Improve google search ranking after Panda algorithm changes

Lately I have gotten lot of requests from readers about google's panda algorithm change and its effect on site rankings. All the questions have just one theme, how can you make sure that your site's rankings in search engine stay at top. One of our site's was hit real hard with this algorithm change and traffic on the site took a nose dive. After making some tweaks and following some of the new guidelines google provided, I was able to recover site traffic quickly. So I thought I will share some of the experience with rest of the publishing world.

• First and foremost advice I have is to follow google webmaster central blog. Google shares lot of information on this blog and provide useful guidance from time to time.
• Read this guidance from google. This provides lof of information on what to do and what not to do.

Based on guidance provided by google and my personal experience in recovery of search site ranking, here are some of the things you can do.

• If you are scrapping information from other web sites and publishing on your site, STOP it. I had a page dedicated to displaying latest Microsoft Knowledgebase articles. This page had content scrapped from Microsoft site itself. I thought I was doing service to community by providing more outlets for same information. It turned out to be a big factor in reducing site's rankings.
• Make sure that your posts or artciles are of decent length now. I would say on average keep atleast 500 words for content. Anything less than that can be considered insufficient by search engine and will make search engine think less of your site as an authority on the topic. Now you have question, what to do about small content that you already have. As per google's guidance, you have following options:
  • Move those to a new domain
  • Combine the content

  One of the things I have done on my blog is that I have created a separate page like "Announcements" where I list all the short content.

• Proof read your content very carefully for any spelling mistakes. This is very important. If your content is full of typos, it reflects negatively on your site overall. If you are reading a book which is full of spelling mistakes, you are not going to recommend that book to anybody. Same goes for search engine as well. Every spelling mistake adds more negative points for your site.
• Do not overload your content with advertisements. One it affects performance of your site by increasing page load time, second search engine thinks of your site as nothing but some page which has only one purpose, advertising.

These are some guidelines you can start with. And then monitor your site's traffic for 2-3 weeks. Do not expect rankings to improve overnight.