Is this Panda?
-
Hi,
I have a page that has been fluctuating a lot the last few days, here are the results:
5/14: #17 (this is where it had been ranking for about 2 months).
5/15: #34
5/16: #33
5/18: #9
5/19: #35
5/20: #13
5/21: #37
I have only made minor changes to the page, and the link profile seems to look good. Here's the page: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/dui.html (targeted KW: San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI Attorney).
The page has a lot of high-quality, original, and well-cited content. Any thoughts on what could be causing so much back and forth?
I should state that none of the other rankings for this site (overall) have been impacted. Just this page for DUI related searches (San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI attorney, San Diego Drunk Driving Lawyer, etc.).
-
I believe its MibuKotaro
-
Hey Sean,
Trying to PM you but the system can't find your username. Is it Sean Williams?
-
Thank you.
Yeah, San Diego DUI Lawyer and San Diego DUI attorney are highly competitive (it's CA, people like to drink and drive apparently). I'm sure it's similar in Tampa.
I'm working on Local SEO, cause you're right, it's a huge area of opportunity.
-
If you have any further questions or want a second set of eyes sent me a PM and I would be glad to assist. Done A LOT of Penalty analysis so recognizing issues is a fun hobby for me
-
Hi Sean,
Thank you for the response. A few sites were adjusted, not just mine. None of them were wiped out, except for one.
This is a tricky area, as I'm trying to rank an interior page for a category in which a lot of attorneys dedicate their entire practice (hence entire website).
I don't see a decrease in traffic (via GA), so maybe it's not Panda.
I'll keep an eye on the competition. Thanks again.
-
The only reason I would worry about the drop is if it triggers something worse. Actually, dropping 20 spots, when you were already on either page 2 or 3, probably isn't going to hurt you all the match. It looks bad in a report, but, in terms of conversion, I don't think it will effect you all that much.
If I were you, I would focus my energy on local SEO and getting reviews. Granted, I don't spend a lot of time looking into how lawyers rank in other cities, but I have done it some. I've never seen so many review sites trigger for a legal term: "San Diego DUI Lawyer." Not to mention, there is only 1 local result that shows. Perhaps this is a fluke for today, but, man, if it's not, you've got a lot of room to grow there.
-
I agree with Ruben that being only a week it is hard to tell for certain. You had said that you have been checking the rankings also, so what does the first page look like for your terms. Are you the only site seeing this flux?
Again this has been addressed but Panda is content based. Grabbing snippets of your content I only found a slight duplication but that was within your own site. The best indicator of Panda is your organic traffic through Analytics. If your Google only Organic traffic has dropped substantially it is entirely possible that it may be the case.
On the other hand it was only recently announced that the Panda updates were rolling out again and this has been happening for longer. I would watch your rankings for the next two weeks or so, but also the people who are the top 5 organically, since you are already passing them to find you. If after that you still notice you jumping a lot but they aren't maybe its time for a quick competitive analysis to see what they may be doing differently.
-
Hi Ruben,
Thanks for the feedback. I see ur in the legal industry as well.
Yes, the anchor text is too exact - I'm working on fixing that.
I guess it's good news that it's probably not Panda. But it's still tough to drop 20 spots on such an important KW.
Ok, I'll keep monitoring it to see how it goes.
Thanks again.
-
A few things:
1. Unless you scraped all that content, I highly doubt it's Panda.
2. From my understanding, Panda is mostly about content so "the link profile seems to look good," doesn't really matter.
3. Also, I do not agree that your link profile looks good (I do not mean that harshly; I have several pages that are way worse. But, I think you should know). Most of your highest quality links are no-follow and you have a bunch coming from directories. Your anchor text is pretty exact as well.
4. Good news: From everything I've read/heard in this forum or others, when people are hit with Panda/Penguin, they do not fall 20 spaces...they fall like 100. Granted, those are all anecdotal so it could be possible.
5. It's only been a week. Yes, 20 spaces is definitely something to pay attention to, but I'd just monitor it for at least another week.
I hope this helps.
Good luck,
Ruben
-
Moz Rank Tracker AND Google it myself with Google Incognito.
-
Can I ask what method you use to come up with those stats on a daily basis, and how confident you are that they are accurate? .... tom
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
-
Can You Help Confirming That 1stWebDesigner Was hit by Panda 4.0 and PayDay Loans 2.0,3.0?
Hello, really hoped for your feedback here. So my site is http://www.1stwebdesigner.com I just used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - and came to realization, that indeed we might have been hit by famous Panda 4.0 update. Here is screenshot from Barracuda tool - https://www.evernote.com/l/AELGaZ6nyxBE1aK7oQJVHBPKJuwjUh5JWk8 and in attachment there is Google Analytics screenshot for that time - especially May, 2014. Can you please help me confirm that we indeed have been hit with the Penalty? It has been 1.5 years already and since then, the traffic never has grown more. Before May, 2014 our site received 1.5 million pageviews/mo, after it..until this moment traffic has never been more than 600,000 pageviews/mo. Now if I look back even more with Barracuda tool, I can see it was also affected by Top Heavy 1.0 update,Thu Jan 19 2012. Even back then before all these updates site grew to 2.5 million pageviews/mo. What is the painful part I always focused on time-consuming link building. Submitting links to design news sites, leaving quality comments under related articles and always have written unique quality content on site for years. Can you tell based on screenshots and confirm we indeed have penalty. And maybe suggest what are the actions to take now? I have ahrefs pro subscription and started using Disavow tool to prepare for submission to Google. Would love to hear feedback on this..it has been painful throughout years. Update: here is one more screenshot from Barracuda looking from 2012 year to traffic - https://www.evernote.com/l/AEIX6iP4USBGtbyRLZ1oTmcACgBtXHBP2rw SpRPIyY
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | researchninja0 -
Did I get hit with a panda update?
I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site. I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with. Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Reality of Panda 3.9 Refresh
I have had a 10 page website(registered in 1999) rank for my top keywords(top 5) for over 4 years. No changes have been made to the website. (Static website). July 11, 2012, most of the keywords, and all the major keywords were dropped from Google. They remain steady in Bing and Yahoo. I saw that some people referred to a Panda 3.9 refresh on that day, but also saw that Google(Matt Cutts) denied the refresh. Given the simplicity of the website and the strong backlinks, which remain, what are other reasons I could see a drastic drop in 1 day. Any ideas on where to target my search for solving this very serious issue? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FidelityOne0 -
Strange recovery from Panda
I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up? Thx Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Need some urgent Panda advice. Open discussion about recovering from the Panda algorithm.
I have a site that has been affected by Panda, and I think I have finally found the problem. When I created this site in the year 2006, I bought content without checking it. Recently, when I went through the site I found out that this content had many duplicates around the web. Not 100% exact, but close to. The first thing I did is ask my best writer to rewrite these topics, as they are a must on my site. This is a very experienced writer, and she will make the categories and subpages outstanding. Second thing I did was putting a NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta in place for the pages I determined being bad. They haven't been de-indexed yet. Another thing I recently did is separate other languages and move these over to other domains (with 301's redirecting the old locations to the new.) This means that the site now has a /en/ directory in the URL which is no longer used. With this in mind I was thinking to relocate the NEW content, and 301 the old (to preserve the juice for a while.) For example: http://www.mysite.com/en/this-is-a-pandalized-page/ 301 to http://www.mysite.com/this-is-the-rewritten-page/ The benefits of doing this are: decreasing the amounts of directories in the URL getting rid of pages that are possibly causing trouble getting fresh pages added to the site Now, the advice I am looking for is basically this: Do you agree with the above? Or don't you agree? If you don't, please be so kind to include a reason with your answer. If you do, and have any additional information, or would like to discuss, please go ahead 🙂 Thanks, Giorgio PS: Is it proven that Panda is now a running update? Or is it still periodically executed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VisualSense1 -
What's the best practise for adding a blog to your site post panda? subdomain or subdirectory???
Should i use a subdomain or a subdirectory? i was going to use a subdirectory however i have been reading a lot of articles on the use of subdomains post panda and the advantages of using them instead of using subdirectories. Thanks Ari
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dublinbet0 -
Does poor quality on a subdomain affect a domain (with regards to Panda)?
We are considering moving some thin content from our site to a subdomain as a potential "panda" fix. But, we are unsure if Google will treat the subdomain as a completely separate domain or not. Does anyone have any data / Google info that might answer this question? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0