Top 8 Ways to Rank High After Google Panda April 2012 Update

On April 24th 2012, Matt Cutts from google published an article over the new google panda update. As always the update has already affected almost every site on the internet either in a good way or in a bad way. Most of the webmasters who suffered from this update have started searching for tricks to outperform after this update.

After reading quite a few official posts on google webmaster central and answers from support forum of google, I’ve realized a few things you can do to not just save yourself from the panda scrutiny but also rank high after the update.

Say NO to Black Hat SEO

Inspite of so may warnings and previous bad experiences people still prefer using black hat SEO to rank high in search engine. This might be a quick way to give your ranks a boost but remember one, someday you will be caught and punished. So if you are a webmaster who puts dedicated efforts to make his blog, then never try black hat tricks. This might seem good in short term, but it is definitely not a good alternative for long term.

Say NO to Link Schemes

No doubt, link building plays an important role when it comes to your site’s ranking. But do not participate in link exchange programs beyond a certain limit. DO NOT link to spamming websites or fraudulent or phishing pages. The new update will decrease your website’s rank for linking to such sites. So beware! Focus more in internal linking instead.

Say NO to Automated Article Spinning

Recently many webmasters have started creating websites with spun content. There are numerous grammatical errors in the articles and none of them make sense most of the time. It is a really bad approach for creating content. So do not follow it. Instead you can try to manually spin the article where in the article makes sense and is valuable from the point of view of the reader. You can find a nice tutorial for it here or here.

Say NO to keyword Stuffing

How often you must have tried to excessively stuff your articles with keywords? Often webmasters make this mistake and end up ranking really low in SERPs. Keyword stuffing is most easiest to catch for search engines. Why risk your website’s ranking for a simple mistake as this? Be genuine while creating content. Using keywords in your article at proper places is not incorrect but using excessive keywords is unnecessary, non-user friendly and wrong from search engine’s point of view.

Say NO to hidden texts and hidden links

Search engines know how smart you can get. So don’t try to outwit them by using such wrong techniques. Using hidden texts means changing the text of the color and make it same as the background. This makes the text appear in the source but not on page unless the text is selected. Some of you might have even tried to hyperlink parts of this text and keep them hidden as well. I would suggest to stop doing it and use legitimate and genuine ways instead.

Work on On Page SEO

The best thing you can do to rank high, regardless of what updates search engines come up with, is working on “On page SEO” for the site. Create relevant interlinking from one post to another. Use header tags to emphasize more on main titles. Bold, italic and underline the relevant keywords to draw attention of the readers. There are numerous techniques to go around with for proper White Hat On Page SEO.

Build Websites for Users not Bots

No doubt, that search engines form a major source of your traffic in most cases. But it does not mean that you create your website primarily for search engines. Use the user’s perspective when generating content, and add a tinge of your webmaster skills to it to improve the on page SEO. Day by day search engine algorithms improvise to provide more importance to user friendly sites. If a user opens your page and closes the window in 3 seconds, then your article is nothing but crap. And do realize, that google keeps a track of it. So act accordingly.

Focusing a little more on visitor loyalty, bounce rates and time per visit attributes, I would also suggest webmasters to keep your websites as ads free as possible. Especially the pop ups and pop unders. They are really very annoying and don’t use them unless you really have to.

White Hat SEO or No SEO at all

Last thing I would like to suggest is, stick to white hat SEO or do not work on SEO at all. But never resort to black hat SEO under any circumstances. Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) has mentioned this point in his recent post. White hat SEO is easy to implement but it has a drawback that it will take some time for your site to rank high. But the good side of this is that once you get to the top there’s no going down, if you stick to White Hat SEO.

I hope this small article helps you to understand ways to Rank High after not only Google Panda update but almost any update by any search engine.