When Panda's attack...
-
I have a predicament. The site I manage (www.duhaime.org) has been hit by the Panda update but the system seems fixed against this site’s purpose. I need some advice on what i'm planning and what could be done.
First, the issues:
Content Length
The site is legal reference including dictionary and citation look up. Hundreds (perhaps upwards of 1000) of pages, by virtue of the content, are thin. The acronym C.B.N.S. stands for “Common Bench Reports, New Series” a part of the English reports. There really isn’t too much more to say nor is there much value to the target audience in saying it.
Visit Length as a Metric
There is chatter claiming Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value. Fair enough but, a large number of people that visit this site are looking for one small piece of data. They want the definition of a term or citation then they return to whatever caused the query in the first place.
My strategy so far…
Noindex some Pages
Identify terms and citations that are really small – less than 500 characters – and put a no index tag on them. I will also remove the directory links to the pages and clean the sitemaps. This should remove the obviously troublesome pages. We’ll have to live with the fact these page won’t be found in Google’s index despite their value.
Create more click incentives
We already started with related terms and now we are looking at diagrams and images. Anything to punch up the content for that ever important second click.
Expand Content (of course)
The author will focus the next six months on doing his best to extend the content of these short pages. There are images and text to be added in many cases – perhaps 200 pages. Still won't be able to cover them all without heavy cut-n-paste feel.
Site Redesign
Looking to lighten up the code and boiler plate content shortly. We were working on this anyway. Resulting pages should have less than 15 hard-coded site-wide links and the disclaimer will be loaded with AJAX upon scroll. Ads units will be kept at 3 per page.
What do you think? Are the super light pages of the citations and dictionary why site traffic is down 35% this week?
-
Traffic (and income) is now down over 55% which is really too bad. The content is unique and highly valuable to the target market.
Any advice about why would be really appreciated.
-
All content is unique. Much of it is 10 years old.
It gets duplicated/syndicated to other sites: some legit, others we constantly fight to have removed. One in India completely copied the site from a few years ago and changed most of the links to internal addresses.
However, the owner wrote all of the non-quote or referenced material.
-
"Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value"
Perhaps, but I wouldn't stress about that metric in particular. As you correctly pointed out, a visitor who is looking for a specific item and finds it will leave a site rather quickly.Is the content unique or duplicate?
EDIT: According to a quick check on Copyscape, your content is duplicated across other sites. You definitely need unique content as a starting point.
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
-
Google's Importance on usability issues in sub directories or sub domains?
Hi Moz community, As the different usability issues like pagespeed or mobile responsiveness are playing a key role in website rankings; I wonder how much the same factors are important for sub directories or sub domain pages? Do each and every page of sub directory or sub domain must be optimised like website pages? Does Google gives same importance? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Does Google considers the cached content of a page if it's redirected to new page?
Hi all, If we redirect an old page to some new page, we know that content relevancy between source page and this new page matters at Google. I just wonder if Google is looking at the content relevancy of old page (from cache) and new page too. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google's spell check recognize a keyword with volume
When the keyword "acls recertification" (an important keyword for our client) is typed into the Google search box, the word "recertification" is underlined in red. Note that you only need to type "acls rec" to make the red underline appear.BUT, Google does not underline the word "recertification" when it is typed into the search box alone, nor does Google underline the word "recertification" when the following keywords are searched: cpr recertification bls recertification pals recertification ^These are all closely related to the keyword "acls recertification," so this spell check behavior is very inconsistent.Why does this matter? Because no matter how close you come to typing "acls recertification," Google's autocomplete suggestions never include "acls recertification" (because of the perceived misspelling?).BUT, Google does suggest "acls recertification online" in the dropdown menu. If you select the "acls recertification online" suggestion then backspace until the word "online" is gone, the red underline disappears, and "acls recertification" becomes an autocomplete suggestion. VERY strange behavior...I have replicated this issue on various depersonalized browsers and devices, so I am confident that this is not related to my personal settings.This keyword contributes to a large portion of our client's business (they specialize in acls certification and recertification), so you can imagine how concerning this is for us. Note that until very recently (3-4 months ago), this keyword did NOT have any spell-check issues. This keyword averages 2400 searches per month according to AdWords which should be enough volume to allow Google to recognize the correct spellingI posted this issue in the Google product forums, where I was advised to submit feedback directly on the search results page via Google's "feedback" link. I have submitted this feedback to Google, but I thought I would bring this to the MOZ community as well to see if anyone has experienced a similar issue, or has any ideas as to what could be causing this issue.
Algorithm Updates | | RyanKent0 -
Changing in website design reduce traffic? I don't think so.
HI, Around the month of Nov I was working on the website. Due to some reasons I have to change the design of website. I saw my traffic going down and down(70 - 100/day) so roll back it on previous one. after that it improve little bit but not as on previously. (traffic 250 - 300/day). Question: All Urls, content and links are same then how that can effect on the traffic. We have removed all the errors that was shown in the seomoz report.But traffic is still the issue here. We are working on SEO area enough and try to recover from it. Your suggestion may be helpful for us.So I am looking forward for your answers. how i can over come with it. Thanks Regards
Algorithm Updates | | lucidsoftech0 -
How come google image search doesn't link to the right page?
For one site I work with the images link to the home page of the site rather than the page the image lives on. I think this is hurting my bounce rate quite a bit. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
Algorithm Updates | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Panda / Penguin Behavior ? Recovery?
Our site took a major fall on March 23rd, ie Panda 3.4 and then another smaller one on April 24th, ie Penguin. I have posted a few times in here trying get help on what items to focus on. Been doing this for 13 years, white hat, never chased algos but of course learned as I went. As soon as the fall hit one expert said it was links, which I kinda doubted because we never went after them but we have some but only a handful in comparison to really good authorative links. I concentrated on cleaning up duplicate content due to tags in a blog that only had 7 posts (an add on section to the site) then focuses efforts on just going through and making content better. Had other overlapping content that I would guess would pass inspection but I cleaned it up. After 6 weeks no movement back up, another expert here said yes, he saw some bad links so I should check it out. So back to focusing on links, I actually run a report and discover questionable links, and successfully get about 25 removed. Low numbers but we have only about 50 that were questionable. No contact info on the other directories so I guess we are stuck. Here is where I just go in circles... When our site fell on March 23rd we had 13 of our main pages still ranking at number 1 and 2 on each keyword phrase. Penguin hit and they fell about 10 spots. EXCEPT, one... This one keyword phrase and page stayed on top and ranked at #1 throught he storm. (finally fell to #4 but still remains up there). The whole site is down 90%, we only have 3 fair keyword phrases really ranking out of 250. The mystery is that the keyword phrase that was ranking was the one that supposedly had way over the % of anchor text, 7% of our links go to that page. The other pages that fell on Penguin had no pages linking back. I have been adding blog posts to our site, I post one an in a few days it gets indexed, have one of those ranking at #2 for the keyword, moved up from #4 a week after posting it in the blog. (google searches shows 80K) Just seems like the site should bounce back if new content is able to rank, why not the old? Did other people hit by Panda and Penguin see a sitewide fall or are they still ranking for some terms? I would love to see some discusson on success stories of bouncing back after Panda and Penguin. I see the WP success story but that was pretty sudden after it was brought to Google's attention. Looking for that small business that fixed something and saw improvement. Give me hope here please.
Algorithm Updates | | Force70 -
Can AJAX implementation affect the rankings in Google Panda?
Hi there, I have the following situation with one of our job sites. We migrate the site to a new application, which is better from design point of view and also usability. For this we use a lot AJAX especially in searches. So every time a user is filtering down their search new results will be shown on the page, at the same url and with no page load. But, having this implementation. affected Bounce rate - which increased from 38% to nearly 60%, PI/visits - which are now half, at 3 and also Avg Time on Site is half that is used to be coming to 2,5 min from nearly 6 min. From Rand post, it is clearly that the content is very important in Google Panda, and all of these parameters we should consider, as it is telling the quality of the content. So, my question will be, can this site be hit by Panda updates (maybe later on) because Bounce Rate, PI/Visits and Avg Time on site, decreased in such way? At the moment we don't measure the Ajax impresion, but as I understood that we can do that though virtual pages in GA, does anyone of you have the experience how to handle this? Won't be this an artificial increase? Thanks, Irina
Algorithm Updates | | InformMedia0