Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in terms of being able to escape its clutches ?
-
Hi,
Is being hit by Panda as hard to get out of as being hit by Penguin ?
Or if you clean up all your content should you get out of it relatively quickly ?
I have a very old (11 years) and established site (but also very neglected site that i'm looking to relaunch) but its on an ancient shopping cart platform which never allowed for Google analytics & GWT integration etc so i cant see any messages in GWT or look at traffic figures to correlate a drop with any Panda updates.
The reason i ask is i want to relaunch the site after bringing up to date with a modern e-commerce platform. I originally launched the site in early 2002 and was perceived well by Google achieving first field of view SERPS for all targeted keywords however competitive, including 'ipod accessories', 'data storage' etc etc. These top positions (& resulting sales) lasted until about 2007 when it was overtaken by bigger brand competitors with more advanced & Google friendlier ecommerce platforms (& big SEO budgets)
I originally used the manufacturers descriptions editing slightly but probably not enough to avoid being considered duplicate content although still managed to obtain good rankings for these pages for a very long time even ranking ahead of Amazon in most cases. The site is still ranking well for some of the keywords relating to products for which there is still manufacturer copied descriptions so i actually don't think i have been hit by Panda.
So my questions Is, is there any way of finding out for sure if the site has indeed even been hit by Panda at all without looking at analytics & gwt ?
And once i find out if it has or not:
- Is it best if i relaunch on same domain to take advantage of the 11 year old domain history/authority etc ? So long as i make sure all product descriptions etc are unique, if i have been hit by Panda the site should escape its clutches quite quickly ?
**OR **
- Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in which case is it best to start again on a new domain ?
Many Thanks
Dan
-
Thanks for taking time to respond Egol
Ok great Panda theoretically escapable in a few weeks then
Cheers
Dan
-
Penguin... If you have crap links you must address them. This can be very difficult to cut what you spent a lot of money on and considered to be assets of your business. The challenge is a psychological mindchange and a lot of time to address the problem. Probably pays to have an objective person review the links who has experience in recovering sites from Penguin penalties and unnatural links penalties.
Panda... If you have a site that has lots of thin content, duplicate content or low value content then you must remove that content or replace it with high value content. Again you have a psychological challenge. You must also be willing to spend money to acquire valuable unique content or spend time to create it. You must be willing to chop off your feet to save your ass. Keep in mind that some panda problems can be cause by technology glitches. Before doing major surgery or major content investment it is probably a good idea to get a person familiar with recovering Panda problems to review your site and your plan of action.
I had two sites hit by Panda. On one site I had published lots of .gov and .edu press releases, some at their request, some at my decision. I removed a lot of that content and noindex/followed the rest. That site recovered in a few weeks. On another site I had pages of .pdf content to control the printing of graphics. These were causing a duplicate content problem. We applies rel=canonical with .htacess and the site recovered a few weeks later.
Good luck.
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
-
An immediate and long-term plan for expired Events?
Hello all, I've spent the past day scouring guides and walkthroughs and advice and Q&As regarding this (including on here), and while I'm pretty confident in my approach to this query, I wanted to crowd source some advice in case I might be way off base. I'll start by saying that Technical SEO is arguably my weakest area, so please bear with me. Anyhoozles, onto the question (and advance apologies for being vague): PROBLEM I'm working on a website that, in part, works with providers of a service to open their own programs/centers. Most programs tend to run their own events, which leads to an influx of Event pages, almost all of which are indexed. At my last count, there were approximately 800 indexed Event pages. The problem? Almost all of these have expired, leading to a little bit of index bloat. THINGS TO CONSIDER A spot check revealed that traffic for each Event occurs for about a two-to-four week period then disappears completely once the Event expires. About half of these indexed Event pages redirect to a new page. So the indexed URL will be /events/name-of-event but will redirect to /state/city/events/name-of-event. QUESTIONS I'M ASKING How do we address all these old events that provide no real value to the user? What should a future process look like to prevent this from happening? MY SOLUTION Step 1: Add a noindex to each of the currently-expired Event pages. Since some of these pages have link equity (one event had 8 unique links pointing to it), I don't want to just 404 all of them, and redirecting them doesn't seem like a good idea since one of the goals is to reduce the number of indexed pages that provide no value to users. Step 2: Remove all of the expired Event pages from the Sitemap and resubmit. This is an ongoing process due to a variety of factors, so we'd wrap this up into a complete sitemap overhaul for the client. We would also be removing the Events from the website so there are not internal links pointing to them. Step 3: Write a rule (well, have their developers write a rule) that automatically adds noindex to each Event page once it's expired. Step 4: Wait for Google to re-crawl the site and hopefully remove the expired Events from its index. Thoughts? I feel like this is the simplest way to get things done quickly while preventing future expired events from being indexed. All of this is part of a bigger project involving the overhaul of the way Events are linked to on the website (since we wouldn't be 404ing them, I would simply suggest that they be removed entirely from all navigation), but ultimately, automating the process once we get this concern cleaned up is the direction I want to go. Thanks. Eager to hear all your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Which is better Ajax, iframe in terms of seo for my category page review section?
Hello, Whatever reviews I receive from customer on my Product page same reviews I show on relevant Category and Subcategory Pages. Now due to this I feel somewhat my page google consider as duplicate. Not sure. So I am planning to use either ajax or iframe on my categories pages so that google can't read my reviews of category pages. Is it a good practice to use ajax or iframe or anything else you can suggest? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | wright3350 -
Website affected by Penguine / Panda
Dear All,
Technical SEO | | omverma
We have some websites. How we can check if site got affected by penguine / panda. We have observed few things since last few days like impressions are going down and keyword ranking is going down too. Any tools or any steps, to detect it will help us.
Thanks,
Om1 -
I think I got hit by the latest Panda update
Hi everyone, I think one of my sites got hit with Panda. On Sept 18th the site dipped to "not in top 50" for almost all keywords. I checked GWT for the manual action email but my inbox is empty!!!!!!!!!! The lesser of 2 evils I guess. They had major server issues that week as well so it is hard to identify what caused the site to dip. My client has original content on the website but almost all content on the blog is copied. Do you recommend me deleting the non original content? Can the problem be elsewhere? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
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 a chance to recover from penguin?
Hello All, I am an internet retailer www.giftbasket4kids.com hit by Penguin and have made many changes to my site since first being hit on May 2011. It seems I lost my ranking in some keywords on the two following landing pages. I am OK on my other keywords /landing pages. http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/shop-by-category/gift-basket.html keyword “Gift Basket Ideas” http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/pages/birthday-gifts.html Keywords “Birthday gift for kids, boys, Girls, Children” it seems all keyword that includes “Gift, Gifts” and “birthday”. Note: sometime most of the lost keywords come to 2<sup>nd</sup> page for a day or two then they disappear again I received a Google notice first week of August that there are unnatural links pointing to my site. There was couple of paid banner advertising. I stopped the links and request reconsideration. A week later I got response that there are still unnatural link pointing to the site. I request for reconsideration again and asked Google to let me know which links are in question.it is over 3 weeks I did not get answer yet as I suspected. I have optimized most of my product (80 fresh content well optimized product pages) and added a lot new content. I am making links differently. I am using Squidoo lens to promote my products. I do not know what else I can do. I have been told maybe I should restart new site! All my other keywords are ok . I do not want to start over. Can I make new landing pages and promote them? Would it work or the site is penalized for those keywords? I appreciate your advice in advance. If anyone knows of recoveries of a site like mine? I am looking for an SEO who has experience with relates to sites like mine. Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?
Technical SEO | | giftbasket4kids0 -
Hit by the penguin update
Hi, My site @ www.mortgageadvicecenter.co.uk has been hit by the penguin update. I cannot be found at all in google for certain keywords such as mortgage advice where we ranked page 2. We still rank for certain keywords. I really don't know why we have been penalised and what to do. I have plenty of brand links and nothing out of the ordinary link distribution. This obviously affects our bottem line so do you have any idea's or time scales? Any help would be appreciated, Thanks Ryan
Technical SEO | | pensionadvice0 -
Identified blog issues, anyone able to help?
hi everyone, I have been going through a site recently and i am noticing certain seo errors that are being caused by the blog. Nothing too harmful, but nonetheless i am hoping to correct them. 1 - The seomoz software have identified that i have duplicate title tags on the following http://www.altman.co.uk/blog http://www.altman.co.uk/blog?page=1 http://www.altman.co.uk/blog?page=2 ETC, ETC, ETC... Now am i right that i need to canonicalize those types of urls with the rel="next" and rel="previous"? <colgroup><col width="583"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | AITLtd
| <colgroup><col width="583"></colgroup>
| <colgroup><col width="583"></colgroup>
| | | |0