How to fight the Panda/Farmer update?

[VisualSense]

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

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[VisualSense]

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?

[VisualSense]

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

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[Bionica]

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).

[CPU]

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.

[sly-grrr]

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.