Need some urgent Panda advice. Open discussion about recovering from the Panda algorithm.
-
I have a site that has been affected by Panda, and I think I have finally found the problem.
When I created this site in the year 2006, I bought content without checking it. Recently, when I went through the site I found out that this content had many duplicates around the web. Not 100% exact, but close to.
The first thing I did is ask my best writer to rewrite these topics, as they are a must on my site. This is a very experienced writer, and she will make the categories and subpages outstanding.
Second thing I did was putting a NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta in place for the pages I determined being bad. They haven't been de-indexed yet.
Another thing I recently did is separate other languages and move these over to other domains (with 301's redirecting the old locations to the new.) This means that the site now has a /en/ directory in the URL which is no longer used.
With this in mind I was thinking to relocate the NEW content, and 301 the old (to preserve the juice for a while.) For example:
http://www.mysite.com/en/this-is-a-pandalized-page/
301 to
http://www.mysite.com/this-is-the-rewritten-page/
The benefits of doing this are:
-
decreasing the amounts of directories in the URL
-
getting rid of pages that are possibly causing trouble
-
getting fresh pages added to the site
Now, the advice I am looking for is basically this: Do you agree with the above? Or don't you agree? If you don't, please be so kind to include a reason with your answer. If you do, and have any additional information, or would like to discuss, please go ahead
Thanks,
Giorgio
PS: Is it proven that Panda is now a running update? Or is it still periodically executed?
-
-
The reason I know for a fact its Panda, is that the site lost its rankings (and thus about 60% of its traffic) end of February 2011.
Since then I managed to get slightly better rankings by adding loads of content and rewriting some categories (with thin pages, and not too many sub pages) from the bottom up, however, I never realized I had the content I currently located, which is terrible in terms of quality, and has duplicates all over the web. Like I said, this content dates back to 2006 when I didn't have a clue about SEO.
It's not that the content will be rewritten, based on what's there. I just told my writer to write about topic X and topic Y and make it very informative, so I will go from bad to really good pages.
Moving the new pages to new locations and getting rid of the others "infected" pages seems the best in my opinion, despite the age of these pages and the occasional link to them.
-
Panda still runs in installments, not continually. Rewriting content sounds like a massive task, hope it's worth it (e.g. is it better to write new stuff instead?). Have you got any pagination present on the site or indexable search results? We are under assumption here that you are certain that the problem is caused by Panda filter and not other factor and that your page layout and ads are not the cause of the drop or that the problem is not link related. I see no problem with 301 of pages with duplicate content to a new better content page. Sounds like something users might appreciate as well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How To Rank Our Featured Snippet - What Changes Are Needed On Our Page?
I've read a number of articles that have been helpful, but most of them are specifically still just trying to prove the value of the snippets and more recently show you how to find what search terms to rank for. What I'm really struggling with is exactly 'How do we rank for them, when we already have the #1 position and the featured snippet is going to another site'? Let me break this down a bit more: 1. We are measuring the 'SERP Features' within Moz Pro Tools and I've identified ~300 pages where there is a 'Featured Snippet' but I don't have the feature. 2. In a good portion of these, I'm outranking the site that has the 'Featured Snippet'. So I can compare my site, side by side to the 'Featured Snippet'. Now that I have the question, my ranking and the competition all in front of me. What changes are recommended I implement on our page? Is there a recommended process to follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabfrug0 -
I need to know if the clicks on GSC are unique? Thanks for the answers
I need to know if clicks on GSC are unique or not? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Binary_SEO0 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0 -
.htaccess question/opinion/advice needed
Hello, I am trying to achieve 3 different things on my .htaccess I just want to make sure I am doing it the right or best way because I don't have much experience working on this kind of files. I am trying to: a) Redirect www.mysite.com/index.html to www.mysite.com so I don't get a duplicate content/tag error. b) Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com c) Get rid of the file extensions; www.mysite.com/stuff.html to www.mysite.com/stuff This is the code that I'm currently using and it seems to work fine, however I would like someone with experience to take a look so I can avoid internal server errors and other kinds of issues. I grabbed each piece of code from different posts and tutorials. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan
RewriteEngine on Index Rewrite RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/$1/ [R=301,L] RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
Rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.com [nc]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [r=301,nc] Thanks a lot!0 -
Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Getting Started with Link-Building (Advice, Please)
Hi forum, my company has done almost ZERO link building, and most of the traffic we receive to our site is for our branded search terms (people searching for our company name). Our content and on-page SEO is pretty solid, but how would you suggest getting started in link building? We've dabbled in comment marketing, but almost all of these were unfollowed links. We already do PR and submit it to prweb.com. We have submitted to quite a few online directories and are currently working our way through relevant directories provided by SEOMoz. We do not want to pay for links, and we want to do all of this in house. We are committed to putting the time in to get high quality links by hand. Does anyone have any advice? A "Beginner's Guide to Link-Building" would be excellent. The specific site we are working on is http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html if that is of any use. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Recovery Steps For Panda 3.5 (Rel. Apr. 19, 2012)?
I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used - especially on sites that are not large scale ecommerce sites. Blog site hit by Panda 3.5. Blog has approximately 250 posts. Some of the posts are the most thorough on the subject and regained traffic despite a Penguin mauling a few days after the Panda attack. (The site has probably regained 80% of the traffic it lost since Penguin hit without any link removal or link building, and minimal new content.) Bounce rate is 80% and average time on page is 2:00 min. (Even my most productive pages tend to have very high bounce rates BUT those pages maintain time on page in the 4 to 12 minute range.) The Panda discussions I've read on these boards seem to focus on e-commerce sites with extremely thin content. I assume that Google views much of my content as "thin" too. But, my site seems to need a pruning instead of just combiining the blue model, white model, red model, and white model all on one page like most of the ecommerce sites we've discussed. So, I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used to decide whether to combine a page, prune a page, etc. After I combine any series articles to one long post (driving the time on page to nice levels), I plan to prune the remaining pages that have poor time on page and/or bounce rates. Regardless of the analytics, I plan to keep the "thin" pages that are essential for readers to understand the subject matter of the blog. (I'll work on flushing out the content or producing videos for those pages.) How deep should I prune on the first cut? 5% ? 10% ? Even more ? Should I focus on the pages with the worst bounce rates, the worst time on page, or try some of both? If I post unique and informative video content (hosted on site using Wistia), what I should I expect for a range of the decrease in bounce rate ? Thanks for reading this long post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustDucky0 -
What has this subdomain done to recover from Panda?
I found that doctor.webmd.com was affected by Google Panda, and then recovered (if you look at traffic on compete.com). What do you think they did to recover?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0