8:43 am, December 1, 2011
Reg Rix, managing director of Netcars.com, offers advice to dealers to combat the effects of the latest Google update, Panda 2.5.2
The most recent Google update, Panda 2.5.2, which took place last month, means dealers could now notice a significant effect on the organic rankings of their websites.
Panda, which is a new algorithm that Google uses to improve the quality of internet search results, is penalising sites that have lots of pages of low quality content or duplicate content from other websites, which can result in dealers’ Google rankings dropping dramatically.
For dealer sites which heavily rely on Google traffic, disappearing from the first two results pages (the point when 99 per cent of searchers give up) can spell serious disaster.
Although dealers which have heavily invested in search engine optimisation (SEO) may not see a huge effect from the update, some may have seen a significant drop in organic traffic. The good news is that it’s not too late for those willing to follow a few simple steps.
Ask your SEO agency or marketing team to complete a monthly website health check, to cut back on site errors such as duplicated pages and navigational issues. Permanently re-direct any pages which are weak and add no value to the parent category page or simply increase the uniqueness of each page with images, videos and useful data.
Freshly updated content is essential to add real value to a dealer’s website. Any content added should be unique and not copied from existing sites. A useful, information-rich site, with clearly written pages and accurate descriptions will impact positively on SEO rankings.
Finally, ensuring Google can read and index your site content is crucial. Free tools such as Google Webmaster Tools can be used to identify errors in a website and ensure these can be solved quickly. The tool will detail any information it had difficulty searching, the type of problem and the page or pages on which the error was found.
