Hit by Panda 4.1 and it couldn't be more wrong!
-
Hi,
I'm scratching my head with this one, I have a website with around 40 pages of unique content produced by a professional copywriter who works magazines and PR agencies - each page has around 750/1000 words - according to Google the reading age is intermediate as you would expect from a good copywriter, I have anchor points jumping around the page to information the user shows an interest in - this happens I have video recording and heat maps.
I also receive 100s and on some pages 1000s of social shares from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and G+. I wanted to build a site the way Google wants you to so I have done no link build at all, everything focused onsite so I just spent the last 2 months making the whole site responsive for mobile and tablet devices - I also spent time getting the load time down and 'was' in the process of hooking into a CDN for extra performance.
Ive done everything I can to make the site just good and its reflected in the social sharing and natural links from sites such as huffington post.
On the 23rd my sites rankings which were solid for over 2 years have crashed, but what's worse is ive been dropped and replaced with sites using the same tactics as the Payday Loan industry, and it seems great favouritism has been given to sites containing Adsense - I can see ranking one page sites with less than 300 words content and 3/4 ad units above the fold and sites which have taken chunks of content off Wikipedia and rank.
Thumbs up Google, great job.
-
Thanks for letting me know others are experiencing the same. If I find anything interesting I will be sure to let you know on this thread - Likewise if you notice anything interesting would be appreciated if you could come back and share also.
-
Hi there, I know that I can't help but just wanted to let you know that we are in a similar situation. We have an e-commerce site (so slightly different) but we have no dodgy back links, have been as clean as possible and each and every description we write is original. We have a lot of content and none of it is duplicated anywhere on web.
On Sep 23 we dropped from #1 or #2 down to page 2. Yet in our place are some sites with copied content. The top 2 spots seem to have gone to newer sites which do have original descriptions which has me wondering if we should be changing our product descriptions on a regular basis (any ideas?)
One last note if this is also about customer behaviour we have pretty good interaction, a lowish bounce rate and good engagement for a retail site.
So like you I am at a loss to see why we have been penalised by an change which is supposed to help small sites with original content and good engagement!
-
Hi JVRudnick,
No worries, see the above post and thanks for showing an interest in my problem/discussion.
-
No worries,
I can share here for you to look at and to help others who may also be interested (or disagree).
So the domain is Followuk.co.uk and seems the whole site has taken a hit but to make this more targeted im looking at the page Followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays - and the target term for this page is -> Bank Holidays 2015 in Google UK and although this may seem a small term this term and its variations receive millions of queries a month.
I could except the drop if it was related to the link profile as currently a little weak but according to my analytic's traffic dropped on the 23rd (inline with the panda rollout) which targets thin/low quality sites if im correct.
Now where it becomes interesting is im not complaining about not being higher up, but the fact I WAS on page 1 and had been for over 2 years, on the 23rd the page was demoted to page 6/7 while thin/low quality sites have been given higher positions or stayed neutral.
In this case the Panda update looks to be doing more damage then good for example take the second result -Â http://www.year-planner-calendar.wanadoo.co.uk/2015-public-holidays-bank-holidays-bank-holiday-dates.htm
Surely this comes under the types of sites Panda is looking to target -> thin, low quality, advertising heavy, spammy etc - BUT Google's algo thinks this is the second most relevant 'quality' site it should show to it's millions of users querying those terms and its not the only site like that in the top 10.
And I just want to say I dont think I should be number 1 or 2, 3 because there are better sites which deserve those positions but do I think I should be in the top 10... Yes.
I would love to know if Google thought the above was the right thing for the algo to do because to me looking at it as if I was an outsider (which I try) this is a straight out.
Fail.
-
LIke iQ above, yes, I'd like to see the URL too...if you'd PM me too I'll take a look/see and get back to you as well...
Jim
-
Do you fancy PM'ing me details of your site & search terms for me to take a look? I would be interested to see cases like this.
-Andy
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
-
Number of internal links and passing 'link juice' down to key pages.
Howdy Moz friends. I've just been checking out this post on Moz from 2011 and wanted to know how relevant it is today? I'm particularly interested in a number of links we have on our HP potentially harming important landing page rankings because not enough 'link juice is getting to them i.e) are they are being diluted by all the many other links on the page? (deeper pages, faqs, etc etc) It seems strange to me that as Google as has got more sophisticated this would still be that relevant (thus the reason for posting).  Anyway, I thought I was definitely worth asking. If we can leverage more out of our on-page efforts then great 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Web designer doesn't see duplicate pages or issues??? Help!
I have a website that has duplicate pages, and I want to fix them. I told my web guy and his response was: "we do not see any issues on our end. It is not hurting any ranking in the 3 major searches. We have no duplicate pages" Here's the site http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/ Here's the home page again http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php Here's what MOZ say: Please see attached image. I'm not sure what to tell him, as i'm not a web person, but MOZ is telling me we have issues on the site and I feel like they should be fixed?? 7QWkVU0 tYCjV
On-Page Optimization | | MissThumann0 -
Why my keyword rank fell down while I didn't do anything wrong?
Hi! I just got ranking results for the past week, and I am a little bit confused about what I saw. Two weeks ago, I optimized one of my website's page for the keyword "viking appliance repair in Los Angeles" (was #43 before), and one week later I found it on the second page of Google (ranked #21). I continued working on other pages thinking that all I need to do for  "viking appliance repair in Los Angeles" to get it ranked even higher is to gain high quality inbound links. But for some reason updated ranking results I got today show this keyword fell down and now ranked #51. Could you please tell me why that might happened? What affected this keyword performance while I didn't do anything with it in between that much?
On-Page Optimization | | kirupa0 -
Page authority still on 1 after url change and 301 redirect
Hi Moz analytics suggestion to help ranking is to have a keyword or phrase in the url so I advised a client to do this they changed one of their pages urls, this page previously had a page authority of 26 since the change its gone down to 1.
On-Page Optimization | | genkee
I advised them that they must do a 301 from the old page but they took a few weeks to do this, would this of affected it why is it not showing up yet its been 3 weeks now, since the 301 and 5 weeks since the url change.0 -
Google is showing the "wrong" page in the serps for user queries
Our site, cpuboss.com has two main types of pages: comparisons of CPUs, and pages about individual CPUs. When I google search for "fx8350", a keyword for the cpu "AMD FX-8350", I hoped to see our CPU page ranking, instead I see a comparison of this CPU against another. http://i.imgur.com/QwNczDj.png?1Â (Our page ranks #5) Any idea? Many of our comparisons rank for CPU keywords, when I think it'd be a better experience for the user if our cpu pages ranked instead. This particular CPU page is linked to on our homepage with appropriate anchor text, and linked to on that comparison also. Â I would have hoped the relevance of the cpu page to this keyword would be stronger than the comparison page, and google might use that relevance signal to show the user the right page. thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | cdnventure0 -
What's the best way to handle crawling of photo gallery?
When you have a photo gallery with many search filters and loads and loads of pages, is it best to block all the filters and use google's pagination code? Ex: http://photo.net/gallery/photocritique/filter This site has pages for many different queries. While the page titles are unique, the pages are showing duplicated content.
On-Page Optimization | | cakelady0 -
Is my blog simply duplicate content of my authors' profiles?
www.example.com/blog is the full list of blog posts by various writers. The list contains the title of each article and the first paragraph from the article. In addition to /blog being indexed, each author's contribution list is being indexed separately. It's not a profile, really, just a list of articles in the same title & paragraph format of the /blog page. So if /blog a list of 10 articles written by two writers, I have three pages: /blog/author1 is a list of 4 articles /blog/author2 is a list of 6 different articles /blog is a list of 10 articles (the 4+6 from the two writers) Is this going to be considered duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Brocberry0 -
Using meta robots 'noindex'
Alright, so I would consider myself a beginner at SEO. I've been doing merchandising and marketing for Ecommerce  sites for about a year and a half now and am just now starting to attempt to apply some intermediate SEO techniques to the sites I work on so bear with me. We are currently redoing the homepage of our site and I am evaluating what links to have on it. I don't want to lose precious link juice to pages that don't need it, but there are certain pages that we need to have on the homepage that people just won't search for. My question is would it be a good move to add the meta robots 'noindex'  tag to these pages? Is my understanding correct that if the only link on the page is back to the homepage it will pass back the linkjuice? Also, how many homepage links are too many? We have a fairly large ecommerce site with a lot of categories we'd like to feature, but don't want to overdo the homepage. I appreciate any help!
On-Page Optimization | | ClaytonKendall0