How to fight the Panda/Farmer update?
-
I have been suffering majorly from the Google algo change, as I lost more than 50% of my traffic of my largest site. Since then I have been focusing on rewriting pages, and adding new ones. New pages are all of high quality up to 2,000 words each, and the improved pages used to be thin content pages, rewritten to about 1,000 words. All content is 100% unique. I have noticed Google still has the old pages cached, dated to more than a month back, despite new pages (linking to some of the old) being indexed. Anyway, I am pretty much desperate by now, and coul really use some advice how to fight this. FYI, I got some budget available and a writer stand-by. Thanks, Giorgio
-
You mention adding and rewriting content, but are you adding it to existing pages or to new pages. Adding new pages may actually make Panda problems worse, even if they have original content. At some point, you're going to need to reduce your indexed pages (maybe dramatically) and canonicalize the new content to the old, thin content. Just adding content is probably a bad idea.
If the crawlers aren't getting into your deeper content, you may have to focus on some deep link-building, either external/inbound or internally by featuring certain pages (and possibly rotating until they get re-cached). You've got to give Google a push to re-crawl and simply adding content to a page they think is low-value probably won't be enough. Injecting solid links at various levels of the site architecture could help.
The tough part of this is that the update cycle for Panda-related problems is out of sync with the main index. What might traditionally take days or a couple of weeks to fix could take many weeks with Panda. They seem to be apply a separate data adjustment or possibly a machine-learning algorithm, and it's not part of the main algorithm. So, it's possibly you're on the right track, but simply getting pages re-cached isn't going to automatically reverse a Panda problem.
-
I want to bump this question, as by now I have added numerous of new pages, and loads of content. Furthermore I have also updated many pages which didn't look very valuable to me, for instance pages with 300 words or less. Where others would have one page of a specific subject, I created a complete guide with several sub pages, up to 15. All pages between 1000 and 3000 words 100% unique written by native English speakers (Canadian and US) which deliver content of the highest quality. Al together I must have added like 50 new (static) pages.
The effect of all of this was:
- Pages tend to be indexed a tad quicker;
- There has been some movement for my top two keywords, but the slightest - 26 to 18 and back to 20 for my main keyword.
I also did some article exchanges (I delivered my articles and picked good sites to exchange with, aka some of them being Google News sites, others related, but decent quality blogs (not Indian spam or the like).
I am still adding as many pages as I can, but since the site is not really moving anywhere (at least not where significant) I am slowly running out of funds.
Oh and I am also 100% sure that this has been caused by the Panda update.
Any more ideas to fight this beast?
-
I did in fact resubmit the sitemap, but no positive results so far. My sitemap is auto generated, but has no date or priority to it. I just went into WMTs to hit the resubmit link. To be more specific, one page I rewrote, site wide linked from the menu, as well as linked to from a couple of new posts in the site's blog section, still isn't recached. It still has a cache dating from January 9th. In this specific category I added 10 articles of each 1,500-2,000 words, all of high quality, and 100% unique. And 2 new articles of the same size are added weekly. Furthermore I ordered a first hiarchy layer category, which has only 2 very thin pages, to be rewritten. This will become a comprehensive guide of a total of 12,500 words spread out in about 10 pages. Something similar will be done for another category. To conclude, I am adding new pages to existing categories, where each existing page will be rewritten with the purpose of bringing more value for the visitors I hope to regain. I also niticed that my traffic started to drop before the actual Panda update. So there could be another reason..... Hopefully I will manage to recover as my site has much more value than most of the current top 10 rankings for my main targetted key phrase. Its been #4 for years and now #23 from US IPs, and 13 from the Netherlands (both Google.com) Any more ideas? Thanks, Giorgio
-
Giorgio, I'm wondering if you've re-submitted your XML site map, and if you've started to see any positive changes yet from the better content.
-
I've got the same situation, with foreign aggregators and scrapers ranking ahead of ever new article I put up. Now lest you say it's about links, I can give you examples where my smaller, less authority, clearly vacuous sites in the same niche are going gangbusters and getting ranked well without a link or tweet to their articles. The authority site that was hit has links, has tweets, has FB likes, has a huge link profile. Yet it is outranked by aggregators for fresh content. The aggregators I am seeing are foreign, with link backs to my article. How does that make sense?
@Jeff, one article I refer to has links to studies on the subject as well as to media articles (for reference).
-
If the links you have to your site were effectively devalued by the update as they came from sites that were hit by the update then you will need to look at strengthening your link profile not just adding more content to your site.
-
With the changes you have made, even though you don't refer to adding any pages, have you re-submitted your XML sitemap?
Putting a new site map up at least sends an alert that you have changed something.
Without being aware of what is on your site content wise, the other thing that might make a difference is a few well chosen out bounds links to authority or reference type sites in your industry (maybe a news article about your subject) not your competition.
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
-
Updating Content - Make changes to current URL or create a new one?
I'm working with a content team on a job search guide for 2019. We already have a job search guide for 2018. Should we just edit the content of the job search guide for 2018 to make it current for 2019, which means the job search guide for 2018 would not exist anymore or should we keep the 2018 guide and just create a new web page for the 2019 guide that way both exist. We currently rank very well for the 2018 job search guide.
Content Development | | Olivia9541 -
Best practice for Wordpress /page/2/
I realize that it might be a minor point but it still bugs me. We have a blog with a number of posts. Content of the posts does not expire or age (in the rare case something changes, we do update the information in the posts). The wordpress blog is setup to display our latest posts and displays 15 posts at once. Since we have a lot of content, the older posts get pushed off the front page which is understandable and desirable behavior. However the pages that have older posts have names like "/page/2/", /page/3/, /page/4/ and so on. This does not look very SEO or user friendly to me. What do you think? Did you come up with something better then /page/ and then a number?
Content Development | | SirMax0 -
Website update frequency as ranking factor
Hellooo, Anyone have more info about this issue? I own 1 e commerce site, and one blog about soccer. Both are brand new, e commerce is older few months, with more backlinks and soccer blog with very few profile links from soccer forums. The soccer blog, was updated regularly 2 times per day, and I saw a tremendous rise on visits. Later on , I stop to update it, and then traffic drop immediately . Notice that I stop to build links at least 1 week before I stop to post content. But the site still enjoyed an increase in traffic even after I stop to add fresh links , and traffic dropped once I stop to create fresh content. The other e commerce site, wasn't updated at all, but I was building links and I saw similar increase in traffic. Niche of the e commerce is very boring (industrial) and none of competitors own a blog. Site is quite big, with not even half of links from competitors but I almost outrank them all with internal linking on competitive keywords. (note that site have over 200 pages with at least 300 words each in contrast with competitor sites of 20 pages). Then I added a blog and I saw similar increase in traffic with the soccer blog. Once I stop to update again the blog, traffic dropped again.. anyone with similar experiences?
Content Development | | nyanainc0 -
Recommendations Content / Copywriter
We are based in the UK & have used alot of content / copywriters & so far have struggled to find someone we feel meets our needs? Can anyone recommend a content writing company or freelancer? Thanks
Content Development | | webguru20140 -
Possible to recover from Thin/Duplicate content penalties?
Hi all, first post here so sorry if in wrong section. After a little advice, if I may, from more experienced SEOers than myself with regards to writing off domains or keeping them. To cut a long story short I do a lot of affiliate marketing, back in the day (until the past 6 months or so) you could just take a merchant's datafeed and with some SEO outrank them for individual products. However, since the Google Panda update this hasn't worked as well and now it's much hard to do - which is better for the end user. The issue I have is that I got lazy and tried to see if I could still get some datafeeds to rank with only duplicate content. The sites ranked very well at first but after a couple of weeks died massively. They went from 0 to 300 hits a day in a matter of 24 hours and back to 2 hits a day. The sites now not rank for anything which is obviously because they are duplicate content. The question I have is are these domains dead, can they be saved? Not talking about duplicate content but as a domain itself. I used about 10 domains to test things, they ranged from DA 35 to DA 45 - one of the tests being can a domain with reasonable DA rank for duplicate content. Seeing as the test didn't work I want to use the domains for proper sites with proper unique content, however so far although the new unique content is getting indexed it is suffering from the same ranking penalties the duplicate (and now deleted content) pages had. Is it worth trying to use these domains, will Google finally remove the penalty when they notice that the bad content is no longer on the site or are the domains very much dead? Many thanks
Content Development | | ccgale0 -
Spell Check Bot / Crawler
Hi guys, Does anyone know of a script / app / bot / browser plugin that will crawl an entire website, examine the content, and report on any spelling (or grammar) mistakes? Many thanks. C.
Content Development | | cmoylan0 -
Multisite Worpress Environment / Community
Hello fellow SEOMOZ rs. We are building out a platform on WordPress that provides a free blog for a market niche in a multi-site WordPress environment. The client we are building this solution for now wants the people signing up for the free blogs to be able to search for each other (based on categories and keywords), to build a list of favorites from other bloggers in this community (sort of like building a team), review each other (leaving a publicly viewable review and score of each other) as well as create a forum that is outside the blogs that each of them have. Here is a summary of the goals for the WordPress Plug in (s) 1. Search for other sites within the multi-site environment
Content Development | | webindustry
2. Scoring / Review system for other users (who also have blogs on the system)
3. Ability to build and maintain a list of other users in the community (like a prefered list or team list)
4. A shared Forum area that we could admin from the multi-site platform that they could log in with using the same credentials as their multi-site blog credentials. My question for you all is: Does anyone have experience in a single plugin that will work in a multisite environment that would handle some or most of the goals listed? If not a single plugin, how about recommendations for individual plug ins that might help with this? Thanks for any recommendations!1 -
Domain MozRank / MozTrust too LOW
I release this site, about 1 year ago: www.bioespaco.com Cant understand why the site has so low value on domain mozrank e moztrust. The page has 1500 visitors/month and 3500 page views/month too. Most of the visitors from Google come to this site, with the keyword "bioespaco" the name of the company. Cant find what is wrong... Looks like something it penalizing the page (or the domain!?) Thanks! GDSAK.png
Content Development | | comercialroldao0