If your website hasn’t been attracting the same amount of visitors it once did, it might pay to examine your content. Changes made by Google some months ago were aimed at better detecting low quality, copied or rewritten content. The markers of low quality content are many but here are two practices that are likely to see your site penalised and your sales or Adsense revenue drop:

• Rewritten content: if you (or your content writers) have rewritten someone else’s content and placed it on your site, or you have multiple sites with rewritten versions of your own content, the Google Panda algorithm may have detected it.
• Poor English: those cheap articles you bought from content writers in India for $2 each might be the problem. Google now looks at the quality of the language and the grammar. And of course, when you buy cheap articles you also run the risk that they have been rewritten. Use good content writers. 

We’ve been seeing the results of the Google algorithm changes that relate to content for some weeks now – we’re getting requests to replace shoddy content. Site owners with low quality content are losing visitors and income as a result of their sites dropping to somewhere past nowhere in the organic listings.

While many have realised that their content is the problem, others are no doubt still scratching their heads. And there are some who still aren’t getting it – we’ve been asked more than once if we can ‘spin’ the offending content. D’oh! That’s what got you into trouble in the first place!

What should you do if your site has been penalised? Remove the offending content and replace it with high quality, useful, original material. Yes, if you’re used to paying $2 an article and if you have a hundred pages to replace, it’s definitely going to hurt.

Can you afford to replace your content? If your site was generating an income a better question would be – can you afford not to?