Google’s ongoing Panda updates are geared to bring websites with high-quality content to the fore and to penalize sites of lower quality, especially when they are merely regurgitating content from other sites.
That dynamic may make it especially challenging to sites with affiliate relationships and some in the Expedia Affiliate Network camp have been particularly hard hit.
“The [affiliate] sites that had quality original content, that added value, fared much better than those that didn’t,” wrote Jeff Slipko, Expedia Affiliate Network’s SEO strategy manager, in a blog post. “Over the last year, we’ve seen our affiliates work incredibly hard to add additional value in order to recover from a Panda penalty or to avoid it all together.”
The following is a summary of EAN’s best practices, as espoused by Slipko, on how affiliates can deal with the big bad Panda updates:
1. Reduce Duplicate Content: Try not to take content directly from other sites, and if you do, repurpose it and rewrite it with your own angle and spin whenever feasible.
2. Avoid Thin Content: Google reportedly categorizes some affiliates as “thin” when they purely exist to make money and don’t chip in with quality content surrounding their money-making pursuits. So any thin content on affiliate sites should be edited and reworked with a focus on enriching the user experience.
3. Take the Bounce Out of Your Step: Google Panda has little love for sites with high bounce rates and minuscule numbers of page views. Again, after examining your analytics, fatten up your most vulnerable pages with quality content.
4. Strive to Dodge Getting Your Site Blocked: Google Panda loves site pages that get bookmarked or earn a +1, and conversely has no patience for sites which users block or bounce off quickly. Again, content is key and affiliates should address issues on any pages where user behavior makes them appear more like trampolines than glue.
5. Go Light on Advertisements: Sites with minimal advertising and those that relegate ads to lower positions on a page seem to do better with Panda than others, so take appropriate steps to comply with these mandates.
6. Templates Alone are a Template for Failure: Template sites which aren’t habitually updated with fresh content will suffer the consequences.
Slipko emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits all panacea for affiliates in trying to sidestep Panda’s wrath, but the above six steps will help combat what has become “a whirlwind of destruction for some.”
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First time I’ve seen +1s or bookmarking associated with panda recovery. Any links to back this statement up?
Maybe Google is only looking at a few of these points such as bounce rate and page views and the other factors such as bookmarking just appear related. It would make sense if pages with low bounce rates also had high rates of bookmarking but it does not imply that bookmarking is something Panda actively looks at. We to often assume that establishing a correlation between two variables is sufficient condition to identify a causal relationship.
Content is still very important. However, good user-experience is one key in gaining better Google Ranking.
The newest Google Panda update that has just been released seems to defiantly target affiliate sites, especially in upcoming markets that Google want in on, ie. online backup and cloud storage. After the dance around last night you wont see many, if any affiliate sites on page 1 and even on page 2 of the serps for the main keywords in the niche.
Thanks for clarifying. Could you expand a bit on what you mean by “templates”? Is it where nearly all pages are exactly the same apart from a sentence or two?