Your website isn’t some old rotten medicine a decade or more old, is it? Come on now! Would expired (probably poisonous) medicine heal you or make you sick?
Millions of website designers and SEO’s like us are making an effort to update and fix old websites to attract visitors and encourage them to come back and visit a healthy, friendly website–that won’t make Panda sick!
According to Search Engine Watch, if you think your site HAS made Panda sick (i.e., your ranking has suddenly dropped or you believe it might have been removed from Google’s index), check for the following:
- To see if your site is still indexed, search Google for your site like this: site:yourwebsite.com. If you get results, you haven’t been removed. If you’ve been removed, go to Google Webmaster Central to find out why and apply for re-inclusion once you’ve cleaned up your problem.
- Do a Google search for “yourwebsite.com” with your URL in quotations. You should be in the top 10 results. If your site appears back on page four or five, Google has most likely penalized you.
- Have you bought or exchanged links from/with low-ranking websites?
- Have you or someone else worked on your site recently and possibly did something to make Panda “sick”?
- Look at your site objectively. Better yet, have someone else go over it for you and give you feedback.
- Are you giving Google the information it needs in your site’s metadata and content to crawl and rank it for the search terms (keywords) you’re after?
- Is your site easy to navigate and user friendly?
For more tips on how to keep your site (and Panda!) healthy, contact us for a free “mini-audit” of your website!
