3 Ways To Avoid Panda 2.3 From Stealing Your Revenue

It’s been nearly a month now, since the latest iteration of Google’s Panda 2.3 ‘algorithm’ code change/ranking system/update/destroyer of many blog, website, and article revenue has hit the streets. There is much at work here behind the scenes, that many of you may be wondering how it's affecting your hard work.

This is obviously a subject very near and dear to us Hubbers, or at least those actively monetizing our Hubs. Anyone that is doing such has no doubt already noticed as much as an 85% drop in traffic already. Fiery emotions, confusion and anger aside, I will break it down to the most basic level for you.

The reason(s) are this: Duplicate Content is penalized heavily now, by the mighty Panda, and this will only serve to reward those of us that create unique, interesting content. What is claimed is that Google wants sites with actual content to display first, instead of marketers and SEO guru’s attempting to manipulate their search rankings. Despite their efforts, this same angry Panda has destroyed those of us that do pride ourselves on making new, quality content. What is a Hub writer to do? Here are 3 tips I've learned that you might not know.

Avoid Writing Similar Articles about Similar Topics.

Google is retooling their search results to provide not only unique content, but unique titles as well. In the past, people would simply create hundreds of articles about the same subject, and hope they would all be indexed to create a bigger spider-web of opportunity. With Panda 2.3, webmasters are finding out the hard way that focusing on fewer articles about a subject with different viewpoints or perspectives works much better. This is proof that the title of the articles can really affect how Google treats indexing.

Creating a site that uses the same keywords over and over again, will hurt you. Allowing you to create the same article hundreds of times, with the same keywords AND site description is really shooting yourself in the foot. If the site is really regarding the topic, there will be less penalties, but having keywords in the title when the same keywords aren't found in the site or content itself, will anger the Panda, and he will striketh thee down!

3 Things you HAVE to Avoid:

-Writing Similar Articles about the Same Subject.

-Having too many Adsense Ads on the Page.

-Heavy Template Content.

Too many Adsense Ads on the Page.

It might seem a little ironic, or hypocritical at the least, to hear that Google doesn't want you to plaster your page with tons of ads, but there is a fair amount of evidence that ads all over your site/page will hurt your results. You see, Google wouldn't be too happy with you if you directed visitors to your page, from their search engine, only to then blast them with ads; it would take away from Google’s revenue, naturally. The team that is looking for spam-type content within search engine results is a different entity than the Adsense team. You can see this in popular websites, too many ads on every corner of the page. Pop-ups, pictures, whack-a-mole ads, grinning yellow teeth…Nothing says crap in my opinion like a bunch of Adsense ads bleeding all over the content.

Way too Heavy Template Content.

You and I, and Mr. Panda here, have seen the sites out there that try to use heavy template content to gain tons of links and have a smorgasbord of redundant site content in front of the user. Now, Mr. Panda realizes that a lot of legit sites do this for a variety of reasons, including navigating, but Google has a filter in place that will basically start to ignore any site that has too much of the same content from the template. How does this affect you? It means even if the main article is different, if the surrounding content is too similar and repetitive; Google treats it all as the same page within the same site. Most analysts theorize that the 95% similarity is about where the cut-off begins, but others say it may be as high as 90%

For instance, this can be particularly bad for any site that just shows videos, but has a lot of similar text surrounding the video. Google seems to be of the mindset that a video isn’t necessarily ‘unique content’, but a single URL surrounded by hundreds of similar text examples.

Also of warning, one should really avoid having too many columns with ‘recent articles’ and ‘best comments’ or ‘favorite links’. One column is plenty, and if you start to add in the same links all over the place, spread out amongst every corner of your site, it will push your duplicate rate through your bamboo hut’s roof!

The best, and easiest way to prevent this is to place most of the duplicate stuff at the bottom of your site’s pages, and allow your sites real-life users to interact with their comments. It is no secret, that Google loves commenter’s!

Don't fear the Panda, as I said above, the newest iteration will hopefully place your valuable and unique content at the top of the search engines again, and hopefully restore some of your faith in the system that may or may not have been helping you with revenue for your labors.

Work hard, and smart, as you were, and ye shall be rewarded in the long run...

For your writing adventures, I located this great tool to weed out pages in your own site that have a high similarity. http://www.duplicatecontent.net/ [I have no affiliation to this site]

If there is one thing that I've read quite a few times already here at HubPages, is that the best advice for ALL your writing endeavors…is that creating real content for real users, in the long run, is what will make you actual, real money. Your frequent visitors that sign up to your newsletter, that return to your site to read your next exploits, your true fans, are your longer term revenue models – Not that one bored, random person who clicks on an ad and makes you a few cents. If you create actual quality material/websites, with actual content, and have real interested readers…this is the key that will result in long-lasting performance and results for any affiliate and performance marketer!