Whether our shared articles caused Panda hit to our high quality site
-
Hello,
We are a quality site hit by Panda
Our article collection:
http://www.nlpca(dot)com/DCweb/NLP_Articles.html
is partially articles written by the site owners and partially articles that are elsewhere on them web.
We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.
Could this be why we were hit by Panda? And if so, what do we do? We've dropped way down in rank but have worked our way half-way back up.
Two of our main keywords are:
NLP
NLP Training
Thanks!
-
You have some valid points to consider... things seem to be improving and the articles that you might cut do pull in some traffic.
I can't tell you how to make your decision but here is how I made mine..
I had hundreds of republished articles but a lot more that I had written myself. Deleting lots of republished articles would cut my traffic and cut my income. Noindexing them would cut my traffic and cut my income. However, although those were serious losses they were small in comparison to other content on my site. So, knowing that google does not like duplicate content I got rid of them. There is still lots of great content on my site, visitors still find stuff to read, I know which of the things that I cut I should author a customized version for my own site.
The upside.... My site is more compact but still has thousands of content pages and the content that remains should be a lot stronger. After making the cuts my rankings, income and traffic increased. Not quite to previous levels but back to nice numbers.
I have reduced risk and am pleased with that. Everything that I cut was redirected to similar content. The most valuable of what was cut will be replaced with custom content with 301 redirects from the old content.
============================
How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.
What from this is unique? Definitely keep that. Keep what is not struggling in Google. Keep what is essential to your site but replace with better that you create yourself.
Do you see further risk in future panda updates?
Yep... that's why I cut off my foot.
My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles,
YES... In the past I wanted all of my content to be anonymously written. I have changed my mind on that and used rel=author on the best stuff.
no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles.
heh.... Here I would be chopping off two of those sites and merging them into one. I would have done that years ago before panda was ever heard of.
I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.
I agree.
-
Hi EGOL,
We are getting a lot of traffic off of some of these articles, so the site owners are not sure they want to no-index them just in case that's not causing the problem. Our rankings have come up from 40 to 26 on our main term, and similar for other terms, even though we still have duplicate content. We were originally at 19 before a big drop in November/December
How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.
What would you suggest I let the owner's know? Do you see further risk in future panda updates?
My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles, no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles. I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.
However, it's not my decision, your thoughts?
-
I don't know. Everything that I have done is an experiment.
If you are really scared, delete... if you have some tolerance for uncertainty then play around with noindex or canonical. I deleted from a really important site.... used canonical where I the ranking loss was small and the risk was not jugular.
-
Hi EGOL,
When is no-indexing enough and when would you suggest deletion?
-
Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Or is some deletion necessary?
On one of my sites I deleted a lot and noindexed followed everything else that was a duplicate. We saw rankings recover in about a month.
On another site i had a lot of .pdf documents that were used to control printing of graphics. We used rel=canonical on them. That works very very slowly to remove them from the index. We are seeing slow recovery on that site.
if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?
If the article belongs to someone else then I would noindex or delete. (Just saying what I would do it if was on my site). If it was my content I would set up a google + profile and use rel=author and rel=me to attribute them to a verified author.
-
Perhaps you could add a link to the original source on some of these where you have the permission. This should send a signal to google that you are showing it on your site for the convenience of users, but it is from a different source.
-
Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Is that enough to save our arse? Or is some deletion necessary?
I assume if we are not first in google for the content and title of an article, it is a potential duplicate content problem, correct? For example, if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?
Any advice is appreciated. You're one of the best EGOL.
-
We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.
Google probably does not know and certainly does not care. If you have duplicate content on your site you are a potential target.
What type of link-building have you been doing? You might have been hit by the overoptimization penalty.
I was republishing some third-party content on a couple of my sites. I deleted most of it and no indexed the rest. Cut off your foot to save your arse.
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
-
Quick SEO Audit of my site.
Hello, I hope you are doing great. I am working on a website that is related to flea collars for cats and dogs. And I want you to make a quick audit of the site where am I lacking. It could be great if you can help ASAP. You can view my site here :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Request4peace0 -
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Is it Wortwhile to have a HTML site map for a Large Site
We are a large, enterprise site with many pages (some on our CMS and some old pages that exist outside our CMS). Every month we submit various an XML site map. Some pages on our site can no longer be found via following links from one page to another (orphan pages). Some of those pages are important and some not. Is it worth our while to create a HTML site map? Does any one have any recent stats or blog posts to share, showing how a HTML site map may have benefited a large site. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
2013 Panda Update Question
Hi everyone, I'm new here 🙂 So far I've had wonderful success seo wise and none of the updates (Penguin nor Panda) affected any sites, until this one. For example, one site has 7 keywords I'm optimizing for. Out of those 7, all but 2 (and variations of the 2 - one word vs long-tail) completely tanked. These keywords were all on page 2/3. One of the two survivors never budged from page 2 (it's a brand keyword so I was sooo happy to finally get it to page 2) Now when I check rankings, the other terms show up in the 200-400 spots, but NOT for the URL I was optimizing for (category page) but instead for random products in the category. The only thing I've done differently with the 2 keywords that are still doing well, was focus - we did more link-building for those, but not an extreme amount. Never over-optimize. My question is, how did 2 survive and 5 are still floating up and down. Last night I saw one go up 122 spots, now today down 14. I'm really struggling with this. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Freelancer130 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is site:domain.com + keyword a good indicator of the quality of a page?
Are the results provided by site:domain.com + keyword a good indicator of the quality of certain pages? For example, should the first result be more relevant, have a higher number of links, etc than the second result?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Which link url placement to buy - High PR vs. High PA?
I'm about to buy one directory link (just the one!) but can't decide which URL to place my link on in that directory because of the varying metrics - which is better of the below (bearing in mind my own site is still a PR0 sitewide)? www.exampledirectory.com/categoryA/subtategory1/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald
Metrics: 21 linking domains, PA 44, DA 59, PR0 www.exampledirectory.com/categoryA/
Metrics:1 linking domain, PA 35, DA 59, PR5 I know PR is no longer relevant and usually ignore this metric (except for possible penalties) and just focus on Seomoz toolbar metrics, but as my own site itself is PA:37 and DA:28 homepage but PR0 completely sitewide (over 6 months old but relatively new site), I thought this might help to balance things. Thanks for your advice.0 -
Panda Update - Challenge!
I met with a new client last week. They were very negatively impacted by the Panda update. Initially I thought the reason was pretty straight-forward and had to do with duplicate content. After my meeting with the developer, I'm stumped and I'd appreciate any ideas. Here are a few details to give you some background. The site is a very nice looking (2.0) website with good content. Basically they sell fonts. That's why I thought there could be some duplicate content issues. The developer assured me that the product detail pages are unique and he has the rel=canonical tag properly in place. I don't see any issues with the code, the content is good (not shallow), there's no advertising on the site, XML sitemap is up to date, Google webmaster indicates that the site is getting crawled with no issues. The only thing I can come up with is that it is either: Something off-page related to links or Related to the font descriptions - maybe they are getting copied and pasted from other sites...and they don't look like unique content to Google. If anyone has ideas or would like more info to help please send me a message. I greatly appreciate any feedback. Thank you, friends! LHC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhc670