Panda Update - Challenge!
-
I met with a new client last week. They were very negatively impacted by the Panda update. Initially I thought the reason was pretty straight-forward and had to do with duplicate content. After my meeting with the developer, I'm stumped and I'd appreciate any ideas.
Here are a few details to give you some background.
The site is a very nice looking (2.0) website with good content. Basically they sell fonts. That's why I thought there could be some duplicate content issues. The developer assured me that the product detail pages are unique and he has the rel=canonical tag properly in place.
I don't see any issues with the code, the content is good (not shallow), there's no advertising on the site, XML sitemap is up to date, Google webmaster indicates that the site is getting crawled with no issues.
The only thing I can come up with is that it is either:
Something off-page related to links or
Related to the font descriptions - maybe they are getting copied and pasted from other sites...and they don't look like unique content to Google.
If anyone has ideas or would like more info to help please send me a message.
I greatly appreciate any feedback.
Thank you, friends!
LHC
-
Mmm... yeah hard to guess without looking at the site then, on my own experience / research, these are some of the issues I found in many of the sites affected by Panda:
•Intrusive advertising, excessive use of Adsense, sites created only for Adsense or to solely promote a product•High amounts of duplicate content / scraped content•Bad user interface / “ugly” design•Usage data - low click-through-rate, low time-on-site, 100% bounce rate•Content analysis - not usable/readable/easily-consumable content•Excessive internal linking to one or two pages only
And I don't mean your site to be spammy, but some cases, like news sites with advertising, sometimes they get articles out with just a couple paragraphs of content, so that single page becomes more advertising than content.
Consider posting your site, it would be nice to take a look
and there is also the last reason: your site is innocent and just got hit by mistake, it happens.
-
Hi, Andrés-
They weren't running any AdSense - no advertising at all and the site isn't spammy.
-
Hi Lisa, besides what was already mentioned, one of the reasons many sites were affected is related to ads, if you have Adsense or any other kind of ads in an excessive way, where in some pages you have more ads than content, then that could be a signal of low quality.
-
We're seeing massive changes in rankings now. Not so much drops but far less in rises, and a few drops. This seems to be happening more recently and not immediately after the update.
We've guesstimated that it is down to the update, despite the delay in effects.
We've come to the conclusion that a lot of the links (both existing links and ones we've been building since) are not holding anywhere near as much weight as they once were. Especially links that were "easier to come by" i.e. blog comments, articles, etc...
Due to the fact that the sites the links were and are on, have been hit themselves it's logical to assume those links are now devalued. Lots of article sites were hit, and "low value" sites. Thankfully not all links were from such sites but some were, which explains the drops I think.
-
Hi Lisa, It will be a little tricky without actually looking at the website but my starting point would be what you have done, duplicate content elimination. If the rel=canonical is in place I would double check that it is a 301 re-direct. I would certainly take a look at the content to see if it is duped on third part websites. Some SEO firms just copy and paste segments of the website and add links. Another concern i would have is the backlink hosts status so I.E a website which seemed appropriate at the time has also been hit by the panda update and is now classed as spam. I would run a backlink checker + search for the content to see if it’s duped. Let me know how you get on with this, it will be interesting to see what the culprit is.
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
-
Shall I hide short product review texts from customers (to avoid google panda/quality issues)?
About 30% of product reviews that the clients of our ecommerce store submitted in the last 10 years are 3 words or less (we did not require any minimum length). Would you recommend to hide those very short review texts? Where to draw the limit?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Numeric star rating would still go into our accumulated product rating. My only concern here is what impact it may have on google ranking.
To give some context, the site has for a long time some panda/phantom related issues where there are no obvious reasons that we could point to.0 -
Panda, rankings and other non-sense issues
Hello everyone I have a problem here. My website has been hit by Panda several times in the past, the first time back in 2011 (first Panda ever) and then another couple of times since then, and, lastly, the last June 2016 (either Panda or Phantom, not clear yet). In other words, it looks like my website is very prone to "quality" updates by big G: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Still trying to understand how to get rid of Panda related issues once for all after so many years of tweaking and cleaning my website of possible duplicate or thin content (301 redirects, noindexed pages, canonicals, etc), and I have tried everything, believe me. You name it. We recovered several times though, but once in a while, we are still hit by that damn animal. It really looks like we are in the so called "grey" area of Panda, where we are "randomly" hit by it once in a while. Interestingly enough, some of our competitors live joyful lives, at the top of the rankings, without caring at all about Panda and such, and I can't really make a sense of it. Take for example this competitors of ours: http://8notes.com They have a much smaller catalog than ours, worse quality of offered music, thousands of duplicate pages, ads everywhere, and yet... they are able to rank 1st on the 1st page of Google for most of our keywords. And for most, I mean, 99.99% of them. Take for example "violin sheet music", "piano sheet music", "classical sheet music", "free sheet music", etc... they are always first. As I said, they have a much smaller website than ours, with a much smaller offering than ours, their content quality is questionable (not cured by professional musicians, and highly sloppy done content as well as design), and yet they have over 480,000 pages indexed on Google, mostly duplicate pages. They don't care about canonicals to avoid duplicate content, 301s, noindex, robot tags, etc, nor to add text or user reviews to avoid "thin content" penalties... they really don't care about anything of that, and yet, they rank 1st. So... to all the experts out there, my question is: Why's that? What's the sense or the logic beyond that? And please, don't tell me they have a stronger domain authority, linking root domains, etc. because according to the duplicate and thin issues I see on that site, nothing can justify their positions in my opinion and, mostly, I can't find a reason why we instead are so much penalized by Panda and such kind of "quality" updates when they are released, whereas websites like that one (8notes.com) rank 1st making fun of all the mighty Panda all year around. Thoughts???!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Google update this wknd or page title issue?
Hi, I've seen a big ranking drop for many major terms, for a particular site, just on Google. This happened Fri 20th or Sat 21st just gone. I don't see any news on an algorithm update over the weekend.I had changed many of the sites major page title protocols 2 weeks ago but a) I would have expected any negative effect before now and not all at once b) the protocols were carefully crafted to avoid traffic drops for major terms and c) i'm seeing traffic drops for keywords that still start at the beginning of the page title d) im seeing drops for some pages which are still using the OLD page titles. I had even tested the protocol on a number of pages in advance to ensure it wouldn't cause problems. As a bit of background - the title protocols were changed to make them more user friendly and less keyword heavy. CTR from search improved so was hoping for better not worse rankings! Ideas, gratefully appreciated.Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
301 forwarding old urls to new urls - when should you update sitemap?
Hello Mozzers, If you are amending your urls - 301ing to new URLs - when in the process should you update your sitemap to reflect the new urls? I have heard some suggest you should submit a new sitemap alongside old sitemap to support indexing of new URLs, but I've no idea whether that advice is valid or not. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Best method to update navigation structure
Hey guys, We're doing a total revamp of our site and will be completely changing our navigation structure. Similar pages will exist on the new site, but the URLs will be totally changed. Most incoming links just point to our root domain, so I'm not worried about those, but the rest of the site does concern me. I am setting up 1:1 301 redirects for the new navigation structure to handle getting incoming links where they need to go, but what I'm wondering is what is the best way to make sure the SERPs are updated quickly without trashing my domain quality, and ensuring my page and domain authority are maintained. The old links won't be anywhere on the new site. We're swapping the DNS record to the new site so the only way for the old URLs to be hit will be incoming links from other sites. I was thinking about creating a sitemap with the old URLs listed and leaving that active for a few weeks, then swapping it out for an updated one. Currently we don't have one (kind of starting from the bottom with SEO) Also, we could use the old URLs for a few weeks on the new site to ensure they all get updated as well. It'd be a bit of work, but may be worth it. I read this article and most of that seems to be covered, but just wanted to get the opinions of those who may have done this before. It's a pretty big deal for us. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well Am I getting into trouble if I do any of the above, or is this the way to go? PS: I should also add that we are not changing our domain. The site will remain on the same domain. Just with a completely new navigation structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Updating Titles - How long do you wait for Google to pick it up... any tips?
Hi We recently trialed some new page titles which seriously helped our CTR on serps, so we thought we would roll them backwards to our other product pages, only about 5% of the SERPS show the new titles. Do I need to change more on the page to get google to notice these changes?Or just hold on and wait?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
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 -
What has this subdomain done to recover from Panda?
I found that doctor.webmd.com was affected by Google Panda, and then recovered (if you look at traffic on compete.com). What do you think they did to recover?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0