Strange recovery from Panda
-
I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up?
Thx
Paul
-
Actually my question (should have made it clearer) is why is my site ranking so much better in the past few months even though all the important analytics numbers have simultaneously been changing for the worse? It would appear that the various pundies were wrong about how Panda really works.
Paul
-
Hi Paul
Have you looked deeper into your analytics - how do your traffic sources for the two sites compare- are they different? Are you getting traffic from keywords on your new site that you aren't on your old site? If so what is the bounce rate on these terms - my thoughts are you might be ranking well for some keywords that don't provide visitors with the information they are looking for. Alternatively your page could be so relevant for that search keyword that visitors don't need to dig any deeper into the new site. In this case time on page should give you a clue as to which of these it may be in this situation - is the time on page too short to read the content for you average person or not - how long does it take you to read? It might not be this but I always find looking deeper into the analytics of a website tends to hold the key, especially when you are comparing it to another site that you own in the same niche as you are in the fortunate position of having access to both sites analytics. Hope this helps.
-
One thing I want to comment on with wordpress and google is how wordpress makes blog post urls. They use dates. Google is all about freshness and this is one of the things I would change how the urls are structured in the permalink area of admin. Make sure not to use dates unless you want to for any material you do not wish to get long term traffic for.
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
-
Very strange HTML docs - what should I do with them through site migration?
I've just been looking at a website and it includes numerous web pages with addresses like this. I click on the URL and it takes me to a fully functional web page (not an image) and when I run it through Screaming Frog this comes up as an HTML page. The site has around 150 unique pages and over 450 pages like this one - how should I deal with these pages during an SEO migration (only a few are backlinked to)? I look forward to reading your thoughts. http://www.[companyname].co.uk/property/caravan-sleeps-4/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/blank.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Ranking strangeness
Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client. Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve. Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on. Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages). The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1! Bang -straight to top spot. However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition. Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one. We still need to fix thin and duplicated content! I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre. Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Website hit by something, but not sure if penguin or panda?
Hi my site was doing ok, last week, humming along and increase in traffic. We felt that all the work removing bad links had worked. then all of a sudden, bang traffic dropped and is still dropping day by day. The strange thing as well is all the social media, bing and yahoo traffic has also dried up! Has anyone else had something smiler?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
To index or not to index search pages - (Panda related)
Hi Mozzers I have a WordPress site with Relevanssi the search engine plugin, free version. Questions: Should I let Google index my site's SERPS? I am scared the page quality is to thin, and then Panda bear will get angry. This plugin (or my previous search engine plugin) created many of these "no-results" uris: /?s=no-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Akids+wall&cat=no-results&pg=6 I have added a robots.txt rule to disallow these pages and did a GWT URL removal request. But links to these pages are still being displayed in Google's SERPS under "repeat the search with the omitted results included" results. So will this affect me negatively or are these results harmless? What exactly is an omitted result? As I understand it is that Google found a link to a page they but can't display it because I block GoogleBot. Thanx in advance guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClassifiedsKing0 -
Are widgets dangerous after the Panda update?
My site provides widgets (online polls) which were developed so that each one would embed a do follow text link into the customers website. With Panda's unnatural link algorithm now in place should I modify these links to be nofollow and give up on this strategy or alternatively just set the text as my sites domain name? The only other option I could think of was to only embed links where the customers site had a certain page rank or above? Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish1 -
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 -
Blog - on the domain or place on separate site, now that Panda ranks for bounce, TOP, depth of visit
Over 10 years ago, we decided to run our blog external to our main website. contrary to conventional wisdom then, we thought we’d have more control/opps for generating external anchor text links, plus working in a bona fide blog software environment (WP). As we had hoped, the blog generated alot of strong inbound links, captured inbound links of it own from other sites and I think, helped improve our SERPs and traffic. Once the blog was established and with the redesign of the website, we capitulated, and finally moved the blog onto the main domain. After reading a number of pieces on Panda and the new reality of SEO, sounds like bounce rates (in particular), time on page, and other GA measures may have a more profound influence on google rankings now. Given that blogs are notoriously for high bounce rates (ours is), low time on site, depth of visit, seems logical that it adversely affects our site averages for the main domain). Is it time to re-consider pulling our blog off the main domain to reassert the ‘true’ GA measures of the main domain? I guess it still gets down to the question... is the advantage of all the inbound links to the blog on the main domain of greater value than moving the blog off-site and reasserting better 'site stats' for google's pando algo? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahw0