Last updated on October 27th, 2017
Google Webmaster is a valuable asset for any online marketer. It allows you to access a plethora of data regarding your website’s rankings, visits, bounce rates and other important metrics for determining how well your SEO efforts are paying off.
As you know from our post on March 4th, Google recently updated its algorithm to weed out sites with less than stellar content. Many of the sites affected contained low-quality content that either wasn’t very good or was simply copied from another website.
Affected sites have seen a big drop off – as much as 50% in some cases – of traffic coming from organic (free) search results. This can have devastating impacts for websites dependent on organic traffic to drive leads and revenues.
Likely you would have noticed your site’s drop off in rankings and traffic by now. If so, you can jump ahead and use Google Webmaster to find out which specific pages have been affected.
If you’re at the ‘Dashboard’ for Google Webmaster tools, choose the ‘search engines’ option under ‘traffic sources’ to see a line graph of web traffic. The Panda update occurred around February 22nd so if your site is affected, you will likely see a big drop off in referring traffic after the 22nd of last month.
A big unknown at this point though is whether Google’s Panda update affects all pages on a site or just specific ones. To see a general picture, choose the “top landing pages” option underneath the “Content” section. You can filter the results further to see if Panda affected all pages or just a select few.
Determining this will help identify the specific pages Google considered to be too ‘spammy.’ Once you know this you can then either remove those pages or re-write them with compelling, engaging content. To learn more, read Mark Nunney’s article on Wordtracker to learn more.
Over 12% of websites in the U.S. were affected by this update. As of this writing, this update has only occurred for websites in the United States.