Panda recovery timeframe question
-
Site was hit by Panda Aug. 22nd. Lost 90% of Google traffic. I know
We think we found a reason and made few changes to landing pages structure. Updated sitemaps submitted. When can we expect effect (if any) - few days or after next Panda data refresh? Thank you!P.S. What is also interesting, similar traffic loss from Bing/Yahoo happened at exactly the same date. Does that mean Bing is "stealing" search results from Google when can't provide their own relevant results?
-
Out of total 365 days in a year both things happened at exactly Aug. 22nd. Hardly a coincidence.
Knowing that Bing/Yahoo indexed 100 times less of our pages than Google did it is naturally normal to assume that the reason may be in some out-of-website factors?
-
P.S. What is also interesting, similar traffic loss from Bing/Yahoo happened at exactly the same date. Does that mean Bing is "stealing" search results from Google when can't provide their own relevant results?
This is highly unlikely. We were hit with Panda, but our Yahoo/Bing positions were relatively unchanged. Most likely a coincidence.
-
There was a Panda update on Aug 20, so you definitely could have been affected around that time. Generally, there are Panda updates about once a month (usually every 4-6 weeks). If you've cleaned up well, then when there is another update (perhaps end of September) you should recover.
Be sure to have a good look for duplicate content issues and any pages with duplicate content on it as well.
It's a little bit strange that Bing and Yahoo dropped as well....makes me wonder if there was something other than Panda going on. Check out this article for other reasons for your traffic to drop.
Good luck!
-
Ah, thank you. Of course. Corrected: happened Aug. 22nd.
-
panda was not last week...
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
-
Geo Targeting Content Question
Hi, all First question here so be gentle, please My question is around geo targeted dynamic content; at the moment we run a .com domain with, for example, an article about running headphones and then at the end - taking up about 40% of the content - is a review of some people can buy, with affiliate links. We have a .co.uk site with the same page about running headphones and then 10 headphones for the UK market. Note: rel alternative is used on the pages to point to each other, therefore (hopefully) removing duplicate content issues. This design works well but it involves having to build links to two pages, in the case of this example. What we are thinking of doing is to just use the .com domain and having the product page of the page served dynamically, ie, people in the UK see UK products and people in US see US products. What are people's thoughts on this technique, please? From my understanding, it wouldn't be any problem with Google for cloaking etc because a googlebot and a human from the same country will see the same content. The site is made in Wordpress and has <....html lang="en-US"> (for the .com) in the header. Would this cause problems for the page ranking in the UK etc? The ultimate goal of doing this would be to reduce link building efforts by halving the number of pages which links would have to be built for. I welcome any feedback. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | TheMuffinMan0 -
Sitemap Question - E-commerce - Magento
Good Morning... I have an ecommerce site running on Magento and the sitemap is automatically generated by Magento based on the categories and sub categories and products. I have recently created new categories that i want to replace the old categories, but they are both in the auto-generated sitemap. The old categories are "active" (as in still exist if you know the URL to type) but not visible (you can't find it just by navigating through the site). The new category pages are active and visible... If i want Google to rank one page (the new category page) and not the old page (old category page) should i remove the old page from the sitemap? Would removing the old page that used to target the same keywords improve my rankings on the newer category page? Sitemap currently contains: www.example.com/oldcategorypage www.example.com/newcategorypage Did I confuse you yet? Any help or guidance is appreciated. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Branding in a post EMD/Panda world?
How do non-business websites think about exact match domain names and branding after EMD and Panda? What is an EMD and what is a "brand" when there's no business or commercial brand involved? And does it impact your SEO outcomes? I have a Thailand travel blog which is a personal crusade of mine. I like Thailand, I love travelling there and I like sharing my experiences and knowledge. I don't have a business name, so when I started the blog I just used the best phrase I could find that was available as a domain name - at the time it was "bangkoktravelthailand.com". Late in 2011 I thought this sounded a bit spammy, so I found a new domain name "traveltipsthailand.com" and 301'd across to that. All went well and traffic grew consistently thanks to good writing and some basic SEO, until in late September 2012 the site got 'whacked' by Google - possibly due to EMD, but I think more likely due to Panda and some accidental poor quality backlinks (I posted a reply on another travel site, pointing back to my site, but it ended up becoming 100s of low value backlinks because of the way that site managed it's "latest comments" widget). Since then I've been trying very hard to rebuild my traffic, but it's a tough gig. I am now averaging better than I was in Sept 2012, but nowhere near where I was on trend to be by now. I have a small social media profile (800 Twitter followers plus Google+, Facebook and Pinterest) and I am slowly building some supporting pages on prominent Web 2.0 sites and seeking out quality guest post opportunities. But I still worry about the domain name. Does Google see it as an EMD? I don't use the domain name words at all in my page titles (I use xxx | Thailand travel blog) and I try not to use it in anchors either (I tend to use "Thailand travel blog" or my own name. But I still have a few old backlinks that say "Travel Tips Thailand" and I use that phrase as my brand when talking about the website. So how should sites like mine think about "brand" and "EMD"? Is it an issue or not? Is my domain name holding my site back? I have others I can use like "1travelthailand.com" and "thailand-travel-blog.com" but I'm just sitting on them, not sure where to go. I also have "asiantraveltips.com" and a long term view of rolling this site up with other blogs I'm slowly developing about China, Cambodia and Vietnam. But again, not sure where to go any more. Anyone care to share their thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Do I have panda issues?
Hi , I m looking for suggestions for my website i believe is suffering from the panda updates. Can someone point out what possible issues within the site that might be causing with recent panda updates? here is the link http://goo.gl/St3aP thanks nick.
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Schema Address Question
I have a local business with a contact page that I want to add schema markup to. However, I was wondering if having the address with schema info on the contact page instead of the home page has any adverse effects on the rich snippet showing up in search. There's no logical place to add schema for a local business on the home page, so having it on the contact page—not in the footer or sidebar—is the only option.
Technical SEO | | DLaw0 -
Canonical Question
Our site has thousands of items, however using the old "Widgets" analogy we are unsure on how to implement the canonical tag, and if we need to at all. At the moment our main product pages lists all different "widget" products on one page, however the user can visit other sub pages that filter out the different versions of the product. I.e. glass widgets (20 products)
Technical SEO | | Corpsemerch
glass blue widgets (15 products)
glass red widgets (5 products)
etc.... I.e. plastic widgets (70 products)
plastic blue widgets (50 products)
plastic red widgets (20 products)
etc.... As the sub pages are repeating products from the main widgets page we added the canonical tag on the sub pages to refer to the main widget page. The thinking is that Google wont hit us with a penalty for duplicate content. As such the subpages shouldnt rank very well but the main page should gather any link juice from these subpages? Typically once we added the canonical tag it was coming up to the penguin update, lost a 20%-30% of our traffic and its difficult not to think it was the canonical tag dropping our subpages from the serps. Im tempted to remove the tag and return to how the site used to be repeating products on subpages.. not in a seo way but to help visitors drill down to what they want quickly. Any comments would be welcome..0 -
Site Hosting Question
We are UK based web designers who have recently been asked to build a website for an Australian Charity. Normally we would host the website in the UK with our current hosting company, but as this is an Australian website with an .au domain I was wondering if it would be better to host it in Australia. If it is better to host it in Australia, I would appreciate if someone could give me the name of a reasonably priced hosting company. Thanks Fraser
Technical SEO | | fraserhannah0