Panda will Play a Roll in 2012
Google announced in early December via Twitter that Panda Updates will resume in 2012. Panda has released six updates since Google first introduced it in February 2011. With the next update being released sometime in January 2012 you should giving some attention to the following three areas when performing regular maintenance on a Web site to ensure the Web site ranks well on Google.
Keyword Density Panda has been coming down heavy on duplicate content, poorly constructed language, and intense keyword density to penalize sites that use too many keywords to try to increase their site rankings. Maintaining a keyword density ratio of 5% to 8% is a safe range to avoid being considered spam by Google or your users. Remember that creating original, unique, quality content is the most important.
Relevancy of Keywords Keep an eye on the relevancy of your keywords and phrases. Sharing keywords and phrases with sites that tend to abuse those words and phrases for rank can be detrimental to your site. Watch the domain authority score for those keywords and phrases, and do a search to see what kind of sites are using them along side you.
Fix Broken Links Check all links and make sure that the URLs still exist. If you find some that are no longer working, fix them or remove the links so that Google will not think that you are intentionally trying to abuse the search algorithm. Broken links give Google the impression you're just a link farm.
And of course, to get the direct recommendation from Casey Markee (our in-house Penalty Expert) read his featured piece here:
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