As you know, Panda is a Google filter that seeks to stop spammy (low quality) sites from ranking high in the SERPs.

In late May the Google Panda 4.0 update was discussed all over the SEO community. The web is full of theoretical advice on how to avoid the Panda penalty. We have some practical tips.

Avoid Exact Match Link Text

Part of any site development is planning how users will navigate the content. In terms of SEO it means that your internal links structure should be well-optimized. Internal links optimization is often ignored, although it is a great method to improve landing (important) pages’ search visibility and to broadcast your website’s theme.

However, if linking is implemented incorrectly, it can attract Panda’s attention. The first thing Google Panda may react badly to is if you have an excessive number of exact matching link texts. The exact matching link texts can set off alarms with Google that you may be trying to manipulate the algorithm and get higher rankings.

How to avoid this:

Go to the WebCEO Internal Links Optimization tool and check the “Link Text Analysis” report. The numbers you are interested in are highlighted on the screenshot below.

Analyze how diverse the internal link texts are. If you see that an exact link text is used with more than 20% of all your internal links, consider changing some texts to diversify you internal links profile.

Decrease Site Wide Links

When building a site’s navigation it is typical to create site wide navigational links to a domain’s most popular pages. Very often these links are found in the side bar or footer and are completely irrelevant to the topic of most of the pages that the link falls on. These links do not improve your page’s authority and should be minimized.

What to do:

Use the Page Authority Analysis report of the Internal Links Optimization tool to identify your most important pages for now. Are your landing pages (the pages you use to convert visitors into customers) the most authoritative pages?

View the details of a page you want to improve the authority of. You will get the list of the pages that are still not linked to your landing page. Use this list to find the best link donors. Remember that the best links are contextual links with natural link text places on the relevant pages, as opposed to links found in the footer of the page.

Avoid Duplicates

Panda uses multiple factors to identify your site’s quality. One of them is the absence of duplicate content pieces. You should use only high quality unique content; this is not even a point of discussion. However, sometimes duplicate Titles and Descriptions make their way to your pages and that can be very bad. It’s an easy mistake to make however.

How to avoid:

The On-Site SEO report of the Content Assistant tool will help you. Scan your website and get notified about all duplicate Titles and Descriptions found. Besides you will know if your site has other optimization issues preventing you from getting high rankings.

After you’ve discovered the duplicates, consider rewriting the Titles and Descriptions to be unique. Remember, that the Titles and the Descriptions are the pieces that prompt a searcher to click your link on a SERP. Make them descriptive and appealing.

Bonus tip: Ensure that your backlink profile is sound. Use the Toxic Links report of the Backlink Quality Check tool to find and remove harmful links.

The post How to Avoid the Google Panda Penalty with the WebCEO tools appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

We hope you use the rel=canonical tag to tell search engines what version of duplicate pages (eg. http://yoursite.com, www.yoursite.com) you prefer to be indexed. This tag is supported by all major search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo. However it’s sometimes rather tricky to configure this in a proper way. In this article we put together some good questions about rel=canonical, that have been asked by Web CEO users.

Should I use rel=canonical, if I have several product pages that differ only by a sentence or two (different colors and sizes)?

Yes, we think it’s appropriate to use a rel=canonical tag on very-near duplicate pages. For example, do this if you have several URLs with very similar products on them. However, you shouldn’t abuse this tag, because search engines may just ignore your tags.

What happens if I put several canonical tags on one page?

If there’s more than one rel=canonical tag on a page, Google will ignore all of them.

Should I use re=canonical for articles with pagination (multiple pages for one piece of content)?

In cases of paginated articles Google recommends that you use a rel=canonical tag that you either rel=canonical to a “View All” page or that you use rel=prev/next.

Should I use rel=canonical or 301 redirects?

While a rel=canonical tag and a 301 redirect behave similarly from an SEO standpoint, they serve different purposes. A 301-redirect takes a human visitor to the canonical URL and a rel=canonical tag does not. The canonical tag just tells the search engines what page to use in search results. Humans won’t be affected by this. You will use a 301 redirect if you want to permanently consolidate two pages and remove the duplicate page. You will use a rel=canonical tag, if you want to keep both pages for visitors, but only one of them should be considered by the search engines for search results.

The post SEO in Brief: How to Use Rel=Canonical Properly appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.