Hit Hard By Panda 20, Road To Recovery?

[Hyrule]

It's been 4+ years and we haven't been hit or affected by any update. But, on September 27th we were hit by Panda 20.

Does anyone have any idea where to start to recover? Any resources help at this point. Should i be focusing on re-writing my OLD web content? Should i focus on building more links?

Like i said, anything helps at this point. thanks,

Paul

[WebSupportGuy42]

Don't mean to distract from Paul's issues, but Marie I have to take issue with your Panda analysis. One of my websites was also hit hard by Panda over 27-29 September. It is NOT an EMD site, by the most common interpretations, so it can only be Panda.

The site has 130 pages of mostly very well-written content, tight on topic, targeting long-tail search phrases. So it does not fall into the "very little crawlable text" category.

The site has no duplicated content. I have run Copyscape across every page of the site and nothing more than about 3-4% duplication. It may be that the internal tag linking structure, or pointer domains, give Google an impression of duplicate content, but SEOMoz says my canonical structures are good.

There are virtually no spelling or grammar mistakes on the site, unless Google cannot handle international spelling. I am a writer by profession.

There are very few ads on the site at all. Certainly not to the level Google describes in its Panda rules.

So why was my site hit by Panda? And what can I do to recover? I am currently working through every single SEOMoz Pro report and checking the site page by page using the analysis tools, but what I am coming up with is really marginal.

The only things I can imagine could have been of concern to Google were (1) I had some scraped affiliate content on the site - hotels by location; (2) I had a decommissioned URL with a lot of indexed posts pointed at my domain; and (3) I had a lot of 404 errors due to a major change in permalink structure. (1) and (2) were corrected weeks before Panda and (3) has also been corrected.

I understand there has already been a Panda refresh since September and it made no difference at all. I had no messages from Google and they have confirmed (through a reconsideration request) that no manual penalty has been applied. All URLs are still indexed on Google, but appear around pages 45-50 of the results. I still get a trickle of Google search traffic, but overall it's down 85-90%.

URL is traveltipsthailand DOT com if anyone cars to check it out and give me their thoughts. Maybe Paul can also learn from what I am doing.

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[Vizergy]

So - any luck?

[Hyrule]

I can't tell you if it's Panda 20 or the EMD update. The domains that dropped aren't EMD's but they are linked to by a few prominent ones which seem to have dropped in the SERPS... hmmm..

[MarieHaynes]

It's important to know that Panda is completely about on page issues and not your backlink profile.

The key issue is to look for pages on your site that have the following:

-Very little crawlable text

-Content that is duplicated either on your own site or across the web.

-A large amount of spelling or grammar mistakes

-A distracting number of ads.

Then, on those pages you need to either add substantial content that is helpful to the reader, change content so it is not duplicated, noindex the page (either via a noindex tag or through robots.txt), or get rid of the page altogether.

You can read more detail abou this here.

For some sites this can be difficult...for example, affiliate sites with very little unique content.  I have seen others though that can recover with some hard work.

We tend to get a Panda refresh about every 3-6 weeks, so if you make the changes and Google is satisfied that you are now providing quality, unique content to readers then you can recover your rankings completely with the next refresh.

[Vizergy]

Weird - I will check my settings.  I was able to send you a PM with my email though.  You should have it

[Hyrule]

I tried to send a PM by looks like you have them disabled Maybe you can send me one with your email?

[Vizergy]

Cool - had to ask, no offence.  I will watch for the PM

[Hyrule]

No email from google because i have not engaged in any black-hat link building. I'll send you a PM.

[Vizergy]

What is your URL?  Did you get an email from Google stating that there was a penalty or anything like that?