Payday Loan or Panda? Any thoughts?

[Catbelly]

So this is a very old problem, but I'm finally getting around to trying to figure it out.  My site experienced a dramatic organic traffic drop from Google (-40%) on May 17th 2014.  It then drops another 30% on May 19th 2014.  See graphs.  According to Moz these two dates correlate with Payday Loan 2.0 and Panda 4.0.

Panda makes complete sense, as this site (www.ausedcar.com) has a large amount of content that is syndicated across other sites (used car inventory is essentially the same everywhere on the Internet).  Payday Loan on the other hand, which seems to be the primary traffic drop doesn't make any sense at all.  Is it possible I started getting hit by Panda on the 17th and then it completed on the 19th?  I know the dates for algorithm changes are not perfect.

Next, assuming it is Panda, what are some things you guys have done to help with this?  As I mentioned this content is duplicated all over the Internet, so it seems like Google arbitrarily picks winners and losers (my site is twenty years old!).  I know I need unique content, but not sure how exactly to do that besides rewriting words so it doesn't appear duplicate.

[BMullz]

Oh no!! So sorry to hear that Phil & sorry for the "loan" mix up. There are some great

There are some great disavow tools available. Here's a great resource to start: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Cleaning up those spammy backlinks will help a lot.

Best of luck!

[Catbelly]

Actually I just Googled backlink audit, and holy hell, what a find!  Someone was definitely deliberately attacking me with negative SEO (looks like a bunch of hacked wordpress sites pointing at us with various keywords).  Thank you for the idea!

[Catbelly]

Thank you Britney, just to be clear my site isn't about loans at all, it just showed a traffic drop when Google's "Pay Day Loan" algo went live.

[Catbelly]

Thank you for responding, what specifically would the back link audit entail, do you have a good resource that discusses this?  Google hasn't marked me for any bad links, but the site has been around so long I'm sure some directories and things we were in back in the day which were considered white hat are now black hat etc...

[seoman10]

Yes, definitely duplicate content could be your problem.  I would also recommend you do a back link audit.

Also the main page content looks quite sparse (sorry, I know it property took you ages.  But it's worthwhile beefing it out, if you've got a few minutes spare).

Strongly recommend you do a full site audit from the ground up and include both on and off page.

[BritneyMuller]

Hi Phil,

It would 100% be worth it to rewrite some of your content and add unique value adds (graphics, video, audio, etc.) to help round out the page, better fulfill your user intents and provide multiple consumption options for your visitors. Google also loves to see old pages updated and improved. It would also be interesting to test this out on one of your payday loan pages to see what kind of organic traffic you can gain back through some on-site content improvements.

It would be interesting to test this out on one of your payday loan pages to see what kind of organic traffic you can gain back through some on-site content improvements. Bonus points for tapping into key influencers in the loan space to try to get some natural link love that could go a long way in re-indexing your content.

Sidenote: I just did a ton of keyword research for an upcoming blog post on keyword research. Looked into "loans", there is huge opportunity for "loan calculator" content. --Lots of volume, low competition.

Hope this helps,

B