Panda'd - and I think I know how to fix it...
-
Hi,
I have a non-core site that seems to have been affected by a Panda refresh in late December http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012
Anyway, I couldn't figure out for the longest time why this site, which is full of high-quality, expert-level content would get dinged -- i made several moves to try and eliminate duplicate content -- even though I couldn't find evidence of the duplicate content, but it's a wordpress site so there's lots of opportunities to accidentally introduce it through archives, tags and whatnot.
The classic SEO mistake I was making was I was forgetting about a type of post we were doing to facilitate one of our email campaigns. On most, sites there's always something you aren't optimizing, and that's the stuff that can really create unintended issues in google, because the decisions made on those pieces, is often more operational toward the other campaigns, than strategic to search.
these posts, are thin little articles, written by humans, but the text is actually submitted to another external site, published there and then recreated as content that the email campaign links to. These posts are segregated from the normal feed on the wordpress site, and the last time I had reviewed this content, we were not using a method for creating that involved publishing it to facebook first.
But, OK, so I'm going to stop indexing this content, that's a given. I believe that is the Panda issue -- I could be wrong, but it makes sense, since otherwise the site is maybe the least likely site to be affected by Panda that I've ever been involved with.
Do I do anything else, after fixing a Panda issue? Is there a reconsideration request for this or something. Should I send a singing telegram to Cutts?
I researched a few articles, and there wasn't much on what to do after you fixed it, but to wait. Just wondering if anyone else who fixed a Panda thang, utilized any communication channel to let google know. thanks!
-
I would be interested to hear of the sites that have resolved the problem with Panda. I can hardly find any examples of Panda recovery examples.
-
Previously you would wait until the next Panda refresh to see if your website was unflagged from the algo penalty. A few months ago, they made Panda a rolling algorithm so you should see whether your site is fixed after its next crawl/reindex.
No need for a reconsideration request but a singing telegram would probably get Cutt's attention if your site doesn't rebound in a week or so
Cheers, Oleg
-
Well, skipping ahead to the "what to do now?" question, I'd say you are correct in that there is nothing to do but wait. If it was a manual penalty, you would have a notice in your Webmaster Tools indicating it as such.
If it is algorithmic (and it sure sounds like it is from what you've described) then all you can do is wait. This process can take anywhere from a week to 2 months and seems to be a bit of a crap shoot. I will say, from my experience I've seen these types of fixes get resolved in more the 2-3 week range but have heard of it taking longer. A singing telegram might be nice but I think Matt would most likely just cross his arms and give off a simple fake smile, thank them and close the door.
This is oddly symbolic to the way the Google Webspam Team punks us SEO guys on the reg.
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
-
Weird behavior with site's rankings
I have a problem with my site's rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mcurius
I rank for higher difficulty (but lower search volume) keywords , but my site gets pushed back for lower difficulty, higher volume keywords, which literally pisses me off. I thought very seriously to start new with a new domain name, cause what ever i do seems that is not working. I will admit that in past (2-3 years ago) i used some of those "seo packages" i had found, but those links which were like no more than 50, are all deleted now, and the domains are disavowed.
The only thing i can think of, is that some how my site got flagged as suspicious or something like that in google. Like 1 month ago, i wrote an article about a topic related with my niche, around a keyword that has difficulty 41%. The search term in 1st page has high authority domains, including a wikipedia page, and i currently rank in the 3rd place. In the other had, i would expect to rank easily for a keyword difficulty of 30-35% but is happening the exact opposite.The pages i try to rank, are not spammy, are checked with moz tools, and also with canirank spam filters. All is good and green. Plus the content of those pages i try to rank have a Content Relevancy Score which varies from 98% to 100%... Your opinion would be very helpful, thank you.0 -
Can't diagnose this 404 error
Hi Moz community I have started receiving a load of 404 errors that look like this: This page: http://paulminors.com/blog/page/5/ is linking to: http://paulminors.com/category/podcast/paulminors.com which is a broken link. This is happening with a load of other pages as well. It seems that "paulminors.com" is being added to the end of the linking pages URL.I'm using Wordpress and the SEO by Yoast plugin. I have searched for this link in the source of the linking page but can't find it, so I'm struggling to diagnose the problem. Does anyone have any ideas on what could be causing this? Thanks in advance Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
What do you think about this links? Toxic or don't? disavow?
Hi, we are now involved in a google penalty issue (artificial links – global – all links). We were very surprised, cause we only have 300 links more less, and most of those links are from stats sites, some are malware (we are trying to fight against that), and other ones are article portals. We have created a spreadsheet with the links and we have analyzed them using Link Detox. Now we are sending emails, so that they can be removed, or disavow the links what happen is that we have very few links, and in 99% of then we have done nothing to create that link. We have doubts about what to do with some kind of links. We are not sure them to be bad. We would appreciate your opinion. We should talk about two types: Domain stats links Article portals Automatically generated content site I would like to know if we should remove those links or disavow them These are examples Anygator.com. We have 57 links coming from this portal. Linkdetox says this portal is not dangerous http://es.anygator.com/articulo/arranca-la-migracion-de-hotmail-a-outlook__343483 more examples (stats or similar) www.mxwebsite.com/worth/crearcorreoelectronico.es/ and from that website we have 10 links in wmt, but only one works. What do you do on those cases? Do you mark that link as a removed one? And these other examples… what do you think about them? More stats sites: http://alestat.com/www,crearcorreoelectronico.es.html http://www.statscrop.com/www/crearcorreoelectronico.es Automated generated content examples http://mrwhatis.net/como-checo-mi-correo-electronico-yaho.html http://www.askives.com/abrir-correo-electronico-gmail.html At first, we began trying to delete all links, but… those links are not artificial, we have not created them, google should know those sites. What would you do with those sites? Your advices would be very appreciated. Thanks 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hi all, my site www.uniggardin.dk has lost major rankings on the searchengine google.dk. Went from rank #2-3 on important keywords to my site, and after the latest update most of my rankings have jumped to #12 - #20. This is so annoying, and I really have no idea what to do. Can it cause bad links to my site? In that case what will I have to do? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xpeztumdk
Christoffer0 -
What NAP format do I use if the USPS can't even find my client's address?
My client has a site already listed on Google+Local under "5208 N 1st St". He has some other NAPs, e.g., YellowPages, under "5208 N First Street". The USPS finds neither of these, nor any variation that I can possibly think of! Which is better? Do I just take the one that Google has accepted and make all the others like it as best I can? And doesn't it matter that the USPS doesn't even recognize the thing? Or no? Local SEO wizards, thanks in advance for your guidance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Do you think WOT (mywot.com) is really neutral? (Discussion)
Dear Mozers, Im concerned about our reputation on mywot.com, the actual reputation doesn't match with our site. Any sggestion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Can literally any site get 'burned'?
Just curious what people think. The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords. Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good. We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000. All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links. Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality. I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right? So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working). I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110 -
Strange recovery from Panda
I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up? Thx Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0