Panda'd - and I think I know how to fix it...
-
Hi,
I have a non-core site that seems to have been affected by a Panda refresh in late December http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012
Anyway, I couldn't figure out for the longest time why this site, which is full of high-quality, expert-level content would get dinged -- i made several moves to try and eliminate duplicate content -- even though I couldn't find evidence of the duplicate content, but it's a wordpress site so there's lots of opportunities to accidentally introduce it through archives, tags and whatnot.
The classic SEO mistake I was making was I was forgetting about a type of post we were doing to facilitate one of our email campaigns. On most, sites there's always something you aren't optimizing, and that's the stuff that can really create unintended issues in google, because the decisions made on those pieces, is often more operational toward the other campaigns, than strategic to search.
these posts, are thin little articles, written by humans, but the text is actually submitted to another external site, published there and then recreated as content that the email campaign links to. These posts are segregated from the normal feed on the wordpress site, and the last time I had reviewed this content, we were not using a method for creating that involved publishing it to facebook first.
But, OK, so I'm going to stop indexing this content, that's a given. I believe that is the Panda issue -- I could be wrong, but it makes sense, since otherwise the site is maybe the least likely site to be affected by Panda that I've ever been involved with.
Do I do anything else, after fixing a Panda issue? Is there a reconsideration request for this or something. Should I send a singing telegram to Cutts?
I researched a few articles, and there wasn't much on what to do after you fixed it, but to wait. Just wondering if anyone else who fixed a Panda thang, utilized any communication channel to let google know. thanks!
-
I would be interested to hear of the sites that have resolved the problem with Panda. I can hardly find any examples of Panda recovery examples.
-
Previously you would wait until the next Panda refresh to see if your website was unflagged from the algo penalty. A few months ago, they made Panda a rolling algorithm so you should see whether your site is fixed after its next crawl/reindex.
No need for a reconsideration request but a singing telegram would probably get Cutt's attention if your site doesn't rebound in a week or so
Cheers, Oleg
-
Well, skipping ahead to the "what to do now?" question, I'd say you are correct in that there is nothing to do but wait. If it was a manual penalty, you would have a notice in your Webmaster Tools indicating it as such.
If it is algorithmic (and it sure sounds like it is from what you've described) then all you can do is wait. This process can take anywhere from a week to 2 months and seems to be a bit of a crap shoot. I will say, from my experience I've seen these types of fixes get resolved in more the 2-3 week range but have heard of it taking longer. A singing telegram might be nice but I think Matt would most likely just cross his arms and give off a simple fake smile, thank them and close the door.
This is oddly symbolic to the way the Google Webspam Team punks us SEO guys on the reg.
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
-
Unsolved I have a "click rate juice" question would like to know.
Hello I have a "click rate juice" question would like to know. For example. I created a noindex site for a few days event purposes. Using a random domain like this: event.example.com. Expecting 5000+ clicks per day. Is it possible to gain some traffic juice from this event website domain "example.com" to my other main site "main.com" but without exposing its URL. Thought about using 301 redirecting "example.com" to "main.com". But it will reveal the example-b.com to the general public if someone visits the domain "example.com". Also thought about using a canonical URL, but it would not be working because the event site is noindex. or it would not matter at all 🤔 Wondering if there is a thing like this to gain some traffic juice for another domain? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blueli0 -
Syndicated content with meta robots 'noindex, nofollow': safe?
Hello, I manage, with a dedicated team, the development of a big news portal, with thousands of unique articles. To expand our audiences, we syndicate content to a number of partner websites. They can publish some of our articles, as long as (1) they put a rel=canonical in their duplicated article, pointing to our original article OR (2) they put a meta robots 'noindex, follow' in their duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. A new prospect, to partner with with us, wants to follow a different path: republish the articles with a meta robots 'noindex, nofollow' in each duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. This is because he doesn't want to pass pagerank/link authority to our website (as it is not explicitly included in the contract). In terms of visibility we'd have some advantages with this partnership (even without link authority to our site) so I would accept. My question is: considering that the partner website is much authoritative than ours, could this approach damage in some way the ranking of our articles? I know that the duplicated articles published on the partner website wouldn't be indexed (because of the meta robots noindex, nofollow). But Google crawler could still reach them. And, since they have no rel=canonical and the link to our original article wouldn't be followed, I don't know if this may cause confusion about the original source of the articles. In your opinion, is this approach safe from an SEO point of view? Do we have to take some measures to protect our content? Hope I explained myself well, any help would be very appreciated, Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fabio80
Fab0 -
What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
Hi, 9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places. For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite. I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin1 -
Google Not Seeing My 301's
Good Morning! So I have recently been putting in a LOT of 301's into the .htaccess, no 301 plugins here, and GWMT is still seeing a lot of the pages as soft 404's. I mark them as fixed, but they come back. I will also note, the previous webmaster has ample code in our htaccess which is rewriting our URL structure. I don't know if that is actually having any effect on the issue but I thought I would add that. All fo the 301's are working, Google isn't seeing them. Thanks Guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Dynamic 301's causing duplicate content
Hi, wonder if anyone can help? We have just changed our site which was hosted on IIS and the page url's were like this ( example.co.uk/Default.aspx?pagename=About-Us ). The new page url is example.co.uk/About-Us/ and is using Apache. The 301's our developer told us to use was in this format: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/Default.aspx$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoGroup51
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^pagename=About-Us$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/About-Us/ [R=301,L] This seemed to work from a 301 point of view; however it also seemed to allow both of the below URL's to give the same page! example.co.uk/About-Us/?pagename=About-Us example.co.uk/About-Us/ Webmaster Tools has now picked up on this and is seeing it a duplicate content. Can anyone help why it would be doing this please. I'm not totally clued up and our host/ developer cant understand it too. Many Thanks0 -
Examples of sites other than Hubpages that have used subdomains to recover from Panda?
Everyone knows subdomains worked for Hubpages to recover from Panda. Does anyone know of other examples of sites that have recovered from Panda using subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Fixing Google Places once Banned
I have a lot of clients who have somehow botched up their Google Places listing, and now are not showing up in local search results. In one particular case, they were using 2 different Gmail accounts and submitted their listing twice by accident. It appears Google has banned them from local search results. How does one undo steps like this and start fresh? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocsearch0 -
Robots.txt: Link Juice vs. Crawl Budget vs. Content 'Depth'
I run a quality vertical search engine. About 6 months ago we had a problem with our sitemaps, which resulted in most of our pages getting tossed out of Google's index. As part of the response, we put a bunch of robots.txt restrictions in place in our search results to prevent Google from crawling through pagination links and other parameter based variants of our results (sort order, etc). The idea was to 'preserve crawl budget' in order to speed the rate at which Google could get our millions of pages back in the index by focusing attention/resources on the right pages. The pages are back in the index now (and have been for a while), and the restrictions have stayed in place since that time. But, in doing a little SEOMoz reading this morning, I came to wonder whether that approach may now be harming us... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurus
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions Specifically, I'm concerned that a) we're blocking the flow of link juice and that b) by preventing Google from crawling the full depth of our search results (i.e. pages >1), we may be making our site wrongfully look 'thin'. With respect to b), we've been hit by Panda and have been implementing plenty of changes to improve engagement, eliminate inadvertently low quality pages, etc, but we have yet to find 'the fix'... Thoughts? Kurus0