The Panda update has everyone scratching their heads regarding proper SEO practices. We all want to know what works now. It’s not based on trying to simply find a way to beat the system, but legitimate questions on what all the changes mean for SEO and the new practices for the best web marketing.

There’s been a major emphasis on indexing in the past and to have URLs ranked appropriately they had to be in an index, at least after being crawled. And for most of us it means that we have been monitoring sites and indexing with a focus on the major search engines, and of course Google has remained at the top of our concerns. If a site was not indexed deeply enough we had to perform all these tactics to help move it up in the rankings; and sites that were well indexed had to be carefully watched to make sure that the ranking was maintained.

Post Panda indexing is not quite as viable, but that’s because Google acts like it wants everything in its index. So all that indexing means now is that Google has the URL in the databases. Panda really hasn’t had as much of an impact on indexing or crawling, as much as it has affected rankings. In other words sites can receive less traffic even though the pages are indexed but some of the individual pages do not rank as high as they did before Panda.

So what does this mean for SEO? Pretty much what worked before, still works but with one major change. Instead of trying to get as many URLs as possible indexed the emphasis is now to get the highest quality and the most important URL’s to be indexed. To achieve this you need to look at the URLs and choose which are canonical and which ones have the strongest signals. For instance, robot exclusion, rel canonical, SML sitemaps and the internal link profile. Then make sure that your most valuable URLs are well optimized and indexed.

Any URLs that are low valued, duplicate or irrelevant URLs should be removed from the index. Rather spend your time building your internal links to canonical URLs from power pages. As far as external links, build them through social media connections.

Removing low quality or duplicate content URLs from indexes may possibly be the most important practice. A site that has high quality content along with too much thin content could see a traffic decrease post Panda.

As far as Panda is concerned the best SEO practices are concerned with putting forth the highest quality information and completely removing low quality pages from indexes. This just means that it is more difficult to compete without good quality content. This means that SEO is a little more difficult to achieve.