Last Panda: removed a lot of duplicated content but no still luck!
-
Hello here,
my website virtualsheetmusic.com has been hit several times by Panda since its inception back in February 2011, and so we decided 5 weeks ago to get rid of about 60,000 thin, almost duplicate pages via noindex metatags and canonical (we have no removed physically those pages from our site giving back a 404 because our users may search for those items on our own website), so we expected this last Panda update (#25) to give us some traffic back... instead we lost an additional 10-12% traffic from Google and now it looks even really badly targeted.
Let me say how disappointing is this after so much work!
I must admit that we still have many pages that may look thin and duplicate content and we are considering to remove those too (but those are actually giving us sales from Google!), but I expected from this last Panda to recover a little bit and improve our positions on the index. Instead nothing, we have been hit again, and badly.
I am pretty desperate, and I am afraid to have lost the compass here. I am particularly afraid that the removal of over 60,000 pages via noindex metatags from the index, for some unknown reason, has been more damaging than beneficial.
What do you think? Is it just a matter of time? Am I on the right path? Do we need to wait just a little bit more and keep removing (via noindex metatags) duplicate content and improve all the rest as usual?
Thank you in advance for any thoughts.
-
Never mind, I have just found your site... thank you again!
-
Thank you very much Marie for your time and explanation, I appreciated it. Do you offer SEO consultation? Please, let me know.
Thank you again!
-
The short answer to this is that this is not what the disavow tool was meant for, so no I wouldn't use it. Affiliate links SHOULD be nofollowed though. However, affiliate links won't cause you to be affected by Panda. Link related issues are totally unrelated to Panda.
Unfortunately at this point though I'm going to bow out of taking this discussion any further due to time constraints. Q&A is a good place to get someone to take a quick look at your site, but if you've got lots of questions it may be worthwhile to pay a consultant to help out with your site's traffic drop issues.
-
Marie, I was thinking, do you think the new Google's Disavow Links Tool could help me with my affiliate's inbound links? I mean, in case I could be damaged by that kind of link profile...
-
Yes, I think will be easier to change our own contents and tell them to add the canonical tag to our page. Thanks!
-
Actually you can see the subsequent pages still in the index, just enter on Google:
site:virtualsheetmusic.com inurl:downloads/Indici/Guitar.html
and you will see what I mean. I see though that most of those pages have been cached before I put the canonical tag, so I guess it is just a matter of time.
Am I correct? I mean, if a page has a canonical tag that points to a different page it should NOT be in the index, right?Thank you for looking!
-
If there's duplicate content then you've either got to change yours, get theirs changed, or get them to use a rel-canonical tag pointing to your site or a noindex tag.
-
I just had a quick look but I don't see any other versions of the page you listed in the index. If you just added the rel prev and next it won't take effect until the pages are crawled which could take even up to a few weeks to happen.
-
Sorry Marie, I forgot to answer your inquiry about music2print.com: that's one of our affiliates! That's another issue we could suffer for... how do you suggest to tackle the affiliate-possible-duplicate content? Thanks!
-
Yes EGOL, I understand that my only way is to really thicken and differentiate the pages with real and unique content. I will try that and keep you posted! Thank you for your help again.
-
Marie, look at the following page, it is the main (first) page of our guitar index:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html
Now, if you want to browse the guitar repertoire to the second page of the index, you click the page "2" or "next" link right? And then the second page appears:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2&lpg=20
And so on... well, those subsequent pages are the ones I was talking about: they have the rel=prev and rel-next tags together with the canonical tag that refers to the main (first) index page, but many of those subsequent pages are still in the index, Shouldn't they disappear and only the first page kept in the index?
As for what you wrote about how I can expect a recover from Panda, it makes sense and I really hope this new integration of Panda into the main algorithm will gradually speed things up. Thank you for your opinion on that.
I think my approach will be to keep noindexing those pages that really don't bring any business first and in the meantime improve all the others one by one. To nonidex all pages and start releasing just the optimized ones one by one scares me too much!
-
Most of the content on my site is articles that are 500 to 5000 words and one to ten photos - all on a single page.
It was very easy for me to "noindex" the republished content and "noindex" the blog posts that were very short.
For a site that consists of pages where most of the content is thin and duplicated a massive rewriting job is required in my opinion. That is what I would do if I wanted to make an attempt at recovering such a site.
I had to chop off my foot to save my ass.
-
I'm not sure that I'm following what you are saying. Which pages are in the index that you feel should not be because of their canonical tag?
You mentioned above that it sounds like it is "easy" to recover from Panda. I don't think that is true for most sites. Most likely in EGOL's case he had a site that had some fantastic content to go along with the duplicate and thin content. If there is good stuff there, then getting rid of the low quality stuff can sometimes be a quick fix. But, if you've got a site that consists almost completely of thin or duplicated content then it may not be so easy.
In my experience, when a site recovers from Panda, it does not happen gradually as the site gets cleaned up and improved. Rather, there is a sudden uptick when Panda refreshes provided that you have done enough work for Google to say that enough of your site is high quality. However, this may change now that Panda will be rolling out as part of the regular algorithm and not just every 4-6 weeks or so as before.
-
The academic year is coming to a close in the northern hemisphere. Hire a music scholar who is also a great writer and attack this. Or hire a writer who appreciates music. Better yet, hire one of each.
It is time to exert yourself.
-
Thank you Marie, yes, the canonical should tell Google what you said, but I don't understand why the other pages (subsequent index pages) are still in the index despite the canonical tag. Am I missing something?
About the thin content and how that affect the whole site, I have no more doubts, that's clear and I will tackle that page by page. I am just wondering if my presence on Google is going to improve little by little over time while I tackle the problem page-by-page, or will my site score get better only when everything will be clean and improved? To deindex everything and start rewriting with the best products first. as EGOL suggested really scares me since we live with the site and we could ending up making no money at all for too long.
-
Yes, I see, it's great to know you could recover pretty easily. I will keep working on the contents then, even though I guess is going to be a long way... thanks!
-
You have a canonical tag on that page which tells Google that this particular page is the version that you would like in the index. It is indeed in the index. But there's not much on the page of value.
EGOL explained well how Panda can affect an entire site. I look at it as a flag. So, if Google sees that you have a certain amount of duplicate or thin or otherwise low quality content, then they put a flag on the entire site that says, "This site is generally low quality." and as such, the whole site has trouble ranking, even if there are some good pages in the midst of the low quality ones.
-
When you have a Panda problem it can damage rankings across your site.
I had a Panda problem with two sites.
One had some republished content and some very short blog posts. Rankings went down for the entire site. I noindexed them and the rankings came back in a few weeks.
The other site had hundreds of printable .pdfs that contained only an image and a few words. These were images using the .pdf format to control the scale of the printer. Rankings went down for the entire site. I noindexed the .pdfs and rankings came back in a few weeks.
In my opinion, your site needs a huge writing job.
-
Thank you Egol for reinforcing what Marie said, but still I can't figure out why some of my best pages, with many reviews and unique content, have dropped from the top rankings (from 1st page to 13th page) the last November:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-can-do-to-put-these-pages-back-in-the-top-results
Thank you again.
-
Wow, thank you so much Marie for your extended reply and information, it is like gold for me!
Some thoughts about what you wrote:
For example, take this page:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html
There is almost no text on that page that is unique to that page. Why should it be in the search results? I did a search for the text on the top of the page and saw that it was repeated on thousands of your pages. The rest of the text is all from other pages as well. If there is nothing on this page that is unique and adds value, then it needs to be noindexed.
I actually used to not care about subsequent pages in indexes such as the Guitar one because I thought that what Google needed was just the new rel=prev and rel=next tags to figure out that the important page was the first one only, but then I got scared by Panda and 5 weeks ago I put the canonical tag on subsequent pages pointing to the main page. So, I don't understand why you still find the subsequent pages on the index... shouldn't the canonical tag help on that?
And I get it now more than before: we really need to make our product pages more unique and compelling and we'll do that. Our best pages have many users reviews, but looks like that's not enough... look at what I am discussing on this thread about our best product pages with many and unique user reviews on them:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-can-do-to-put-these-pages-back-in-the-top-results
Those pages are dropped from page 1 to over page 10! Why?! Everything looks non-sense if you look at the data and how some thinner pages rank better than thicker ones. IN other words, despite what you write makes perfectly sense to me and I will try to pursue it, if I analyze Google results and my pages rankings, I cannot understand what Google wants from me (i.e. Why it's penalizing my good pages?).
And so, my last question is: have you idea when I will begin to see some improvements? So far I haven't seen any good results from my last action of dropping over 50,000 thin pages from the index, which I must say, it is not much encouraging!
Thank you again very much again.
-
I agree with Marie. The content is duplicate AND the content is very thin. Both of the Panda problems on every page.
A complete authorship job is needed.
Every page needs to be 100% unique and substantive.
Comments that appear on some pages are the only content that I saw that I would consider as unique.
If I owned this site and was willing to make a big investment I would deindex everything and start rewriting with the best products first.
-
Hi Fabrizo. I have a few thoughts for you. In order to recover from Panda you really need to make your pages compelling. Think, for each page, "Would Google want to show this page to people who are searching for information?"
I still see that there is a lot of work to be done to recover. For example, take this page:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html
There is almost no text on that page that is unique to that page. Why should it be in the search results? I did a search for the text on the top of the page and saw that it was repeated on thousands of your pages. The rest of the text is all from other pages as well. If there is nothing on this page that is unique and adds value, then it needs to be noindexed.
Is music2print.com your site as well? I see that the pages redirect to your site, but they mustn't have always done that because they are still listed in the Google index. If you had duplicate versions of the site then this is a sure-fire way to get a Panda flag on your site. If you no longer want music2print.com in the index then you can use the url removal tool in WMT to get rid of it. With the 301 in place, eventually Google will figure it out but it could take some time.
When I look at a product page such as http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html, the page is extremely thin. This is one of the difficulties with having a commerce site that sells products. In order for Google to want to display your products prominently in search, they need to see that there is something there that users will want to see that is better than other sites selling this product. When I search for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring sheet music" I see that there are 136,000 results. Why would Google want to display yours to a user? Now, the argument that I usually get when I say this is that everyone else is doing the same thing. Sometimes it can be a mystery why Panda affects one site and not the next, and comparing won't get us anywhere.
So, what can you do for products like this? You need to make these pages SUPER useful. I like giving thinkgeek.com as an example. This site sells products that you can buy on other sites but they go above and beyond to describe the product in unique ways. As such, they rank well for their products.
Also, the way you have your pages set up with tabs is inviting a duplicate content issue as well. For example, these pages are all considered separate pages:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html?tab=pdf
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html?tab=mp3
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html?tab=midi
...and so on. But they are creating a duplicate content problem because they are almost identical to each other. EDIT: Actually, you are using the canonical tag correctly so this is not as big an issue. However, if the canonical tag on http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html?tab=pdf is pointing to http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html, you are saying to Google, "http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/JesuGu.html" is the main version of this page and I want this page to appear in your index. The problem is that THIS page contains almost no valuable information that can't be found elsewhere and the majority of the page is templated material that is seen on every page of your site.
Unfortunately there are a lot of issues here and I'm afraid that recovery from Panda is going to be very challenging.
If this were my site I would likely noindex EVERYTHING and then one page at a time work on creating the best page possible to put into the search results. You may start by looking at your analytics and finding out which pages were actually bringing in traffic at some time and then rewrite those pages. You may need to be creative. You could write something about the history of the composition. Is there a story around it? Was it ever played for someone famous? Has anyone famous every played it? If so, on what instrument? Is there anything unusual about the composition such as the key or tempo? Can you embed a video of someone playing the composition?
It may sound ridiculous to do so much work for each item, but unless you can add value that can't be found elsewhere, then Panda is going to continue to keep your rankings down.
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
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
Google WMT Showing Duplicate Content, But There is None
In the HTML improvements section of Google Webmaster Tools, it is showing duplicate content and I have verified that the duplicate content they are listing does not exist. I actually have another duplicate content issue I am baffled by, but that it already being discussed on another thread. These are the pages they are saying have duplicate META descriptions, http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/bathroom-remodeling.html (META from bathroom remodeling page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Bathroom Remodeling Washington DC, Bathroom Renovation Washington DC, Bath Remodel, Northern Virginia,DC, VA, Washington, Fairfax, Arlington, Virginia</a>" /> http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/estimate-request.html (META From estimate page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Free estimates basement remodeling, bathroom remodeling, home additions, renovations estimates, Washington DC area</a>" /> WlO9TLh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler0 -
News section of the website (Duplicate Content)
Hi Mozers One of our client wanted to add a NEWS section in to their website. Where they want to share the latest industry news from other news websites. I tried my maximum to understand them about the duplicate content issues. But they want it badly What I am planning is to add rel=canonical from each single news post to the main source websites ie, What you guys think? Does that affect us in any ways?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyas_heych0 -
Duplicate blog content and NOINDEX
Suppose the "Home" page of your blog at www.example.com/domain/ displays your 10 most recent posts. Each post has its own permalink page (where you have comments/discussion, etc.). This obviously means that the last 10 posts show up as duplicates on your site. Is it good practice to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW on the blog root page (blog/) so that only one copy gets indexed? Thanks, Akira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai0 -
Blog Duplicate Content
Hi, I have a blog, and like most blogs I have various search options (subject matter, author, archive, etc) which produce the same content via different URLs. Should I implement the rel-canonical tag AND the meta robots tag (noindex, follow) on every page of duplicate blog content, or simply choose one or the other? What's best practice? Thanks Mozzers! Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content that looks unique
OK, bit of an odd one. The SEOmoz crawler has flagged the following pages up as duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea what's going on? http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/november-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-winter-insulation http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/july-2011/telephone-issues-$9-2nd-july-2011 http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-nordic-walking-poles http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Is this will post Duplicated Content
I have domain let say abcshoesonlinestore.com and inside pages of this abcshoesonlinestore.com is ranking very well such as affiliate page, knowledgebase page and other pages, HOWEVER i would like to change my home page and product page to shorter url which abcshoes.com and keep those inside page like www.abashoesonlinestore.com/affiliate or www.abcshoesonlinestore.com/knowledgebase as it is - will this pose duplicate content? This is my plan to do it: the home page and product page will be www.abcshoes.com and when people click www.abcshoes.com/affiliate it will redirect 301 to abcshoesonlinestore.com/affiliate HOWEVER if someone type abcshoesonlinestore.com or abcshoesonlinestore.com/product it will redirect to abcshoes.com or its product page itself (i want to use 302 instead 301 (ASSUMING if the homapage or product page have manual penalization or anything bad we want to leave it behind and start fresh JUST assume because i read some post that 301 will carry any bad thing to new site too) The reason i do not want to 301 from abcshoesonlinestore.com to abcshoes.com is because those many pages is ranking top 3 in GOOGLE ( i worry will lose this ranking since this bringing traffic for us) Is this good idea or bad idea or any better idea or should i try to see the outcome 🙂 - the only concern is from abcshoesonlinestore.com to abcshoes.com will pose as duplicate content if i do not use 301 - or can i use google webmaster tools to remove the home page and product page for abcshoesonlinestore.com can we tell google that? PS: (home page and product page will have new revise content and minor design change) but inside page will stay the same design Please give me some advise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | owen20110 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1