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
-
Panda and Large Web Presence
I'm experiencing some recent significant drops in rankings across the board for a client of mine and I suspect that it's probably related to Panda. Their internet presence features completely unique, useful, well written content by certified industry experts. Further, all content is of proper length and again serves a core purpose, providing helpful information to their viewers. Where I think things potentially go wrong is that they have around 20 micro sites in operation, including multiple web 2.0 blogs. There are also multiple sites in operation that target more specific areas of the same city. Again all of the content is unique, but they all feature content that's of the same industry and broad topic. Despite everything being 100% unique, I fear it's too excessive. Anyone know if Panda may target this type of approach even if the quality and uniqueness is appropriate?
Technical SEO | | BrandishJay0 -
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 -
Local SEO and Penguin
All, One of my client's sites was hit by Penguin. The business has lost almost all of its organic rankings but is still holding on for a handful of local searches for some of its satellite offices. We've built a new site and are slowly building domain authority. My question is this: at what point do I swap out the new site's location URL for the old URL in Google places? I don't want to risk the existing local placement which is all they have left for the time being. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
SEO Terms for Internal Vs External
Hey there! I am writing up an SEO plan for our company and wanted to get the groups input on the use of some SEO terms. I need to organize and explain these efforts to nonSEO people. I usually talk about, SEO in terms of "Internal" vs "External" efforts. Internal SEO efforts being things like Title Tags, Description Tags, Page Speed, Minimizing errors, proper 301 redirect, content development for the site, internal linking and anchor, etc. External SEO efforts being things like Link building, social media profile setups and posts (FB Twitter Pinterest, YouTube), PR work. How do you split these out? What terms do you use? Do you subdivide these tasks? What terms do you use? For example, with Internal, I sometimes talk about "Technical SEO" that has do to with making sure that site speed is working well, 301s are setup correctly, noindex tag etc are all used properly. These are things that different versus "On Page" efforts to use keywords properly etc. I will also use the term "Site Visibility" for non SEOs to explain the technical impact. For example, if your site has the wrong robots.txt, if you have 500 errors everywhere and a slow site, if you are sending spiders down a daisy chain of 301s, it is difficult for the key parts of your site to be found and so your "Visibility" to the engines are poor. You have to get your visibility up, before you begin to then worry about if you have the right keywords on a page etc. Any input or references would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Panda recovery timeframe question
Site was hit by Panda Aug. 22nd. Lost 90% of Google traffic. I know 🙂 We think we found a reason and made few changes to landing pages structure. Updated sitemaps submitted. When can we expect effect (if any) - few days or after next Panda data refresh? Thank you!P.S. What is also interesting, similar traffic loss from Bing/Yahoo happened at exactly the same date. Does that mean Bing is "stealing" search results from Google when can't provide their own relevant results? 🙂
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Looking for sites hit by Penguin for research
I'm doing some link profile analysis and need examples of sites hit by Penguin (not Panda). If you have a site that was hit and are willing to share, please PM me: Your site homepage URL Main keyword(s) you lost rankings for (preferably keywords your homepage was ranked for but no longer is) I will keep your information strictly confidential and will not share it. (I will publish the results of my findings, but will not mention any of the sites used for research.) Thanks.
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
How to publish duplicate content legitimately without Panda problems
Let's imagine that you own a successful website that publishes a lot of syndicated news articles and syndicated columnists. Your visitors love these articles and columns but the search engines see them as duplicate content. You worry about being viewed as a "content farm" because of this duplicate content and getting the Panda penalty. So, you decide to continue publishing the content and use... <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> This allows you do display the content for your visitors but it should stop the search engines from indexing any pages with this code. It should also allow robots to spider the pages and pass link value through them. I have two questions..... If you use "noindex" will that be enough to prevent your site from being considered as a content farm? Is there a better way to continue publication of syndicated content but protect the site from duplicate content problems?
Technical SEO | | EGOL0 -
Google Panda and ticketing sites: quality of content
Hi from Madrid! I am managing the Marketing Department of a ticketing site in Europe similar to Stubhub.com. We have thousands of events and, until now, we used templates for their descriptions. A lot of events share the same description with minor changes. They also have a lot of tickets on sale, so that's unique content different on each event. Now the last Google Panda update hit Europe and I was wondering if that will affect us a lot. It's hard to tell for now, because we are in the middle of the summer and the volume of searches in our industry depends decreases a lot during this time of the year. I know that ideally we should have unique descriptions but that would need a lot of resources and they are not important for our users: they just want to know the venue, the time and the price of the tickets! Have you experienced something about Google Panda update with a similar site or with another e-commerce industry? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0