Google Panda Guide: Your site in compliance

To follow up on the previous article about what Panda considers to be quality content. Here is a free translation of the guide of good practices published by Google itself and taken up by Ron Gilles, a reference in New Zealand.

Be aware that if you are unfairly the victim of the Panda fix, you can contest it via webmaster tools ( update Bamboo for the re-examination and restoration of sites hit by Panda)

Is your website ready for Panda patching?

By following Google’s recommendation guidelines, you ensure your website is indexed and ranked “deserved”. We recommend that you keep a word in mind “quality” and refuse illegal practices that can lead Google to penalize your site or even deindex it (which is rare). Once penalized, a site will take many months to reappear in the SERPs of Google and partner sites.

Content design and writing

• Make a site ergonomically designed, with clear menu prioritization. Make sure that each page is accessible with at least one text hyperlink. (So, not just from the menus).
• Edit a “sitemap” page with links to important sections of your site. If this sitemap displays a very large number of links, divide it into multiple pages.
• In each article, don’t overdo the number of links pointing to your inner pages, keep this number reasonable! (I like the vagueness of the word reasonable – we’re talking about staying under 100 links).
• Create a useful site rich in information, use a simple, precise vocabulary that corresponds well to the subject of the article (Tell yourself that Google can read, but that its vocabulary still lacks finesse and that it still has progress to make).
• Think about the logical keywords that your readers will use to find your page and use them in your texts.
• Use text instead of images or links to state the most important concepts; Crawlers can’t see what’s in the images. And if you must use photos in the context of your article, fill in the “alt” tags and the “Title” attribute of the image with a few descriptive words. ( This last remark is user-oriented, major SEOs have repeatedly “shown” that the “Title attribute of the image” was not taken into account by Glouglou).
• Fix your HTML code and check for broken links.
• If your site is a dynamic platform and these urls call for queries, don’t leave a character like “? or &” in URLs). Be aware that spiders don’t crawl dynamic pages in the same way they crawl static pages. Rewrite your URLs for short statements, clear parameters, and fewer parameters.

Technical guidelines

Photo 1: See cache in the SERPs

• The use of session IDs and navigation tracking arguments are obstacles to the exploration of Google’s spiders, search engines do not circulate in a site in the same way as an Internet user…. Using these techniques can result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots lose, in this case, the ability to eliminate URLs that look different despite pointing to the same page.

• Check the text that is actually perceived by Google, remember that javascripts, cookies, session IDs, frames, flash hide some parts of the text and can cause crawling problems for spiders.
• (the Lynx browser does this perfectly but it is difficult to install and is not compatible with all sites), a basic trick is to click the cache version of the SERP (photo 1) and then click on “text only version” of the page cache (photo 2) ]

• Make sure your web server supports the http header If-Modified-Since”. This feature allows your web server to tell Google that your content has changed since it was last crawled your site. This feature saves your bandwidth and therefore overhead.

• Use the robots.txt file on your web server. It tells the robots which directories to explore or not. Make sure it’s adapted to your site’s technology so that you don’t block Googlebot while crawling. Go to the http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html text robot info page for any info on this subject. You can also test the robots.txt file and check that you are using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
• Do what you can to make sure that the ads don’t harm the work of search engines. For example, Google AdSense and DoubleClick ads are excluded from crawling by a robots.txt file. (small call for the use of good advertising agencies)
• Avoid crawling pages generated “on the fly” (usually redundant aggregation, categories, keywords, etc.) that don’t add value to the site. Use the robots.txt file to exclude them from Google’s indexing.
• If you have a CMS (Content Management System), make sure that the platform creates pages and links that search engines are able to crawl.
• Test your site to make sure it looks good in different browsers.
• Monitor your site’s loading speed and optimize it as best as possible. Google promotes the user experience and punishes sites that display their pages too slowly. Fast sites give better satisfaction to Internet users and consume less bandwidth.

Overall website quality advice

Here is a mini directory of the very common illicit and manipulative behaviors practiced on the web and that Google disapproves of and sanctions. Not all of them are there! It would not be realistic to think that under the pretext that a specific deceptive technique is not included in this page, it would be ignored or approved by Google. (Example, domain name registration with spelling mistakes on the names of well-known sites). Webmasters who strive to respect the spirit of the basic principles will offer a much superior user experience and will have a much better ranking on their site than those who spend their time looking for flaws to exploit.
If you believe that another site is not meeting Google’s quality guidelines, please report it to (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/SpamReport). Google brings scalable and automated solutions to each spam problem by dint of adjustments, which makes it possible to reduce “manual correction”. Spam reports sent to us are used to evolve our algorithms and block future spam attempts.

Quality Tips: The Basics

• Make pages primarily for users and not for search engines.
• Don’t disappoint your visitors by presenting content that is different from what they are looking for.
• Do not present search engines with content that is different from what is displayed to users, (commonly known as “cloaking“)
• Don’t use “obscure” software to submit your pages and do ranking tests, this software consumes valuable resources and violates Google’s policies. (WebPosition Gold is mentioned by name)
• Avoid “stuff meant to improve search engine rankings. The right conduct consists in asking yourself these three questions:
• 1) Can you justify, without blushing, what you have done against a competing site?
• 2) Will what I do for this site help my visitors?
• 3) Would I have done the same thing if search engines didn’t exist?
• Avoid participating in link farms, avoid setting them up. Don’t create your network of satellite sites in order to link “on your own”, don’t participate in the schemes set up by black hat enthusiasts.

Quality advice – Specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Avoid duplicate content, even within your site.
• Do not create pages with malicious intentions, such as phishing or installation of viruses, Trojans.
• Avoid “front doors”, pages created exclusively for search engines, such as affiliate programs whose original content is of little or no interest.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure it adds value. Provide relevant and original content to get people to surf your site first.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

Conclusion

Not much new compared to the recommendations of the Google SEO Guide 2010 (Eng Version) and it’s logical, the corrections are not made to modify what is considered to be THE QUALITY but to sanction the abuses of the clever people who take advantage of the flaws of the algorithm.

That’s why your site has nothing to fear from Panda if you’ve generally respected the rules of the game.

If you want a quick but good synthesis of the Panda effects on the English-speaking web, I recommend the EKO blog and the DNCOM article David Carle , their conclusions are in line with the common sense of the clean SEO community, which is always a pleasure.

We hope that this reference reminder will be useful to some of you.

NB

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Let loose

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