How to Protect Yourself from Pandas
August 24, 2011 
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Aren’t pandas cute? Of course they are – as long as they’re not the kind of panda that Google unleashed upon the Internet on February 24th, 2011. The effect of this panda has come to be known as the “Panda Slap“, and with good reason. Just ask the people of OneWayFurniture.com how vicious a panda slap can be. Many sites that provided inbound links to the e-tailer were slapped by Google’s Panda update, and this significantly impacted the organic Google traffic that OneWayFurniture enjoyed.
OneWayFurniture made three huge changes as a result of the Panda slap:
- Revamped their pages to load faster in browsers. (Google considers page load speed a ranking factor.)
- Hired professional copywriters to write product descriptions with SEO in mind instead of their previous tactic of copying and pasting the descriptions that product manufacturers used on their respective sites (thus removing duplicate content).
- Replaced the SEO firm that brought low quality inbound links with a new firm that promised high quality links.
The changes OneWayFurniture made will not work for every site affected negatively by the Panda update, so first answer the question:
How Can I Tell if I Have Been Panda-Slapped?
Method One
Log in to Google Analytics. Under the Traffic Sources tab, pick non-paid, then click Search Engines, then Google. Below the Site Usage tab, click Keyword, then Country/Territory, and type in United States. Click the Go button to the right of the data field and pray you do not see a sharp drop in traffic on or immediately after any of these 2011 dates:
- February 24th
- April 11th
- May 10th
- June 16th
- July 23rd
Those dates are when Panda and its updates were released.
Method Two
Use “advanced segments” to see the same data. Create a new segment and configure it so that the condition for Medium matches exactly “organic,” the condition for Country/Territory matches exactly “United States,” and the condition for Source contains “Google.” This method segments visitors by organic Google traffic from the US, and also allows you to view Panda’s effect on a page-by-page basis.
At its worst, Panda can affect online retail sales significantly. Say you run a website that sells Christmas decorations and accessories – call it ChristmasExpress.org for argument’s sake – and one of your many high quality affiliates is HalloweenExpress.com. People can purchase cheap costumes at HalloweenExpress and similar affiliates, while your site, ChristmasExpress.org, contains several videos detailing how to create unique holiday decorations (in addition to selling products.) Everything was working out splendidly until – BAM – those affiliates are Panda-slapped for whatever reason, reducing referral traffic to the point that your sales are falling.
While your affiliates work out their Panda issues, you can sell an e-book or create a mailing list to try compensating for the lost revenue. But what can you do when it’s your site that is Panda-slapped?
Use a Spreadsheet to Help Visualize Potential Problems
In an interview with Wired magazine, Google engineers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts gave a few hints about dealing with Panda. It’s important to realize that Panda was largely aimed at removing “low quality” sites from the Google SERPs. So, try building a spreadsheet and listing the types of pages on your site in columns – blog posts, product pages, gateway pages, articles (low quality), articles (high quality), guest posts (low quality), guest posts (high quality), forum pages, etc.
The next columns to add should address different on-page factors, such as:
- Few or moderate number of ads
- Several ads
- Little or medium duplicate content
- Most or all duplicate content
- Short or medium articles
- Long articles
- Few or no images
- Image-heavy
- Percentage drop in organic US Google traffic
You’ll use this spreadsheet to…
Test, Re-Test and Adapt
Reduce the percentage of pages containing low quality posts by replacing the content with higher quality writing, or eliminate those pages altogether. In cases where ad-laden pages suffer a greater Panda slap (drop in Google traffic) than pages that display fewer ads, consider shifting the ads amongst relevant pages. On the other hand, if pages with few or no ads fare worse than pages with more ads, then the ads are probably not the cause, so look for duplicate or lower quality content.
Google has been testing ads and they believe that changing the display url’s to lowercase, the click-through rate could increase. While I cannot deny that this might be true or not, I know that a good amount of advertisers want their display urls in proper case. The reason for this might be two letters back to back that can confuse visitors. I know I have seen a few urls that look strange due to similar letters being back to back. Luckily, advertisers do not have to change their ads to see the change and hopefully Google is correct about the possible increase in click-through rates. What do you think about the change?
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