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
-
Adult Toys Sites
Does anyone know of any changes SEOwise when running an adult toy site versus a normal eCommerce site? Is there any tips or suggestions that are worth knowing to achieve rankings faster? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Can You Help Confirming That 1stWebDesigner Was hit by Panda 4.0 and PayDay Loans 2.0,3.0?
Hello, really hoped for your feedback here. So my site is http://www.1stwebdesigner.com I just used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - and came to realization, that indeed we might have been hit by famous Panda 4.0 update. Here is screenshot from Barracuda tool - https://www.evernote.com/l/AELGaZ6nyxBE1aK7oQJVHBPKJuwjUh5JWk8 and in attachment there is Google Analytics screenshot for that time - especially May, 2014. Can you please help me confirm that we indeed have been hit with the Penalty? It has been 1.5 years already and since then, the traffic never has grown more. Before May, 2014 our site received 1.5 million pageviews/mo, after it..until this moment traffic has never been more than 600,000 pageviews/mo. Now if I look back even more with Barracuda tool, I can see it was also affected by Top Heavy 1.0 update,Thu Jan 19 2012. Even back then before all these updates site grew to 2.5 million pageviews/mo. What is the painful part I always focused on time-consuming link building. Submitting links to design news sites, leaving quality comments under related articles and always have written unique quality content on site for years. Can you tell based on screenshots and confirm we indeed have penalty. And maybe suggest what are the actions to take now? I have ahrefs pro subscription and started using Disavow tool to prepare for submission to Google. Would love to hear feedback on this..it has been painful throughout years. Update: here is one more screenshot from Barracuda looking from 2012 year to traffic - https://www.evernote.com/l/AEIX6iP4USBGtbyRLZ1oTmcACgBtXHBP2rw SpRPIyY
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | researchninja0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Reindexing a site with www.
We have a site that has a mirror - i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com - there is not redirect both url's work and show pages so basically a site with 2 sets of URLs for each page. We have changed it so the domain.com and all assorted pages 301 redirect to the right URL with www. i.e. domain.com/about 301's to www.domain.com/about In the search engines the domain.com is the site indexed and the only www. page indexed is the homepage. I checked in the robots.txt file and nothing blocking the search engines from indexing both the www. and non www. versions of the site which makes me wonder why did only one version get indexed and how did the clients avoid a duplicate content issue? Secondly is it best to get the search engines to unidex domain.com and resubmit www.domain.com for the full site? We are definately staying with the www.domain.com NOT domain.com so need to find the best way to get the site indexed with www. and remove the non www. Hope that makes sense and look forward to everyone's input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site. Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect. Thanks --
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Lots of incorrect urls indexed - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site
Hi, Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Basically, our rankings and traffic etc have been dropping massively recently google sent us a message stating " Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site". This first highligted us to the problem that for some reason our eCommerce site has recently generated loads (potentially thousands) of rubbish urls hencing giving us duplication everywhere which google is obviously penalizing us with in the terms of rankings dropping etc etc. Our developer is trying to find the route cause of this but my concern is, How do we get rid of all these bogus urls ?. If we use GWT to remove urls it's going to take years. We have just amended our Robot txt file to exclude them going forward but they have already been indexed so I need to know do we put a redirect 301 on them and also a HTTP Code 404 to tell google they don't exist ? Do we also put a No Index on the pages or what . what is the best solution .? A couple of example of our problems are here : In Google type - site:bestathire.co.uk inurl:"br" You will see 107 results. This is one of many lot we need to get rid of. Also - site:bestathire.co.uk intitle:"All items from this hire company" Shows 25,300 indexed pages we need to get rid of Another thing to help tidy this mess up going forward is to improve on our pagination work. Our Site uses Rel=Next and Rel=Prev but no concanical. As a belt and braces approach, should we also put concanical tags on our category pages whereby there are more than 1 page. I was thinking of doing it on the Page 1 of our most important pages or the View all or both ?. Whats' the general consenus ? Any advice on both points greatly appreciated? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Please review my site
Hi I hope that all is going well in Seattle! I just make this site and I would like to be judged! site is http://mangakaotaku.com I am open for recommendations and review. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0