How to Recover From Google Panda

A ton of websites got slammed with Google Panda. Panda was meant to filter out low quality sites, and spam. For the most part article directory’s, travel sites, product comparison sites, & adsense sites are the ones who got hit.

Chris Knight from EzineArticles.com reported they lost between 10-35% of their traffic, you can read more & watch the interview here.

Here is a checklist to recover & also to make sure you don’t get hit!

1. Check canonical issues- To check this see if you can access your website with and without www. If you can you could be suffering from a huge internal duplicate content issue, that could be destroying your Google rankings. To fix this you need to pick which version you want to remain. Do a site-wide 301 redirect from any non www. Here is a more in depth post on this matter. If you are using wordpress and it’s using the latest version you are already covered!

2. Duplicate content check- Go to google.com and click on search settings, make sure google isntant is off and set your results to 100 per page versus the standard 10 (be sure to save your preferences). You can find search settings by clicking on the gear icon in the top right of your screen. Then do a search for “site:domain.com” obviously replace domain.com with your url. Navigate to the last page of results.

If you see the message above you definitely have a duplicate content issue. Go ahead and click on the link “repeat the search with the omitted results included”, take a look at the individual results. Has google found pages it shouldn’t have? If your title tags are to similar you will want to rewrite them. In a recent look at mlmincomediary.com i found that google indexed this url:

If you find any urls you dont want indexed, you need to edit your robots.txt file. In Google Webmaster Tools, you can easily generate a robots.txt file for your website.

4. Verify Google Webmaster Tools Account! If you havent gotten it yet, I absolutely 100% believe in this tool. Look at your account at least once a month to ensure nothing is wrong.

6. Has your website been compromised? Google Webmaster tools, will alert you if they find malware under the Diagnostic menu. Also try doing a search in Google for: