Panda Penalty Recovery?
-
My site: www.stephita.com, is based in Toronto, Canada.
It used to rank top 3 in local and national searches for "wedding invitations" and "wedding invitations toronto". I've now been placed on the dreaded page 2 ;|
I didn't keep up with the times and news, and wasn't aware of Google Panda Penalty until earlier this year
So, I've cleaned up most of my site with what I suspect what caused me to drop:
a) Cloaking pages - I had PHP script generate about 1000 pages of "cloaked" pages. This has been removed, and I've used Google webmaster tools to "remove" the directory as well.
b) Duplicate Content pages - (not cloaked, but I've done content writing on the majority of my product pages)
The 2 items above is what I "assume" caused a Google Penalty... I started this cleanup endeavour late January, and with the content writing to remove what MOZ tools notices as duplicate pages.
I've read online that Panda is now part of the search algorithm. So does that mean, ideally, I should start seeing "better" ranking results now? Or is there a process I should be following and submitting my site for "reconsideration"?
Thanks all!
-
If it is Panda then cleaning up the site to make it more useful is your best bet.
- Make sure the design is clean.
- Make sure the writing is answering the user's question, and that it's well written.
- Make sure that the function of the page matches the search query.
Fixing these things should result in an eventual improvement in rankings.
If you were cloaking, that could be a penalty all by itself. Make sure to fix anything shady, and consider whether non-standard implementations or architecture could have confused Googlebot or made it look like you were trying to manipulate rankings. Check Webmaster tools for any warnings or manual penalties for sure.
You can also cross-reference drops in traffic to what others have seen on similar dates to make sure it was Panda.
-
There may be other technical issues or algorithm updates in play here. If you haven't done so already, you should check your Analytics against the dates of any algorithm updates using one of the links below.
If you're confident that it's a Panda issue, one of the best guides I've seen is http://www.thesempost.com/understanding-google-panda-definitive-algo-guide-for-seos/.
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
-
Noindex large productpages on webshop to counter Panda
A Dutch webshop with 10.000 productpages is experiencing lower rankings and indexation. Problems started last october, a little while after the panda and penguin update. One of the problems diagnosed is the lack of unique content. Many of the productpages lack a description and some are variants of eachother. (color, size, etc). So a solution could be to write unique descriptions and use rel canonical to concentrate color/size variations to one productpage. There is however no capacity to do this on short notice. So now I'm wondering if the following is effective. Exclude all productpages via noindex, robots.txt. IN the same way as you can do with search pages. The only pages left for indexation are homepage and 200-300 categorypages. We then write unique content and work on the ranking of the categorypages. When this works the product pages are rewritten and slowly reincluded, category by category. My worry is the loss of ranking for productpages. ALthoug the ranking is minimal currently. My second worry is the high amount of links on category pages that lead to produtpages that will be excluded rom google. Thirdly, I am wondering if this works at all. using noindex on 10.000 productpages consumes crawl budget and dillutes the internal link structure. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | oeroek0 -
How long to recover from Panda Update
Hi there, I think I was affected by the recent Panda update as I had a lot of duplicate content for my product descriptions (about 300). I'm going through and rewriting these to be both helpful and unique. I was ranking quite nicely for a big spread of keywords, but have been seeing my rankings drop day after day since the update. Is it possible to see my rankings improve again after Google re-crawls my site, or would a penalty have been applied to my site preventing me to re-gain my positions for sometime. It's probably worth noting that I have a lot of unique and helpful content, it was just my product pages that had duplicate content, but I've seen my rankings across the board drop. Any discussion and insight would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | BlueTree_Sean0 -
Do I have panda issues?
Hi , I m looking for suggestions for my website i believe is suffering from the panda updates. Can someone point out what possible issues within the site that might be causing with recent panda updates? here is the link http://goo.gl/St3aP thanks nick.
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Do I have a manual penalty?
My rankings and traffic suddenly went down about 50% around the end of Feb 2013. I never received any warnings in webmaster tools (and as far as I know never did anything even vaguely black hat) but thought it might be a penalty since the drop was so steep and as far as I know there were no major algo updates at the time. I sent a reconsideration request expecting to receive an answer that I have no manual penalty. Instead, I received the following email: We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.sitename.com/. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help There have been no changes in my rankings. Does this reply mean that I have/had a manual penalty?
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Moving articles to new site, can't 301 redirect because of panda
I have a site that is high quality, but was hit by penguin and perhaps panda. I want to remove some of the articles from my old site and put them on my new site. I know I can't 301 redirect them because I will be passing on the bad google vibes. So instead, I was thinking of redirecting the old articles to a page on the old site which explains that the article is moved over to the new site. I assume that's okay? I'm wondering how long I should wait between the time I take them down from the old site to the time I repost them on the new site. Do I need to wait for Google to de-index them in order to not be considered duplicate content/syndication? We'll probably reword them a bit, too - we really want to avoid panda. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | philray
Phil0 -
I think I have a penalty on my domain...
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these. Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site. Any feedback would be gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Is there a penalty for linking to sites that are all hosted on the same IP address?
Hi... We're doing some reciprocal link building and a gentleman has been kind enough to offer me sever additional links for the exchange. All of them (5) are on the same IP address as one of his links to which we have already linked. They are in a related field of endeavor, legal websites. If I make the swap with him, is Google going to disregard, penalize or otherwise marginalize my efforts? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | hornsbylaw0 -
Pagerank panda rebound
First, I want to say thank you to the support i've been getting from everyone in this community over the last few months. Im glad to be a part of something that isnt full of flammers and haters... and happy late 4th of july... I implemented canonical tags on a clients website (job board with tons of job postings) and the pagerank has almost immediately rebounded from 2.3 - 4.6. it was a little higher pre-panda, but im happy with the rebound. has anyone had experience on how long it usually takes for the keyword rankings to rebound after changes are made? google recached the site this morning, but im still waiting to see traffic bumps. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | malachiii0