How long to recover from Panda Update
-
Hi there,
I think I was affected by the recent Panda update as I had a lot of duplicate content for my product descriptions (about 300). I'm going through and rewriting these to be both helpful and unique. I was ranking quite nicely for a big spread of keywords, but have been seeing my rankings drop day after day since the update.
Is it possible to see my rankings improve again after Google re-crawls my site, or would a penalty have been applied to my site preventing me to re-gain my positions for sometime. It's probably worth noting that I have a lot of unique and helpful content, it was just my product pages that had duplicate content, but I've seen my rankings across the board drop.
Any discussion and insight would be much appreciated.
-
Weekly sounds about right. Dont forget to take a look at your places listings, and other elements while you are in the mood to update and improve!
I understand how frusterating it can be optimizing an ecom shop or store. Lots of pages, lots of time, lots of typing. Just got done doing a site that had over 3000 pages. Keep your heart in it, and you will see the results you want. I took a look at the site, seemed like you were going in the right direction.
-
Thanks Andy, and everybody else. I think I have a clear action plan to move forward now. Get the product descriptions unique - and written to be more helpful and better for converting customers, adding more to the blog (bit thin at the moment with just news rather than useful info) and creating great resources to help customers (+ giving the site linkable assets)
Many thanks
-
Hi David, I think I have it set to weekly. I was guestimating it might take a month for it to start resolving itself. Gutted really as I was just about to invest time in more content and outreach. Ohwell.
-
Once its all fixed, you should see start seeing changes in about a month or so. There really isnt any specific timeline, and all you can do is get the errors fixed, and resubmit the sitemap and use the "fetch as google" option in Google WMT. Sometime changes can happen in a week, all depends what your crawl frequency is set to. In your sitemap, do you have it set to daily, weekly, or monthly?
-
I would defiantly say its something to do with Panda
Your drop as seen on the graph, is your search visibility and while its not a great indication on its own, it still pretty useful. Your drop in % terms in the same as Ebay's.
Generally speaking people are saying Ebays drop is down to poor quality content, so if David is right about Matt Cutts saying its not affecting product descriptions I would take a look at your blog and add more content (however that does all seem unique).
I will still work on the product descriptions and making them more useful for the user, plus you win twice, higher ranking and more customer converting and they are getting the advice they need without leaving your site
-
Hi David,
I appreciate your input. I only made that assumption as the drop coincided with the update - literally the same day of the update after having massive gains for weeks (and months) prior. A lot of my rankings that dropped were for category pages and my homepage that are unique and actually quite useful for readers.
Do you think you could pinpoint the reason for the drop if it isn't due to duplicate content?
-
Thanks Andy, that's the app I'll be using.
I've seen a drop across the board for keywords, but not a complete failure. Yes this time of year is when I make the money. I've just started so put some of the fluctuations down to that too. Just need to keep plugging away at it I guess.
-
I'd be surprise if you were hit by Panda for duplicate content on product descriptions. Matt Cutts is on record saying it's not a big deal for ecommerce sites.
-
Hi Sean
I used to have a shopify store as well and there are plenty of apps, try this one I have used previously and liked:
http://docs.shopify.com/manual/more/official-shopify-apps/product-reviews
Investing in product descriptions and unique content will pay off in the long run.
I've noticed you have got some great content on your category pages (hopefully these still rank as its the time of the year when I guess you get a lot of sales) so its just the product pages which will require work.
-
Hey Andy,
Thanks for your response. Yep, you hit the nail on the head. Duplicated from the manufacturer to save time as I wanted to launch quickly. Invested my time in creating new content rather than revisiting my product descriptions. I'm pleased I'll be able to recover.
I will look to get product reviews implemented ASAP.
Many thanks,
Sean -
Hi
Yes it is possible to recover, but it wont be an overnight solution.
You are doing the right thing and tackling the issues of duplicate content. I think this update will have affected quite a few e-commerce sites as a lot I see always use the manufacturers description (duplicating content) usually for the reasons is easier and cheaper.
And good way of improving might be to ask previous people to write product reviews on the page. This is a good way of generating good unique content.
Not sure what platform you use or whether its custom built, but there is usually some good apps that will automate this process, sending emails to customers after a certain time to come and leave a review.
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
-
Payday Loan or Panda? Any thoughts?
So this is a very old problem, but I'm finally getting around to trying to figure it out. My site experienced a dramatic organic traffic drop from Google (-40%) on May 17th 2014. It then drops another 30% on May 19th 2014. See graphs. According to Moz these two dates correlate with Payday Loan 2.0 and Panda 4.0. Panda makes complete sense, as this site (www.ausedcar.com) has a large amount of content that is syndicated across other sites (used car inventory is essentially the same everywhere on the Internet). Payday Loan on the other hand, which seems to be the primary traffic drop doesn't make any sense at all. Is it possible I started getting hit by Panda on the 17th and then it completed on the 19th? I know the dates for algorithm changes are not perfect. Next, assuming it is Panda, what are some things you guys have done to help with this? As I mentioned this content is duplicated all over the Internet, so it seems like Google arbitrarily picks winners and losers (my site is twenty years old!). I know I need unique content, but not sure how exactly to do that besides rewriting words so it doesn't appear duplicate.
Technical SEO | | Catbelly0 -
Updating Old Content - Should I update In Search Console?
Hey Mozzers If I'm updating old content on a site (for example adding some copy and adding some new links in the page) - Is it important to get Google to recrawl with the feature in webmaster tools? If you didn't do this, could you be waiting a long time for google to recrawl the URL? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
I think I got hit by the latest Panda update
Hi everyone, I think one of my sites got hit with Panda. On Sept 18th the site dipped to "not in top 50" for almost all keywords. I checked GWT for the manual action email but my inbox is empty!!!!!!!!!! The lesser of 2 evils I guess. They had major server issues that week as well so it is hard to identify what caused the site to dip. My client has original content on the website but almost all content on the blog is copied. Do you recommend me deleting the non original content? Can the problem be elsewhere? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
January 2013 Google update affected my projects ?
I am running 400+ projects. Mostly all projects keyword rank has been effected recently. IS there any new update from google between 10-19 January 2013 ?
Technical SEO | | deepakwadhwa0 -
Thought I was Hit By Panda? Regained Rankings?
Hello, At the beginning of the week, traffic dropped drastically, I was under the impression that the site was hit by panda. This morning, I am seeing the keywords/pages, right back into position? Does anyone know what this could be? Webmaster had no messages, and was free of errors? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Updated title tags not displayed in SERPs?
A couple weeks ago I updated the title tags and URLs of some of my site's top landing pages, but the new versions aren't indexed in Google. Webmaster tools says that my site has been crawled since updated. I'm using a pretty old version of Joomla for a CMS, and had to fight with the plugins a little bit to make it all work (sh404SEF for the URLs and sh404SEF Custom Tag Module for the title tags). For example, www.radiussecurityinc.com's indexed title is still: Radius Security Solutions | Home But should be: CCTV System Design - IP Industrial Surveillance | Radius Security Other pages besides the home page have the old title tags as well as old URLs. Any ideas how I can fix this? Thanks a lot in advance! Jeff
Technical SEO | | jaysan0