Hit with Panda, but still confused

[cbielich]

Back on March 24th I was hit with Panda. Pretty much all but my main keywords were hit and I was wiped off the board. Luckily I kept my rank with my main keyword which was part of my URL. I have been since trying to figure out what Google thought was spammy with my site. I made changes, but nothing changed except my main keyword. I have been confused as to why I still ranked well with my main keyword, but nothing else. I have read from several posts of others complaining about the same issue. Seeing some keyword rankings go down, but not all. I also have read that if Google thinks even one page is spammy it might effect my whole site.

Today I found a couple pages that might have been contributing to the low rankings. I am a scrabble based site and I had several pages that listed many words related to things like 2 letter words, 3 letter words, words that end and start with. These pages would contain from hundreds to over a thousand words and I was linking them all to my dictionary look up portion of my site. I have some other sites that do the same thing but not nearly as much as my main site and they were still doing just fine. I had over 3500 pages giving me warnings in my Pro Account about to many links on a page, but I have been ignoring it because I felt I was helping my users by giving them a less step in having to type the word to search. I have removed all these links except I found a couple pages that were still doing it. I just removed them so hopefully that helps this time.

My question is do I have to wait till the next panda refresh or just until the next time Google crawls my site to see the changes.

UPDATE: it is not 1.24.2013

It's been a while since I asked this question and just wanted to fill in on the updates and things I have done since then to maybe give some hope to all you penguinizers. My site https://www.wordgamedictionary.com/ has changed quite a bit since I posted this original question. I was hit on April 24th with Penguin and just was racking my brain trying to figure out what I did to get there. Here is some advice I have learned since then.

1. Be Patient - Its going to be a long road to recover from it (I am still recovering almost 1 year later, but I am recovering)
2. Don't Freak Out - Yeah it sucks when you income drops 50% in a matter of overnight, but you can change that.
3. Check your back links (Yes this is beating a dead horse with a stick, but it's true)
4. On page anchor link text - Are they over miss used keywords? Change that. Make it look natural
5. For goodness sake! check for spelling errors
6. ADD FRESH CONTENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I would say about something new at least once a week. 3 to 4 is good (unless you are Q and A then you will have much more). Think to yourself "What would keep me coming back to my site?" If you don't have it, they add it
7. Back links are not going to come to you unless you are creative. Sitting there thinking they are going to fall on your lap is dreaming.
8. Back linking is nessary to stay ontop, but you can get them naturally. Experiment a ton and take risks. The more risks you take, the better chance you will eventually succeed.

Today I have almost fully recovered from Penguin, but what is awesome is that by taking the natural and pro active method to SEO I have actually increased my overall traffic to my site by double since April 24th. I am still recovering from the original keywords that I was hit at, but whats awesome is that I have gained so much traffic from other keywords that I ended up doubling my traffic.

The next time you think you know everything there is about SEO, slap yourself...because you don't

Some nice Link building articles I have found to be good

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

http://www.slideshare.net/RossHudgens/link-building-strategies-2013-edition-15477553

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/advanced-link-building-strategies/53439/

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Lilac,

This is an older thread, and it's probably best to start a new question on this topic rather than add to this older question. Thanks!

[KarenJames]

Hi all

I have been reading this with great interest. I have a client who has suddenly lost ranking for 2 keyword terms why others have remained solid. There are no anchor text links to this keyword. We only conducted on page work for them. There are only 7 linking root domains. The only thing that looks odd is multiple image links from a blog sub domain. Is this what you refer to as 'sitewide blogroll?  Any help greatly appreciated. Karen

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks for updating this question!

[MarieHaynes]

Ah, ok, so April 24th was the date of the first Penguin hit.  Penguin is less about on page quality and more about backlink quality.

Penguin usually affects just certain keywords though and not your whole site.  Have a look at your backlink profile ranked by anchor text:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.freescrabbledictionary.com

I didn't delve into it deeply, but I notice that you've got 1018 links containing the word "scrabble dictionary" from just 12 sites.  Do you have a sitewide blogroll somewhere? That can definitely trigger Penguin.

Unfortunately if this is a Penguin hit you've got an uphill battle.  A quick look at your site shows lots of anchor texted comment spam.  For any of those that are followed links you've got to get them removed.

We think the key to escaping Penguin is to clear up your backlinks ratio - so basically to get keyword anchor text changed to your url, removed or nofollowed.

Unfortunately, you can't recover from Penguin until there is a Penguin refresh and we've been waiting since the end of May for one!

Also look and see if you have warnings in your webmaster tools as this could be a factor.  As your drop coincides with Penguin, it's likely Penguin, but you never know.

I found the canonical issue by looking at your source code.

[cbielich]

I'm so sorry, didn't realize I said March. It was April 24th my rankings tanked. Also where did u see the canonical solver?

[MarieHaynes]

I've got a few thoughts for you Cesar.

Are you sure that your traffic drop happened around March 24?  There was no known Panda refresh on that date.  The closest dates were February 23 and April 11.  If your drop happened March 24 then this is not Panda.

And it doesn't fit with Penguin either as Penguin didn't happen till April 24th.

Do you have any warnings in your webmaster tools?  And if so, do the warnings have a yellow caution symbol next to them?

If not, if you had a drastic traffic drop March 24 you've got to look for other reasons such as a hosting problem, accidental noindexing, malware, canonical issues etc.

I just had a quick look at your site and you've got something unusual going on with your rel canonical.  It points to www.yourdomain/solver, yet that page is not in the google index.  Is there a reason you did this?  I'm wondering if it would help to point the canonical on your home page simply to your home page.

[MarieHaynes]

If this is a Panda hit it's less likely to be about links and more likely to be about on site quality.

Plus, there's no point filing a reconsideration request if you've been hit with an algorithmic change.  The reconsideration requests are for manual warnings in your webmaster tools.

[SanketPatel]

Hi Cesar,

I have read your whole post and i came to conclusion is that you  are using only one keyword for link building and i ma sure that Google consider that links as a unnatural links so you have to remove unnatural links which are given by Google,  After removal all links you have to reconsider mail to Google. Google updates it's algorithm so it consider those links as a spam links which are coming from same sites for example you have getting 1000 links from single forum then it must be consider as a unnatural links. So remove all links and applied new strategies for link building which are produced by Google after these changes your site comes back with good position it takes time you did not get instant result but it works.

[MoosaHemani]

Cesar, I think you are missing something here!

Let me go step by step...

About your first confusing like why your many keywords go down but you are still ranking for one of your main keyword... well honestly Google’s penalty can be limited as well especially if you have a Big site it is fairly possible to have limited area to be affected by the update IMO.

Now the thing that you are missing here is links... it’s not only your on-site content (Although it’s good to remove the onsite errors as well) try to get in to links and see what low quality links are pointing to your website and remove them... try to build authority links and build new and great content to get out of the update...

It’s not really an easy and a quick job but to be honest until now this is the only thing to get out of Penguin!