Panda Update - Challenge!

[lhc67]

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

[andresgmontero]

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.

[lhc67]

Hi, Andrés-

They weren't running any AdSense - no advertising at all and the site isn't spammy.

[andresgmontero]

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.

[SteveOllington]

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.

[portalseo]

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.