Panda Or Penguin Hit ?

[dweangorber]

Hi,

My site was hit in  april and  did get a warning message in wmt for unnatural links , so i removed links and filed a reconsideration request , google then revoked the penalty .

that was june , the site still has not recovered and thinking maybe i was hit by both panda and penguin , at that time i did not have analytics installed was using awstats .

I have attached awstats for april So you can see when the traffic drop started .

So was i hit by panda , penguin or both ?

NElu6 NElu6.png

[AdamThompson]

Panda is about a lot more than just ads on the website - it involves quite a few factors related to the quality of the content on a website (having too many ads is one of the factors).

Here is a blog post from Google listing some quality factors related to Panda: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Dean

If you really want to review this in earnest you need to go back to Feb 2011 and start reviewing things from there. Check for traffic drops that correspond with known updates to Penguin and Panda which you can get from here:

http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Then, you also need to compare this against the time you got the email from webmaster tools stating there was a manual penalty (which, of course is in addition to any Penguin and Panda issues).

So, resolving a Manual penalty is pretty tough so if you have sorted that, odds are you have got rid of a bunch of the bad links so may well have cleared up any Penguin issues but you really need to review the affected keywords and make double sure.

First step, check all the dates you lost traffic to get an idea of what your problems are then use that information to guide your hand going forward.

From our experience helping people with various penalties we can generally recover specific keywords by fixing the anchor text and we can recover some traffic with Panda penalties but reports of people recovering in entirety are thin on the ground (WPMU is the only one that springs to mind).

Ultimately, if you picked up a Penguin, Panda and Manual Penalty this year, then you probably have a whole bunch of problems that you need to review that go beyond trying to resolve the actual penalty issues.

Some useful further reading:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/penguin-diagnosis-and-recovery-strategy/

If you want more feedback and anything more than just a generic overview we would really require a link so we can take a look at the site itself.

Sure hope this helps though!

Marcus

[smokin_ace]

I am pretty sure that you have been hit by Penguin, I have the same traffic drop approximately at same dates. (24-25 of april)

Even if  Google revoked penalty it doesn't meen that your rankings will return.

At the the time you need to understand how Google filters work:

Penguin is all about wrong on-page optimisation and unnatural linkbuilding! Don't buy from link farms and etc.

Panda is all about ads on website.

Thanks

Russel