Recently lost visitors! What should I do?

It has been unanimously agreed by many web developers that, Google’s new panda update has created too many red flags for copycats. Ben Kemp from sitepronews very aptly presented the facts in his case study on Flexiscreens.com.

How monthly visits on the website came down from 36,000 to 17,000 in December 2011 to March 2012. The content on the website never changed drastically in between, but the number of visitors surely did, what happened? What changed in between? It was Google’s update (Since most of the search volume share have been owned by google as per 2013), No doubt.

Though it has been seen by a lot of people that Google rewards quality content, but what actually comes under the purview of quality content? Content which the engineers at Google talk about are

1. Images and Alt-text for those images
2. Anchor text in hyperlinks.
3. URLs in the hyperlinks to internal and external websites
4. Title of the page
5. Meta Description
6. Visible text on the page

What should you do to update your site, so that it does not affect your page rankings.

Now for the question of the hour 'Having lower visitors since last month? What should you do?'
Thinking about google’s last updates, several things have come up. Though at first look it might strike you as the search engine’s trying to rule the cyber planet, but its not, Actually the only thing the giant search engine is trying to do is give developers their rightful place, and the rightful visitors they deserve. A lot of websites have lost to duplicate content taken from their own webpage, just because they did not have higher number of visitors in the start and the website copying the content had. Now as per google old algorithm visitors were given quite a lot of priority in the search engine rankings, but not now.

Nowadays, due to google’s panda and EDM update, the websites with superior content will be more visible in the search listings, leading to higher visitors and higher earnings.If you feel you have cleared the above criteria, you’re ready to move on. There are some things you must start on,

Remove inferior content

For Bloggers this is a glaringly open mistake, which nearly all make. Ameteur bloggers start their blogs in one direction and as they blog, they move on to another. They develop and mature as the write more and more. So what do you think happens to the initial blogs? Those blogs remain as it is as webpages on your website, since they were written months ago, you may suspect them as inferior (if not you’re a super blogger) this what you might call as a dead weight slowing down your website. Don’t fret, you shouldn't be deleting those precious posts but just update it to your current standards. This may take months if you've already written many posts, but since all those articles are hooked up on your URL, its your duty to protect the integrity of your website in the interest of all those hours you've put in to exalt your website’s position.

Combine and Redirect Replicas

In certain international websites, especially commercial, there are pages with the same content, the only difference is that those pages were country specific, i.e. content is optimized for different countries. One thing that can be done in this is to redirect the traffic and get rid of the replicas (which Google might think of as duplicate content or mark as spam).

Use only Superior Quality links

Had there been a quote about websites, It would be, ‘Don’t judge a book by its text but buy its links’ The one and only motto used by each and every search engine to judge websites. Also one must use the Nofollow command judiciously as it is also being used by Google as an additional parameter for search engine listings. Find good blogs to follow, dig out ideas, cite them and you're done!

Remove too many images

Images are a great way to express yourself, but not to a search engine. It is very well known that the technology for a search engine to crawl through an image looking for content (just like it does for text) has not been used until now. So if you’re using too many images, remove and use less, as they’ll do you no good.

Upgrading your pages

Use different styles and merge them together. Show some diversity in content. Use headings (h1, h2), bold text, catchy titles but relevant titles brief but snappy descriptions etc. Try lowering your page load time for a change (See how does it matter). Find faults in your SEO and rectify them. Do not stuff too many keywords (See the perils of keyword stuffing). Also a 'custom page not found' page is better in all aspects.

Finally If you think, you’re website was affected by Google’s updates, Its still not too late to start making amends. Usually such amends make a direct impact on your rankings and changes occur fast. Though there are cases when people have cheated and deceived to get into Google’s good books, but is it really worth it? The time and energy usually spent in creating vicious schemes and black hat SEO techniques is nearly the same as using the right techniques and producing quality content.


For More information on SEO tactics and content improvement, try out codemakit's 'The SEO and content Guide' free e-book in pdf.

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