As you all may know by now the latest Panda Penguin update from Google happened about a couple of months ago. But I was to busy with my head in the sand working on other things to notice. But after seeing significant drops in traffic in November and December I pulled my head out an looked around and noticed this decline right after Penguin 3.0 hit.

So I decided to do some research and find out what I can do to recover. You see I am not a huge online guru, nor am I a knowledgeable SEO person. I am just a guy who has been doing online business sales via eCommerce, eBay, and now Amazon and have made a life for myself doing it.

In addition to the latest Penguin update there was a Panda update earlier in the year. But we did not seem to affected by that. But this could be deceiving, it could of meant with the combination of the two our site, well basically sucked for the new requirements of Google and the Panda Penguin update combined just killed us. But I am no expert, nor do I have time to read their huge guide. I will leave that up to SEO experts and glean what I can from them. But I needed to know what I needed to do to fix my sites from Panda as well.

But while we saw a drop in revenue in November we have recovered and are back to normal levels in December. What scares me most about this is the fact that it can happen and it is so penalizing and demoralizing. So I decided to look into ways I can try and develop good solid online business (website) building practices to minimize these effects in the future.

So here are some things we did to help recover from the Google Panda Penguin update.

1. Installed a WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker to make sure we were not getting penalized for bad links. There were a few but a lot of redirects.

2. Went to Google webmaster tools and checked all of our site for errors in Search Appearance, checked Mobile Usability, and checked all the links. Checked crawl errors and Page Speed Insights under Other Resources. You may want to check any other data acquisition tools like Google analytics, key word density checkers, and Alexa rankings.

3. Increased page speed from 44/50 Mobile/Desktop to 58/66 with more optimization to come. We need to learn how to get down to the nitty gritty on optimization and further research beyond what we have already done is needed. This may take some time to get the site up and beyond 80 or so.

Used this article to solve some Java script and CSS loading issues.

4. Looking at how we optimize our links trying to avoid having way to many non-relevant links and having the site too optimized for them. Some ways we are trying to avoid this are by;

Getting rid of links to our home page and creating links to content deeper within our site.
Get rid of key word internal linking and spreading those links over entire sentences rather than just the key word.
Making sure we are linking outside to relevant sites and not harmful or irrelevant ones.
Not using any key word spamming tactics within the post, footer, or using keywords not related to our site to gain search traffic.

5. Setting up Social Media high authority profiles with a link back to our site. By adding sites like Linkedin, Pinterest, and others we hope to get high quality links back to our site.

6. Removing unnecessary code, plugins, and short-codes from pages. While this is not a big deal we just want to make sure we are not sacrificing speed for fancy looking pages that ruin our search engine ranking. One of the biggest thing is to remove short-codes we do not need like Drop Caps and other things used to give seeming beauty to the site.

7. The last thing in the first round we are doing is expanding on all of our old articles. Making sure we add additional content to under achieving or low word count articles.

The Conclusion

Well this is only part one of the article with further articles to come on what we will be doing in the next iterations on fixing our site from the Google Panda Penguin Update. It was hard to do some of these items. But in the end I think it is worth the effort to start becoming more Google centric and not relying on get traffic quick schemes.

So what other fixes for the Panda Penguin Update do you recommend we use?