Recovery Steps For Panda 3.5 (Rel. Apr. 19, 2012)?

[JustDucky]

I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used - especially on sites that are not large scale ecommerce sites.

Blog site hit by Panda 3.5.   Blog has approximately 250 posts.  Some of the posts are the most thorough on the subject and regained traffic despite a Penguin mauling a few days after the Panda attack.  (The site has probably regained 80% of the traffic it lost since Penguin hit without any link removal or link building, and minimal new content.)

Bounce rate is 80% and average time on page is 2:00 min.  (Even my most productive pages tend to have very high bounce rates BUT those pages maintain time on page in the 4 to 12 minute range.)

The Panda discussions I've read on these boards seem to focus on e-commerce sites with extremely thin content.  I assume that Google views much of my content as "thin" too.  But, my site seems to need a pruning instead of just combiining the blue model, white model, red model, and white model all on one page like most of the ecommerce sites we've discussed.

So, I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used to decide whether to combine a page, prune a page, etc.

After I combine any series articles to one long post (driving the time on page to nice levels), I plan to prune the remaining pages that have poor time on page and/or bounce rates.  Regardless of the analytics, I plan to keep the "thin" pages that are essential for readers to understand the subject matter of the blog. (I'll work on flushing out the content or producing videos for those pages.)

How deep should I prune on the first cut?  5% ?   10% ?  Even more ?   Should I focus on the pages with the worst bounce rates, the worst time on page, or try some of both?

If I post unique and informative video content (hosted on site using Wistia), what I should I expect for a range of the decrease in bounce rate ?

Thanks for reading this long post.

[JustDucky]

Alan : Thanks for sharing your experience in such detail.

[loopyal]

After almost 2 years of panda destruction, and constant work on my site with no recovery whatsoever, I don't know if I have anything useful to contribute yet, so take this as some input.

Large site with over 2.2 million pages.

Deleted around 1.5 million pages

Removed all duplicate titles (removed for fixed)

removed all duplicate descriptions (removed or fixed)

Removed all problem pages (extra short, damaged content, empty)

Removed all duplicate body content pages.

Prevent addition of any new duplicates and if any slip past, fix within 24 hours.

Also, checked for incoming links and discovered some sites with problems pointing in - fixed or had these removed.

RESULT after almost 2 years? - zero improvement.

Almost ready to slash wrists, but about to try subdomaining first.

It would be funny if not so sad.