your sources

Another way of sorting out this issue is to broaden your horizons. Don’t just depend on Google alone. Share information to your friends and well wishers by newsletter which can bring you more traffic. Add yourself in community sites like Face book and twitter. You can also include advertisement about your product or add some latest developments of your site in social websites. Nowadays, many potential users seek information from these social sites and this could help in restoring your traffic. Social sites have become a powerful medium now and make best of use of them for your product.

To conclude, you have to deal with this issue in creative approach. Think from the perspective of the user and find out what he will expect from you. Avoid including low quality content on your site. Instead devise a new plan by adding fresh inputs which are genuine and unique.

Content farm is nothing but a company which handles and pays lot of freelancers to write and to produce greater number of texts or articles for increasing the rating of their website or blog using the Search Engine Optimization technique. These articles or texts for that matter are purposely written to satisfy the algorithms of the search engine thereby increasing their page ranking and number of potential customers to their site. To put it simple, they can generate revenue by attracting each and every visitor to their web page.

Now the issue before us is Google has silently introduced a major change in the algorithm of the search engine which decides the fate of the thousands of website owners across the world. Instead of displaying search content from content farms (which it was doing before) now Google has switchover to generate good quality search results for its user. Nevertheless, Google has not fully implemented this algorithm change worldwide. Now to begin with it has introduced this change from middle of February in U.S. alone. It has plans to progressively execute this change to other countries also.

This innovative idea of Google would for sure have large impact on low quality content farms who were once finding the top listed page ranking through search engines. Needless to say it would reduce the page ranking of many popular (!!) websites who were once boasting themselves as No.1 in the content world.

But what about the poor user who entirely depend on Google for searching anything from booking a move ticket to understand complex mathematical calculations. The user should thank the Google full heartedly because this update would fetch him better results ever before. And he would enjoy the original content generated from one of the good website which gives value for the stuff and not only for page ranking.

Infographic: Search Engine History by Infographiclabs

1. Use good title for your pages.
The title of the page should represent the content in the page. Identify the keywords in the page and shrewdly insert those keywords in the title. Use the important keywords in the beginning of the title.

Don’t
1. Never stuff too many keywords in the title
2. Never use too many comma separated words in the title
3. Never insert irrelevant keywords. (Irrelevant means, The keywords which don’t represent the content in your page)
4. Don’t exceed 70 characters

Instead of “Show me your friend and I will tell you who you are” i would say “Show me your title and I will tell you how good you are in SEO”

2. Using Header tags (H1, H2…) at the right places

When you write the content for each webpage make sure it has a content title and never forgot to mention that title inside a H1 tag and wrap the following sub headings inside the h2, h3… tags.

Though I know the use of the header tag, I haven’t included any header tags in one of my website (very very quality community based website), the reason is obvious, I don’t want to disturb the appealing design of the webpage by including a large text. Not surprisingly, for the keyword I targeted my website is in the 4^th page of Google (But it’s in the first page of Yahoo and MSN). Frustrated with the result, I included the keyword inside the H1 tag and placed it in the top of my homepage, just below the menu.

Result: Believe me, Just after three weeks my website is in the first page of Google. So what are you going to do, still worrying about your design or ready to get more visitors to your website?

Tips: Find the keywords inside that Webpage content and shrewdly include it inside the header tags.

3. Meta Tags: Still Alive?

The predominantly used meta tags by many SEO’s are Meta description and meta keywords. Well, That’s history now. The big “3’s” (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are now not considering the meta keywords. When your webpage has no text content, say a Flash page, Google consider the Meta description and list it in their web result. For example see the picture below:

So I would say, meta will not affect your search engine ranking.

4. Don’t keep a page size more than 100KB

Google loves the webpages with more text. Try to keep your webpage size under 100KB. Though Google lists all the webpages, which has the size under 150 KB, my advice is to keep the webpage size under 100KB.

Now the question is, Why Google is doing this? Is it because your webpage is cached in Google’s Server? Nope.

The straightforward answer to this is, “Google wants their visitors to be happy, They don’t want to lead their visitors to a webpage which takes more time to load”.

To be Continued >>

Now you know why all the SEO’s are scratching their head to optimize their website for Google.