Panda Update: Need your expertise...
-
Hi all, After Panda update our website lost about 45% of it's traffic from Google. It wasn't an instant drop mostly it happened gradually over the last 5 months. Our keywords (all of them except the domain name) started to lose positions from top #10 to now 40+ and all recovery attempts we have done so far didn't really help. At this moment it would be great to get some advice from the top experts like you here.
What we have done so far is that We have gone through the all pages and removed the duplicate / redundant ones. We have refresh the content on the main pages and also all pages now have an canonical tags. Our website is www.PrintCountry.com.
Thank you very much in advance for your time.
-
Any other advice from the experts?
-
Yeah... beyond what I've already said, I don't really know what to do. A sort of similar question is here, and Thomas makes some good points. Adding some of the new schema.org markup could help (they have it for products, reviews, blogs, and more).
-
Thanks again John. There are really good points here.
What would you suggest for the duplicate content? I mean we originally created those pages and mostly our affiliates took those descriptions and even titles. It's little bit out of control who can use our content but don't you think Google should know who the owner of the content is? or any advice to cope with this?
Another point is that it's very hard to create different content for the all products we have. For example some of them are the same cartridges with different colors so the descriptions and titles most of the time are very similar.When we look at the competitors they also have same content issue for the products but their ranking are still good.
In terms of content we actually have a blog (http://goo.gl/i0uXS), article site (http://goo.gl/lGtNl), testimonials and review etc...There are some great sources here and interestingly none of them got affected by the panda update. It was just the main domain.
Thanks
-
I looked a bit more. If I had to guess why you're being penalized it's because your site doesn't have much in the way of original content. For example, go to a product page, like this one for a Brother ribbon cartridge. The description reads "Brother Black Ribbon Cartridge. This brand new Brother 1230 black ribbon cartridge is manufactured by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). 100% Manufacturer Guaranteed." If you stick that in Google, you'll see that you, along with every other printer site uses basically the same description, like printert.com, 123cheapink.com, inkcircus.com, etc.
You need to provide original content on your site that doesn't appear as duplicate content to Google. The blog is a good start. Having customer reviews, testimonials, and articles custom to your site are also good.
You might try taking a look at your competitors that are doing well in searches, and see what they're doing in terms of original content on their sites.
-
Thank you John for the reply.
Like you said what is good for user should be good for Google too right? The reason there are three ways to navigate on the website is mostly because of our visitor behaviors. Some visitors like to use the selector on the right side versus some of them like to use the top navigation links.
For h2 tags I see your point. It's something relatively easy to fix. But do you think it could be the major reason for our penalty?
-
Usually, what's good for the user is good for Google. I'm a little confused by how I'm supposed to navigate your site. There are 3 ways on the page to navigate your site, on the left, top, and right? There seems to be a lot of redundancy between these. You could probably consolidate these into one form of navigation?
Also, the links to categories within the expanded top navigation are wrapped in
s. For example, if you expand Ink & Toner, Brother, Canon, Dell, etc are all in
s. This is resulting in a lot of
tags on your page. I'd remove those tags since those elements aren't headers. It looks spammy to me.
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
-
Traffic cut-off since Google core update
Hi all, I am the webmaster of www.chepicap.com/en (Cryptocurrency news), and since the 3rd of june (Google core algorithm update) we got the hammer from Google. Organic traffic dropped with 90%+ overnight. We are still in the dark whether we can do to improve the current situation. Does someone have suggestions regarding this issue?
Algorithm Updates | | NielsDE0 -
Post-August Google Updates High volume keyphrases rankings mess
Howdy, fellow mozzers, Couple of our clients keep losing rankings, slowly but surely, which seem to correlate to August Google updates. No major changes to the websites have been done - neither code, backlink profile nor content. It seem to affect higher search volume keyphrases, while other longer tail keyphrases are climbing up. The screenshots of the visibility rankings are attached below. Any ideas/news/thought about the Google update itself or what might be happening? I know that the Medic update was overall quality, yet it seems to be that these websites in particular are going down after Birthday update, not Medic itself. Google and da mighty Internets being quite.. Help! Links to screenshots (includes higher volume keyphrases only): https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/sf/MzAyNjg0MV85MDczNDkz https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/sf/MzAyNjgzN185MDczNDY1
Algorithm Updates | | DmitriiK0 -
Google Algo Updates
Hi I have noticed strange drops in our rankings, some last Monday 12th & some Sunday 18th - has anyone else experienced anything on these dates? I've seen talk of a possible algo update, but nothing concrete Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Did anyone else notice all their keyword rankings go down after the last Panda refresh on January 17th 2013?
Even before January 17th I noticed my keyword ranking slowly going from the top 3 to around 8, 9 and 10. Then between January 15 and January 30th, (SEO MOZ) is not showing the exact date) they all went down to the second page and worse. The rankings dropped for an e-commerce website petsspark.com. They sell a tear stain removal product which is a pretty competitive market. After January i started to notice that Google was starting to rank blogs, forums, overal product review websites and of course amazon, better than me and my competitors. Was anyone else effected by the panda refresh or have any idea what may have gone wrong? Please help ScreenShot2013-04-10at50852PM.png?t=1365628252
Algorithm Updates | | DTOSI1 -
Sitemap link in footer?? Is it needed
Hi, I know sitemap is important to have as it tells google the pages to crawl. I have an xml sitemap for google to crawl. However, Do I need a sitemap link in footer. Any thoughts?? Does it have any harm if I dont include a sitemap link in footer
Algorithm Updates | | pejman500 -
Google Panda - large domain benefits
Hi, A bit of a general question, but has anyone noticed a improvement in rankings for large domains - ie well known, large sites such as Tesco, Amazon? From what I've seen, the latest Panda update seems to favour the larger sites, as opposed to smaller, niche sites. Just wondered if anyone else has noticed this too?Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
Google new update question
I was just reading this, http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/220662 We have our official site, which has 200+ service pages, which we wrote once and we keep doing SEO for them, so they rank high all the time. Now my question is, how does Google handle the site freshness ? Service static pages or if we are adding blog items, then also they consider them as fresh site, right ? So, we dont have to update those service pages, right ?
Algorithm Updates | | qubesys0 -
Content below the fold and Panda Update
Hi I was at the linklove conference and I heard some worrying stories about the way content is formatted on a page being a factor in ehow has avoided being slapped. It was the first time I had heard the expression "below the fold..." I am producing some very sexy SERP's results and other sexier metrics are up too but I am concerened that thefurnituremarket.co.uk has a ton of images on the home page and the nice content is below all of them.. firstly is this content..."below the fold"? secondly I know the site is old but do you think when this panda update hits the UK... were will be penalised for the look of the site.. I know there was talk yesterday at the conference of coming up woth a tool to check this out... my gut says that this will be a factor... sooner rather than later hence I am looking at magento and how we can skin it to look nice and present products better.. I would be really interested to know what exactly is "below the fold" on the furnituremarket.co.uk and some thoughts on the whole ehow formatting issue..
Algorithm Updates | | robertrRSwalters0