Do user metrics really mean anything?

[seo-wanna-bs]

This is a serious question, I'd also like some advice on my experience so far with the Panda. One of my websites, http://goo.gl/tFBA4 was hit on January 19th, it wasn't a massive hit, but took us from 25,000 to 21,000 uniques per day. It survived Panda completely prior. The only thing that had changed, was an upgrade in the CMS, which caused a lot of duplicate content, i.e 56 copies of the homepage, under various URLs. These were all indexed in Google.

I've heard varying views, as to whether this could trigger Panda, I believe so, but i'd appreciate your thoughts on it.

There was also the above the fold update on the 19th, but we have 1 ad MAX on each page, most pages have none. I hate even having to have 1 ad. I think we can safely assume it was Panda that did the damage.

Jan 18th was the first Panda refresh, since we upgraded our CMS in mid-late December.

As it was nothing more than a refresh, I feel it's safe to assume, that the website was hit, due to something that had changed on the website, between the Jan 18th refresh and the one previous.

So, aside from fixing the bugs in the CMS, I felt now was a good time to put a massive focus on user metrics, I worked hard and continuing to spend a lot of time, improving them.

1. Reduced bounce rate from 50% to 30% (extremely low in the niche)
2. Average page views from 7 to 12
3. Average time on site from 5 to almost 8 minutes
4. Plus created a mobile optimised version of the site
5. Page loading speeds slashed.

Not only did the above improvements have no positive effect, traffic continued to slide and we're now close to a massive 40% loss. Btw I realise neither mobile site nor page loading speeds are user metrics.

I fully appreciate that my website is image heavy and thin on text, but that is an industry wide 'issue'. It's not an issue to my users, so it shouldn't be an issue to Google.

Unlike our competitors, we actively encourage our users to add descriptions to their content and provide guidelines, to assit them in doing so.

We have a strong relationship with our artists, as we listen to their needs and develop the website accordingly. Most of the results in the SERPs, contain content taken from my website, without my permission or permission of the artist. Rarely do they give any credit.

If user metrics are so important, why on earth has my traffic continued to slide?

Do you have any advice for me, on how I can further improve my chances of recovering from this?

Fortunately, despite my artists download numbers being slashed in half, they've stuck by me and the website, which speaks volumes.

[seo-wanna-bs]

The duplicates that were created by the CMS are now all gone. Though didn't get 100% sorted until several days before the recent Panda refresh. There was a line in the code, that said any index.html, display the contents of the homepage. So Google had 56+ pages showing my homepage. Crazy.

It maybe that I've solved the issues, but waiting around for month is awful.

[Dr-Pete]

From a "pure" SEO standpoint, here's what I'd say we know about user metrics:

(1) Bing has confirmed using click-through rate (CTR) and "dwell time" as ranking factors. Dwell time is the time it take a visitor to return to search results from a site, so it's related to both bounce rate and time-on-site.

(2) Google has officially said that they do not use bounce rate as a ranking factor. Google historically defines things narrowly, so we don't know if they factor in dwell time. Reading between the lines, they seem to find it unreliable.

(3) I'm not sure if Google has confirmed this, but they very likely factor in CTR.

(4) We don't know for sure how user factors fit into Panda, although people have certainly suggested a connection. My gut reaction is that, if it's part of Panda, it's not a large part.

Of course, looking beyond SEO, reducing your bounce rate and increasing your page-views and time-on-site is great. You've improved your engagement and it will help you. This is in no way wasted effort, and even if it doesn't have a direct, immediate impact on SEO, it will have indirect effects.

You mentioned the CMS spun out a lot of duplicates. If you have text-thin pages AND a ton of duplicates, that certainly could cause some problems. Have you taken steps to control and de-index those duplicates? That would probably be the first place I'd look, from your description of the problem.

[seo-wanna-bs]

Hi Highland, I truly wish I was in a niche, where it was viable to use Adwords. So much more reliable and consistent.

As we give away content and don't sell anything, adwords is a no-go.

I only wish I were hit by Penguin, I feel that's a much easier mess to clean up. Panda to me, is the bigger evil.

I do feel ATM, I am looking for a needle in a haystack.

But that said, I must remain hopeful!

[Highland]

This is going to sound screwy (especially in an SEO forum) but I stopped worrying about the organics after we tanked in April (I think Panda 3.5 possibly but no one update fits the drop). We started Adwords immediately and got some of the lost traffic back but there's really nothing major we can do to fix it. It's not that I've given up, its that the drop is really hard to quantify as to the cause, so fixing it is nigh impossible. I cleaned up some links that looked bad and I have my fingers crossed that it will fix the problem as the index catches up but, beyond that, most of our efforts in general are in making our website better. We've pretty much defined our niche and I suspect we will bounce back eventually but, until Google stops disliking us, we're just going to keep on plugging away. We've made our site far better and nobody else even comes close to offering what we offer (although some people have stock items that are cheaper)

Incidentally our bounce rate has gone way down, conversion rates have crept up and I still have no earthly idea how to get us back to #1 (there's 15 cruise liners of people like us out there, tho). But Adwords have shown us some terms we've not pursued before. Small blessings in a hurricane, I suppose.

My advice to you: be the best at what you do. Make your website awesome and then call it crap and make it even more awesome (that's how artists do it I think). Be sure you're running social campaigns as well. Social has been a small bright spot as well. Sooner or later Google will sort it out but I have a hunch they're playing chicken with the spammers.