Panda Recovery: Is a reconsideration request necessary?

[TomNYC]

Hi everyone,

I run a 12-year old travel site that primarily publishes hotel reviews and blog posts about ways to save when traveling in Europe. We have a domain authority of 65 and lots of high quality links from major news websites (NYT, USA Today, NPR, etc.).

We always ranked well for competitive searches like "cheap hotels in Paris," etc., for many, many years (like 10 years). Things started falling two years ago (April 2011)--I thought it was just normal algorithmic changes, and that our pages were being devalued (and perhaps, it was). So, we continued to bulk up our reviews and other key pages, only to see things continue to slide.

About a month ago I lined up all of our inbound search traffic from Google Analytics and compared it to SEO Moz's timeline of Google updates. Turns out every time there was a Panda roll-out (from the second one in April 2011) our traffic tumbled. Other updates (Penguin, etc.) didn't seem to make a difference.

But why should our content that we invest so much in take a hit from Panda? It wasn't "thin." But thin content existed elsewhere on our site: We had a flights section with 40,000 pages of thin content, cranked out of our database with virtually no unique content. We had launched that section in 2008, and it had never been an issue (and had mostly been ignored), but now, I believed, it was working against us. My understanding is that any thin content can actually work against the entire site's rankings.

In summary: We had 40,000 thin flights pages, 2,500 blog posts (rich content), and about 2,500 hotel-related pages (rich and well researched "expert" content).

So, two weeks ago we dropped almost the entire flights section. We kept about 400 pages (of the 40,000) with researched, unique and well-written information, and we 410'd the rest. Following the advice of so many others on these boards, we put the "thin" flights pages in their own sitemap so we could watch their index number fall in Webmaster tools. And we watched (with some eagerness and trepidation) as the error count shot up. Google has found about half of them at this point.

Last week I submitted a "reconsideration request" to Google's spam team. I wasn't sure if this was necessary (as the whole point of dropping the pages, 410'ing and so forth was to fix it on our end, which would hopefully filter down through the SERPs eventually). However, I thought it was worth sending them a note explaining the actions we had taken, just in case.

Today I received a response from them. It includes:

"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.

If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages..."

And thus, I'm a bit confused. If they say that there wasn't any manual action taken, is that a bad thing for my site? Or is it just saying that my site wasn't experiencing a manual penalty, however Panda perhaps still penalized us (through a drop in rankings) -- and Panda isn't considered "manual." Could the 410'ing of 40,000 thin pages actually raise some red flags? And finally, how long do these issues usually take to clear up?

Pardon the very long question and thanks for any insights. I really appreciate the advice offered in these forums.

[EGOL]

No reconsideration requests are needed for Panda.  It is algorithmic.

Good luck.

[TomNYC]

Thanks for sharing your experience with this. So you didn't submit any reconsideration requests. I'll just sit tight for a few more weeks and hope for the best!

[EGOL]

Is a reconsideration request necessary?   [...]   Pardon the very long question...

Just a short report here...  I had Panda problems on two sites.

On one I was republishing government and academic documents.  These were noindex/followed or deleted.  A few weeks later SERPs and traffic recovered for the rest of the site - these pages fell out of the index but were still useful for my visitors.

On another I had dupe content in .pdf documents to control printing format.  I used .htaccess to implement rel=canonical on the .pdf pages.  A few weeks later SERPs and traffic recovered.