Keeping the Panda Happy

If there's one thing we've known since the arrival of Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching in the '70's - Pandas may look docile but FUCK they have teeth! (The dude is on his second movie and gets to hang with the 'oh sit you is so fine' - "Angelina (don't fuck with me) Jolie".

Well, the big Panda has finally arrived, for most of us, its arrival is far from positive. Funny to see so many of the usual SEO monkeys applauding its arrival. I guess it makes them look squeaky clean. Behind closed doors, pretty much everyone is crying, bar the odd lucky few who got a boost.

So What next?

I guess every SEO in the UK right now is franticly trying to fix their site, looking for potential ways to fight off this 40 stone Panda.  I might add, right now is maybe the worst time to make any changes. Along with the Panda came a mass volume of junk URLS being indexed in SERP. These will all eventually be kicked off, again resulting in another shuffle in the search results.  So my advice would be to hold out and wait a few weeks before you start going on a “be nice to panda mission”. Granted it’s got everyone stirred up, but let’s not forget, our spammy friends who are dominating the top of the SERPS, are still in once piece, what does this tell us?

Keeping the Panda Happy

At the moment, looks like the sites which took the worst hits are directories, and sites which scrape a lot of content via feeds. The best advice for resolving this is,  by simply adding in more content on your light pages and check for internal duplications. Maybe also a good time to sack the far east content writer.

Links

As for cleaning up your links, evidence at the moment shows, if the spammers are all still alive and well, the links maybe not such a big deal. Worst that may have happened is, some of your links lost some value.

Article Marketing

Since the word Panda was on everyone’s lips, nearly every SEO out there is scared to use article directories.  Looks like Googles PR machine did a good job. They obviously wanted to kick article marketing hard, obviously because it works so well! So rather then being paranoid, do continue to use them, just stop using 2 dollar guys in the far east to spin your content. Write something decent and you might not feel the panda bite!

Example of Google still showing silly results.
You only have to type into the keyword SEO in to google.co.uk. You will find a little gem a few positions down called www.micrositez.net . This site has come out of the depths of Google. How long can this rank on page one? I would say has to be a clear indication Google hasn’t finished the update quite yet.
Conclusion

Stop crying and checking SERP every 10 minutes. Wait a few weeks and see how it all maps out before you make any drastic changes. In the mean time use your spare time checking for obvious mistakes like duplicate titles, thin content and all general poor quality content. If you have got duplicate content, use the rel= can tags!

Will be back with an update when I have more data! I'll still be in a bit of a foul mood!