Google Panda Update – Reconsideration Request Denied
Denied by the Google Panda- The email from Google came the other day as I’ve been sick. The reconsideration request had been denied by Google. My PageRank remains still at 0. The traffic and search has not been affected by this Google Panda (yet.) It did state one or more pages from http://inspiretothrive.com/ may be subject to one or more of the following actions: So it doesn’t mean all these following actions would happen. It states one or more of the following MAY Happen.
- Removal from the search results
- Ranking change
- Changes to search result appearance
- Be considered to be less trustworthy than sites that follow the quality guidelines
It appears so far the one factor is the PageRank – ranking change. The post I originally did about this ranking when it first happened actually drove an increase in traffic to the site. So do we get overly excited about PageRank?
What is PageRank?
According to the Google Guide PageRank is “Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.” It’s only Google’s ranking, not Bing or any other search engine for that matter. So why do we care so much? If we are trying to get advertisers to pay for ads on our site we may care. They sometimes look at PageRank as a guide. Others look at Alexa, comments and amount of social shares. The other reason may be our ego, right? Who wants 0 when other websites around us have a 2, 3 or higher PageRank?
What Else To Do To Make The Google Panda Happy?
According to my webmaster tools the issue seems to be a little different now. This time it says the site violates “quality guidelines“. I went to investigate what that means and some of the terms I don’t even know what they mean so how can I be practicing them?
- Doorway Pages? What is a doorway page? (After going through incoming links I learned quickly what they are).
- Sending automated queries to Google? I didn’t know this could be done or how one does it. Do you?
- Cloaking – Another term I do not understand though have heard many times throughout the years. It really means making something look like what it is not. Links pretending to be something else.
- Removing user generated spam – I didn’t know users could generate spam unless their comments are spammy. Are commentings killing blogs lately?
You can read the whole list here from Google. From my first time reading it – I would think it could go back to spammy comments. I dug back through some of the 11,000 comments left here on 390 posts. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack!
That is until Mayura contacted me with some wonderful suggestions. I went through over 900 links via the Google Webmaster tools that were linking to me. It was amazing what I found. Many spammy sites and some with names that lead to other sites. Sounds like doorway pages to me! Any sites that use numbers in their URL – be aware. I also found many sites ending in with .ca to be of a spammy nature. Some of the linking sites were no longer available on the web. It may be time for the Disavow tool from Google.
It’s amazing how a website or blog can be penalized for sites that link to them, not sites we link to.”
More Things To Check
There are still more things for me to check along the way, are all my links nofollow? Any affiliate links from years ago still here? SO if you don’t see me visiting your blog for a while, you will know why. I’m deep in the haystack looking for the needles to keep the Google Panda happy.
Making Your Links NoFollow For The Google Panda
The question came up in my last post on how to make your links nofollow: Here is how to code it with HTML:
< a href=”http://mynofollowlink.com” rel=”nofollow”>My No Follow Link</a>
Of course you may use a plugin too so that all your links may have this attribute and if you want to change to follow – just eliminate the word “no” in front of follow.
Have you gone through the links that link to your blog or website lately?
Have you been hit lately by the Google Panda?
“Denied” Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net and Haystack Image courtesy of xedos4 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
