15 Must Have WordPress Plugins To Recover From Google Panda Effect

Today I will be going to discuss the main pillar of Google SEO which is Google’s Panda update.It was my horrible experience with Google Panda update.My first decision was to leave blogging as i was not getting good traffic but later on I decided to move on and lets face this hurdle.This update changed all the SEO strategies which big SEO companies used to rank higher in search engines,Earlier for them SEO was a child’s play but now it’s not. So What is This Google Panda Effect ? Google in order to maintain its search result’s quality and user experience,keep updating its algorithm.Google Panda is a great modification in the algorithm to flush out spammers from its search results and give priority to quality content.It is a domain level penalty that means because of few low quality posts,Whole domain will get penalized. Your site could be affected by this Panda Update if your site have :

• Copied or duplicate content
• Poor grammar mistakes or misspelled words
• Thin or outdated content which makes no sense to readers
• Automatically generated content or content farms
• Irrelevant SEO parameters
• Over Optimization (I was very much confused about this point when i read an article about this at Searchengineland but later on I came to know by rereading a post at Shoutmeloud that over optimization simply means Blackhat SEO 🙁 My site also got affected by this pathetically.

Lets see what advice Matt Cutts give to overcome this Panda Effect

1. Optimize your website for speed,Make it fast user-friendly and easy to navigate. A faster loading site is always rewarded by Google for page ranking.
2. Keeping good internal linking from relevant keywords.
3. Educate management to get buy in for investment in SEO best practices for best ROI.
4. Social media marketing. Spread content across Twitter and many other social bookmarking sites to create more inbound links. Google is tracking social media links as a signal for search engine page ranking (SERP).

Here is what i think my site got affected for :

• Doing Over Optimization ( Blackhat SEO ),Using Blackhat SEO strategies surely can be primary reason for this.
• 404 errors,Since i removed all the low quality content without any Permalink redirection therefore it led to large number of 404 errors thus increase in bounce rate.
• Weak internal linking,I was not using Yet Another Related Post and recent article at that time nor I did manual interlinking between posts.
• I was not using Social Media and Bookmarking sites effectively.
• Some of my posts were having grammar errors.
• I was not writing consistently.

Here are some plugins i used to overcome this issue and the best thing about them are that they are free :

1. Meta Robots WordPress plugin : This plugin is very useful in adding relevant meta tags to your pages and also allow to noindex low quality content with links followed by the search engine on that page. Click to download Robots Meta plugin 

2. Admin Word countColumn : This plugin checks for word count of each post and then display it in admin’ post manager.Less word count also plays vital role in spoiling your blog’s ranking in search engine as that post will be taken as not well researched post. Click here to download Admin Word Count Column
3. SEO search terms tagging 2 : This is very powerful plugin for on page SEO it automatically tags the search terms for which your page got hits.In short it automatically converts search terms into post tags.This plugin can help you to know relevancy of keywords of your posts but according to Panda Update tagging search engine terms to post can be taken as over optimization and thus it can harm you instead of benefit So use it just for knowing the low quality content and then fixing that. Click here to download search terms tagging 2
4. Improve my load times WordPress plugin : This plugin compresses the webpage and thus page loads faster.You can save nearly 50-80% of bandwidth by using just this plugin. Click here to download Improve my load times WordPress plugin
5. Pushpress also known as PubSubHubbub WordPress plugin : Alternative to Pingshot,There is a service called pingshot in feedburner.This is similar to that and helps in getting your blog indexed very fast as soon as you hit publish button.Thus it can beat content scrapers. Click here to download Pushpress WordPress plugin
6. Hyper-cache or WP Super-cache plugin : These plugins help in serving your webpages much faster.Hyper Cache is compatible with most of web hosting but super cache works better than hypercache.So if WP Super Cache does not work for you go for Hyper cache. Click here to download Hypercache Click here to download Supercache
7. Dropbox CDN : Upload your theme files in your Dropbox account public folder and then use this plugin.You can maximum use 10gb of bandwidth per day or roughly 25k pageviews per day.If your blog have greater traffic than that then use paid services like Maxcdn.Some bloggers have issues regarding Dropbox cdn they can use Cloudfare instead,I will write tutorial on that too very soon. Click here to download Dropbox CDN
8. SEO Friendly Images : This plugin helps in optimizing images by updating alt text and title of images.Images can also help in driving traffic so don’t optimize only text but also optimize images. Click here to download SEO friendly images
9. Broken Link checker: This plugin helped me a lot as i deleted all low quality posts but still there were many internal links which i manually made were there so i used this plugin to check for all broken links causing 404 errors and then i fixed those links.404 errors effects your blog pathetically that’s why its very important to fix the broken links. Click here to download Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin
10. SEO Smart Links : This plugin automatically finds phrases or keywords and link them to post tags or related articles.It helps a lot to keep strong internal linking thus reduces bounce rate. Click here to download SEO Smart Links WordPress Plugin
11. YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) : This plugin automatically add links to older related posts and helps in making internal linking strong also you will get more pageviews.This also helps in pinging your old related articles to Googlebot. Click here to download YARPP WordPress plugin
12. Redirection Plugin : A great solution to 404 errors broken links,This WordPress plugin creates redirection from any internal or external broken link  to any desired target URL.It can forward all your traffic to right place as you don’t have to worry about post links. Click here to download WordPress Redirection plugin
13. SEO No Duplicate : This plugin redirects your post’s canonical to the Permalink thus helping you manage the duplicate content.Search Engines don’t like duplicate content so this plugin is to get rid of duplicate content. Click here to download SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin download
14. Google XML Sitemaps : Oh i forgot the very basic yet powerful plugin.As the name itself clearly give you idea that it makes XML sitemap of your blog and then ping it to search engines like Google,Bing and Ask.I will also recommend sitemap for images so that images from your blog gets indexed in image search by Google. Click here to download Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin Click here to download Google XML Sitemaps for Images WordPress plugin
15. WordPress SEO by Yoast : Last but not least very effective SEO plugin covers all the major SEO elements like permalink,titles,meta description and keywords.This is one of best free seo plugin available on WordPress repository. Click here to download WordPress SEO by Yoast WordPress plugin

For grammar mistakes spell check,proof reading is included in Jetpack so i did not mentioned it separately. Using all these plugins can improve your blog’s traffic for sure but I want to remind you that no one till now has recovered 100% from this Panda Effect.When i used all these plugins i could see a measurable increase in Pageviews and time spent by users also Bounce rate decreased which was earlier kept on increasing. Tell us which plugins do you use ? must have seo wordpress plugins,seo plugins wordpress,wordpress seo plugins,google panda recovery,plugins google panda,google panda plugins wordpress