The Road to a Successful Panda Penalty Recovery: How To Do a Content Audit

THE ROAD TO A SUCCESSFUL PANDA PENALTY RECOVERY How to Conduct A Content Audit Panda is wreaking havoc on websites with low quality content and usability issues. Want to recover your rankings and traffic? FOLLOW THESE STEPS... PLANNING THE JOURNEY When conducting a content audit, there are usually two common factors that come into play. STEP 1 SIZE OF THE SITE CONTENT AT RISK FOR A PENALTY SMALLER SITES Penalties result from content that is: Smaller sites usually need less work like keyword research to recover. Low quality Irrelevant LARGER SITES Thin/Short A Misleading Larger sites may have too many overlapping pages that aren't written well and require hefty pruning. Unfinished D Duplicated Curated with no value added PRIORITIZE WHAT CONTENT TO TACKLE FIRST FOLLOW THE 80/20 RULE 20% o 80% Generate great content for the top 20% best-performing Leave the other 80% to improve and release over the course of 6 months to 1 year. pages ASAP DOES THE SITE HAVE A PENALTY ALREADY? YES NO Take the 80% worst Keep everything indexed and rewrite over time. content out of the index, and release into the index as they are rewritten. SCAN FOR DANGER Choose a web crawler to scan the website. A crawler will sift through all of your data in a comprehensive, thorough manner to map out and analyze your content. STEP 2 POPULAR CRAWLERS ARE: Don't crawl images, CSS, JS, or flash! This will confuse the data. SCREAMING FROG GSITE XENU LINK SLEUTH When the crawler is done, export the list of URLS and data from your crawler to a CSV file. CHOOSE YOUR TOOL Take the data from your crawler and use a content auditing tool, like URL Profiler, to help analyze your URLS. You want a tool that can include data for metrics such as... STEP 3 HTTP://Www. facebook GOOGLE SOCIAL SHARES HTTP STATUS GOOGLE INDEXED COPYSCAPE, PAGESPEED IN GOOGLE ETC CREATE YOUR DASHBOARD Create a Content Audit Dashboard on a new Excel spreadsheet. This will be where most of your research goes. STEP 4 Content Audit Tab Import the content auditing tool output into a tab in your dashboard labeled "Content Audit" Tab In addition to the aggregated data, add columns for Action and Strategy. URL F Page Title B Action G Meta Description C Strategy H Word Count D Page Type I Copyscape Score Source Google MATCH YOUR CONTENT TO YOUR KEYWORDS This is most useful for content gap analysis and PENALTY PREVENTION. If your site is larger or already has content penalty risks, skip to Step 8. STEP 5 You need to match URLS in the content audit with the keywords they are ranking for in Google. You can use query data from Google Webmaster Tools. HOW TO IMPORT TOP QUERIES FROM GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS Webmaster Tools - Search Traffic Search Queries Log in From Search Traffic, go Log in to Google Webmaster Tools from Chrome. to Search Queries. Search Queries Make sure the view is set to “Top Queries" Top Queries Top Pages Feb 3, 2014 ▼ to Dec 5, 2014 ▼ Download this table Show 25 rows v Download the table as a Adjust the date range to see as far back as possible, and view the maximum amount of rows. You can adjust the url so it ends & grid.s=######, with the number the maximum rows of data available. CSV file. Import the CSV file into a “GWT Top Queries" tab in your Content Auditing Dashboard. RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH STEP 6 USE WHATEVER METHODS YOU LIKE FOR GATHERING A LIST OF KEYWORDS, SUCH AS: LATERAL AUDIENCE SEMRUSH GOOGLE RESEARCH ANALYTICS WHEN YOUR LIST IS COMPILED... M Remove irrelevant keywords Run the rest through a tool that collects search volume and competition data, such as SWISSMADEMARKETING Go gle GOOGLE ADWORDS KEYWORD PLANNER Export data from the tool as CSV, and import into your dashboard in a "Adwords/Keyword Data" tab. BRING YOUR DATA TOGETHER STEP 7 CREATE A NEW "KEYWORD RESEARCH" TAB... Keyword URL Position Search Volume CPR CTR With this data you can create a Keyword Matrix (KWM) to improve the copy of a given page based upon important keywords. CREATE YOUR CONTENT AUDIT PLAN This process will be different for every site! You need decide what you need to do for each site-or if you should do anything at all! STEP 8 AS A GENERAL GUIDELINE... REWRITE / IMPROVE REMOVE CONSOLIDATE important pages with good traffic and social/link any internally-duplicated content, or out-of-date low-quality, irrelevant, or plagiarized content, and pages with a high Copyscape Risk score. metrics. content which can be made Evergreen. BIG SITES, BIG CUTS To save time and ROI, large sites should use a hatchet, not a scalpel. Use these "largescale" strategies to improve your audit efficiency: STEP 9 SEND TO TECHNICAL AUDIT Sometime the issue ISN'T with the content, such as: Parameterbased URLS Internal (2 3 Blog tag pages that shouldn't be indexed search results BLANKET REWRITES For example, in cases such as product pages, duplicate manufacturer descriptions can be refreshed with 23 unique sentences. REMOVE For out-of-date pages and posts, it's good to update where you can, but if the metrics are low, it might be better to remove than rewrite. FOCUS ON THE FUTURE Use your keyword research to inform your focus in generating new content to fill in content gaps. STEP 10 Content Level KEYWORD KEYWORD Create buckets for keywords or landing pages that can help reframe the taxonomy and improve the success of certain pages. Add a "Content Level" column to the Dashboard that identifies the amount of work the content would need to compete in it's keyword space. • STEP 11 CONGRATULATIONS! YOU'VE MADE IT! You know how have the knowledge to conduct a full Panda Penalty content audit. REMEMBER... Be sure to document Don't be afraid to Outline a strategy and all of your data and findings. make the "hatchet" recommendations for cuts! future actions. YOU'RE NOW READY TO EXECUTE THE STEPS TO IMPROVED RANKINGS AND TRAFFIC! http://moz.com | http://uk.queryclick.com/ | http://www.lunametrics.com |http://www.quicksprout.com TollFreeForwarding.co Gryffin BUSINESS WITHOUT BORDERS media. Пи