Google is doing what they do best and that is playing "hide-the-ball" with how to manipulate their search engine. Their newest iteration of Panda < aka Panda 4.2 > is already wreaking havoc on some of my clients rankings even though it was supposed to have an extremely slow roll out. If you are part of the 2-3% of the folks already penalized by the new Panda then this post is for you!

Like with all good, organic SEO strategy the main way to combat the low rankings is what you are <hopefully> already doing: focusing on creating quality content (“be described by 80%+ of visitors as useful, high quality, & unique.”) consistently over time.

The next quick fix (depending on how guilty you are, of course) is to clean up your keywords. Google looks to be punishing sites that are keyword stuffing. Another way to combat this is by mastering the long-tail keyword integration. Sound like gibberish to you? Just think how specific can you make your keywords - that's the answer. Here's a great article on all these items: http://contently.com/strategist/2015/02/24/seo-isnt-dead-its-just-different/

This article also mentions the importance of title pages, URL, and meta description length (page titles should be under 75 characters, URLs under 90 characters, and meta descriptions under 160 characters). Still focusing on Metadata? It has been pretty dead for years when Google realized people were manipulating it in a spammy way. Try cleaning up these items and make sure to give your site ample time to be re-crawled and a new sample of data to come forward.

Still lost? Become a Client of Houston's A Brand Strategy Consulting today and we can get you the help your business needs: either via hourly coaching, consulting, or custom SEO strategy. Whatever works best for you and your budget.

Is Your Strategy Ready for Google's Panda 4.2?