Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in terms of being able to escape its clutches ?

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi,

Is being hit by Panda as hard to get out of as being hit by Penguin ?

Or if you clean up all your content should you get out of it relatively quickly ?

I have a very old (11 years) and established site (but also very neglected site that i'm looking to relaunch) but its on an ancient shopping cart platform which never allowed for Google analytics & GWT integration etc so i cant see any messages in GWT or look at traffic figures to correlate a drop with any Panda updates.

The reason i ask is i want to relaunch the site after bringing up to date with a modern e-commerce platform.  I originally launched the site in early 2002 and was perceived well by Google achieving first field of view SERPS for all targeted keywords however competitive, including 'ipod accessories', 'data storage' etc etc. These top positions (& resulting sales) lasted until about 2007 when it was overtaken by bigger brand competitors with more advanced & Google friendlier ecommerce platforms (& big SEO budgets)

I originally used the manufacturers descriptions editing slightly but probably not enough to avoid being considered duplicate content although still managed to obtain good rankings for these pages for a very long time even ranking ahead of Amazon in most cases.  The site is still ranking well for some of the keywords relating to products for which there is still manufacturer copied descriptions so i actually don't think i have been hit by Panda.

So my questions Is, is there any way of finding out for sure if the site has indeed even been hit by Panda at all without looking at analytics & gwt ?

And once i find out if it has or not:

• Is it best if i relaunch on same domain to take advantage of the 11 year old domain history/authority etc ? So long as i make sure all product descriptions etc are unique, if i have been hit by Panda the site should escape its clutches quite quickly ?

**OR **

• Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in which case is it best to start again on a new domain ?

Many Thanks

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks for taking time to respond Egol

Ok great Panda theoretically escapable in a few weeks then

Cheers

Dan

[EGOL]

Penguin... If you have crap links you must address them.  This can be very difficult to cut what you spent a lot of money on and considered to be assets of your business.  The challenge is a psychological mindchange and a lot of time to address the problem.  Probably pays to have an objective person review the links who has experience in recovering sites from Penguin penalties and unnatural links penalties.

Panda... If you have a site that has lots of thin content, duplicate content or low value content then you must remove that content or  replace it with high value content.  Again you have a psychological challenge.  You must also be willing to spend money to acquire valuable unique content or spend time to create it.  You must be willing to chop off your feet to save your ass.    Keep in mind that some panda problems can be cause by technology glitches.  Before doing major surgery or major content investment it is probably a good idea to get a person  familiar with recovering Panda problems to review your site and your plan of action.

I had two sites hit by Panda.  On one site I had published lots of .gov and .edu press releases, some at their request, some at my decision.  I removed a lot of that content and noindex/followed the rest. That site recovered in a few weeks.  On another site I had pages of .pdf content to control the printing of graphics.  These were causing a duplicate content problem.  We applies rel=canonical with .htacess and the site recovered a few weeks later.

Good luck.