Recovered from penguin/panda but which one?

[jay.raman]

So the good news is that for the first time since April 24th, one of our websites is back in the search results as of around December 12 but I am still unsure as whether it was panda or penguin (or both) that was impacting the site?? Note this was not a manual penalty.

I diagnosed it as a penguin issue (drop on April 24th, aggressive on-page optimisation, around 10% of links from spammy directories like addyourfreelinks.com with anchor text built by a questionable agency), but on further advice it was thought that panda was also an issue because it is a hotel microsite so there was duplication with our own brand site and across third party travel sites and there were a number of pages with bare content. I figured it was a good time to clean everything up to address both.

Here is a summary of actions taken:

• submitted disavow file on October 24th with all questionable links including actions taken and comments.
• Since then I have cleaned up some content so it is less aggressively targeting certain keywords.
• Amended several third party listings with duplicate content
• No follow,indexed pages that were directly duplicated with our brand site
• and over the last month have built a few good quality links.
• Cleaned up 404's in webmaster tools over the last week

I have searched to see if there were any algorithm updates around December 12 but cannot find any mentions.

Thoughts?

[danatanseo]

You are welcome Andrew. Yes, Mozcast is pretty nifty!

[jay.raman]

Hi Dana, thanks for posting that link, I never knew that mozcast existed so that is great and certainly shows some heat over that period. Couldn't agree with your comments more and that is why I just began making all the changes at once because I knew that overall it would have a positive impact going forward. Thanks for taking the time to post your response.

[danatanseo]

Mozcast indicates some fairly "hot" activity (or buzz about activity) in Google's algorithm on December 10th. That doesn't mean there was an update and it doesn't mean there wasn't. Most of Google's updates aren't ever announced (They do hundreds every year). It could be that you suffered from one or the other or both, but the short of it is, you are on the right track to simply making a better site, period.

IMHO, it doesn't matter which one it was. What matters is that you are doing all the right things to making your site better. I think that's the true essence of SEO. Knowing what the algo updates are and what they address is interesting, but if you are taking care of some real SEO issues, like structured data, removing duplicate content, writing better content and earning great links and yes, important house-keeping issues like addressing your 404 errors properly, algorithms can come and go and unless you try again to take a backroad and easier path to success, you should come out just fine. #RCS will help make your site algo-proof Glad to hear you are back!

Dana