What the Panda are we doing wrong?
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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:
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Can anybody spot potentially Panda-triggering issues on our website?
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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?
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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!
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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.
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