Recovering from Google’s Panda and Penguin

If your site got hit but the Google’s animal squat team, then you might be interested in this post. 

In the period from early February to May of 2013 Google rolled out several updates to its search engine ranking system, of which the two major – and most vicious ones – were called Panda and Penguin, occurring in April and May of 2013 respectively.

Before that, for the past three years, our main website Joomla Bliss was consistently ranked on the first page, among the first five links, for our main keywords: “website design Ottawa”, “webdesign Ottawa” as well as “Joomla website design” on Google.ca

And this positioning accounted for 85% of SEO and website marketing we did for our business. We were quite happy and proud that our marketing expenditures were minimal and yet our business was doing well.

Well, all this was ended by Panda and Penguin. I am terrified to think what Zebra might do to us, if it ever gets released.

We are now on our way to recovery, noticed some positive changes already. Hopefully, this will continue. So this post is to share with other small businesses that got crippled by Google’s animals on how to recover from the hit.

Before I summarize the steps we have taken to recover our rating, let me just say that Google’s official position is that it has changed its algorithm in order to reward sites with high quality content and downgrade (penalize) websites with low quality content. By “low” quality Google usually means “borrowed” or “partially borrowed” content as well as "overly optimized" content, i.e. stuffed with too many keywords per unit of text. 

Well, our site’s content was written by us from scratch, we got very good feedback on its content from clients (one of them said that before hiring us she read every single FAQ and Blog post on the site). So Panda/Penguin would not have hit us for this reason.

In terms of keyword stuffing – well, in the past, Google worked in such a way so that if you pepper your main keywords in all structural elements of your site as well as on each page’s content – you got higher ranking. We did have a lot of our keywords everywhere, so we figured we probably got into the "keyword stuffing" category.

So, did Google change its own rules and penalized the sites who followed those rules (albeit unspoken but nonetheless actionable!) in the past? Hmm..

We conducted some research, listened to video announcements by Matt Cutts, Google’s official SEO spokesperson, read articles like this one regarding SEO recovery from Panda/Penquin updates, tried and tweaked things on the site – and in the end came up with these observations:

1. Used iJoomlaSEO and decided to optimize our meta tags by including more of our keywords – our site went down by several links in the next few days  (this was in February)
2. Contacted Google’s support from inside our Google webmaster account and received a reply that there was no manual penalty imposed on our site (which confirmed that did nothing illegal)
3. Simplified our site’s structure by removing a 3^rd level in the main menu hierarchy and adding more items to the 1^st and 2^nd levels – moved a couple of links up, not a significant change
4. Use iJoomlaSEO to de-optimize our site by re-phrasing description META tags and removing some of the keywords (and even removing a lot of them!) from each tag; de-optimized all Page Title tags and Alias tags  – the site went up 7 links within two days, i.e. a significant change. Note that we did not remove ALL keywords, we left at least one set in each description, but we used to have more than one (so this is where the keyword stuffing comes in)
5. Analyzed our keywords presented inside Google webmaster account, made changes to the site, ensured that the keyword list generated by Google reflects our site’s specialization and  finally achieved a prioritized list that does correspond to our site's content – no noticeable change in positioning
6. Acquired 3-4 links from design websites and software-related blogs – site moved up a couple of links, i.e. need to acquire more of such quality links, i.e. related to web design
7. Acquired Social Media likes and Google Pluses and Tweets from local Ottawa contacts – site moved up (especially after someone added comments to their "likes" that happened to have our target keywords in them)
8. Posted new blog post weekly or bi-weekly, each post being a long article with the "authorship" information enabled, some strong formatting styles, tag cloud, and some images) – site moved up. 
9. Upgraded our CMS version from the obsolete Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 3.0 (having received Google’s notification into our webmaster account that “new software is available”) – the site went up 1 link
10. After the upgrade, some of the social media button counts got lost due to certain changes in the URLs (we removed Joomla IDs from the URLs, whereas the twitter counts and some other counts were tied to those and some of them got lost) - the site went down by 3 links. If you have a lot of social media likes and doing a CMS upgrade, ensure ways to preserve those counts! 

Overall, in the course of several weeks, we moved up from being on the links 36-39 to 22-23 for our three main keywords: “website design Ottawa”, “webdesign Ottawa” as well as “Joomla website design” on Google.ca. This is still a far cry from being on the first page among the first 3-5 links as before, but it is progress.

SUMMARY: HOW TO RECOVER FROM GOOGLE'S PANDA AND PENGUIN HIT.

I tried to list the steps in the order of priority:

1. Add more content to your website every week, post long blog articles with images and some custom formatting and add links to other reputable resources related to your field
2. Acquire more social media "likes" and "shares"and "tweets" and "Google pluses" with sharing comments that contain your target keywords (ideally), and 
3. De-optimize your site if you used to follow old SEO standards: leave ONE set of keywords per Page Title tag and META description tag. If you are using Joomla, do NOT manually alter the alias tag to make it slightly different from the Page Title tag. Although we can't prove, we suspect that this matters too.
4. Clean up your site's content by removing or merging short pages into long ones. Make sure the content is perceived as authentic (add Google authorship). If you are using Joomla, learn how to enable Google authorship on a Joomla site, you'd need to add some code.
5. Acquire back links from related websites and try to get your keywords as an anchor text.

If someone noticed other things that were proven to work for Panda and Penguin recovery, do let me know! Contact me via our Ottawa web design firm Joomla Bliss or via this blog.