What the Panda are we doing wrong?
-
Starting at June 8 of this year (the exact date of the Panda 3.7 update) the organic search engine traffic to our website dropped by about 30%. We're talking about a fairly new domain (about 8 months old) that has (or at least is suppost to have) pearly white SEO, and no outside parties have ever done any SEO for it. Organic search traffic was very stable in the weeks prior to June 8.
Organic search visits have dropped pretty much across the board (due to dropped ranking at the SERPS, as reported by our SEOmoz campaign). The (not provided) keyword has dropped 25%, while traffic from keywords related to our core products (joomla templates) have dropped almost 50%.
Knowing that June 8 saw a Panda update, I dug up some of the old Panda posts (never thought I'd need those for one of my own sites) to see what factors trigger a Panda hit. Based on the factors mentioned in this article at SEW, I'll briefly discuss what is going on at our website.
Affiliate links and ad units
Not a single affiliate link or ad unit can be found on our website.
Low-quality or thin content
Only 163 URLs from the www subdomain have been submitted in our sitemap, of which 152 are indexed. About 25 of those pages (the individual questions on our FAQ page) could in my opinion be characterized as 'thin content' pages.
Canonicalization
Every single page on our www subdomain has a rel="canonical". Given that the demo subdomain is based on Joomla, we have less control over those pages (and there will probably be some duplicate content issues there), but nothing more than any clean Joomla website would have.
Site speed
Our www subdomain receives a near-perfect 97/100 on YSlow, the demo subdomain scores a 83/100.
Quality
In the past months several popular resources (blogs, infographics) have been released that were well linked to by other (significant) players in our niche.
Social signals
Our site received about 25 +1's, several dozen (or more) tweets and a few Facebook Likes.
Search result pages
We don't have those.
Questions:
-
Can anybody spot potentially Panda-triggering issues on our website?
-
I'm aware that our link profile isn't perfect (not very bad either), but to my knowledge Panda was/is an on-page driven algorithm update, right?
-
We're also running a demo subdomain (click 'demo' in the menu), hosting there five full Joomla installations to showcase our products (just like virtually all other template providers do). This subdomain seems to also have taken a hit, but less than the www subdomain (about 15% decrease in organic search visits). Is it possible that the demo subdomain has triggered this issue (and if so, what changes would you advice)?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-
-
Based on a few Panda related issues I've worked on and manage to get traffic back I will post a few ideas bellow.
Hopefully it will help or at least bring some new ideas to the table.
1. Panda is related mainly to content. Even if there are several other signals that gets into play - content is the major issue.
2. Also related to content, having thin pages into the index is a no-no. I've manage to get traffic back (almost to the same level as prior to the drop - around 90%) just by setting a lot of listing pages to no index and merging some thin content pages.
3. Duplicate content is a major element associated with Panda. As a starter you have http://www.themepartner.com/index.php and http://www.themepartner.com without a 301 redirect. Maybe you have more duplicate content. Screaming frog is a very good tool to check this out.
4. Affiliate issues and other issues (seo related) are not related with panda. Separate manual action or algorithmic action (filters) can be set but not related with panda. There is a very small percentage that a separate automatic filter was applied in the same exact date as a Panda update (not impossible but highly unlikely).
Site speed, quality overall, social signals are important as you know but not related with Panda.
Another good idea is to get some fresh content on the majority of pages - if possible.
Another idea - just an idea though - get rid of some of the boiler plates from the site have a better unique content on each page.
Just a few ideas - hope you can find some ideas.
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
-
Wrong image shown to represent brand in mobile search
The image I’ve attached is a screenshot of what shows up on mobile when I do a branded search for one of my clients. We have a Youtube video on the homepage featuring Harry Connick Jr. The video is directly under the hero image on the homepage, and the thumbnail for the video is the image that Google is pulling into the SERP. I don’t want this image in the SERPs. I’ve marked up the logo with schema but that doesn’t seem to be helping. Is there any other schema markup I can use to remedy this? What else I can do to influence which image Google pulls? zVfvz
Technical SEO | | tdastru0 -
Wrong titles for site links of my website.
Hello, everyone. As you can see from the images attached, the site link of the About page has a Weird title " About About about". I have add proper meta description, but it still appears like this. This problem is killing me. What else i can do to solve this problem? Thanks Jason UJcRov1
Technical SEO | | jasonyeyeye0 -
Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example
Hi All, I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory. My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed. But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs. Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear. Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition) Thank you.
Technical SEO | | georgexx0 -
Do I have panda issues?
Hi , I m looking for suggestions for my website i believe is suffering from the panda updates. Can someone point out what possible issues within the site that might be causing with recent panda updates? here is the link http://goo.gl/St3aP thanks nick.
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Moving articles to new site, can't 301 redirect because of panda
I have a site that is high quality, but was hit by penguin and perhaps panda. I want to remove some of the articles from my old site and put them on my new site. I know I can't 301 redirect them because I will be passing on the bad google vibes. So instead, I was thinking of redirecting the old articles to a page on the old site which explains that the article is moved over to the new site. I assume that's okay? I'm wondering how long I should wait between the time I take them down from the old site to the time I repost them on the new site. Do I need to wait for Google to de-index them in order to not be considered duplicate content/syndication? We'll probably reword them a bit, too - we really want to avoid panda. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | philray
Phil0 -
Wrong Page Ranking
Higher-level page with more power getting pushed out by weaker page in the SERPs for an important keyword. I don't care about losing the weaker page. Should I: 404 the weaker page and wait for Google to (hopefully) replace it with the stronger page? 301 the weaker page to the stronger page? NOTE: Due to poor communication between content team and myself, the weak and strong pages have similar title tags (i.e, "lawsuits" and "litigation")
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Anyone notices the effect of the panda update for the rest of the world?
Friday google applied the Panda Update for the rest of the world, I checked my rankings and nothing seemed to have changed , does anybody notice any of the effects already? Is it to soon to draw any conclusions after 2 days?
Technical SEO | | Arnx0 -
Panda Update Question - Syndicated Content Vs Copied Content
Hi all, I have a question on copied content and syndicated content - Obviously copying content directly form another website is a big no no, but wanted to know how Google views syndicated content and if it views this differently? If you have syndicated content on your website, can you penalised from the lastest Panda update and is there a viable solutiion to address this? Mnay thanks Simon
Technical SEO | | simonsw0