Numbers are now halved.

[hamackey]

We lost 10% last month when Google upgraded. Now we are half of last weeks numbers. I run an informational site for digestive diseases. We don't sell, and we don't spam. How do I recover from something I am not doing?

Moz shows me a few errors, but the only thing that it consistently reports is the keyword is used too often in the pages. This is an informational site that talks about diseases.

We do have some strange links that point to us, but we did not create them, and have no idea why they are there. We did not buy them.

Any ideas would be appreciated. Scratching our heads a lot here.

Harry

www.ddc.musc.edu

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[MarieHaynes]

I had a quick look at your links and I don't think they're the problem.  Penguin and link related algorithms are meant to catch sites that are cheating.  The links that you have with exact match anchor text don't look like self made links to me.  Now, I only spent a few minutes looking, but I think you need to look elsewhere.

I think EGOL's on the right track with Panda thoughts.  The update that happened a month ago was a Panda update and sites that were affected either positively or negatively have been seeing a further jumps or dips in traffic since then.  I have seen other sites that seemed to have another Panda related change in traffic around June 12 as well.

A few of us who deal with a lot of Panda hit sites noticed that a good number of the sites that were affected by Panda were ones in industries where Google could recognize "experts".  What I mean by this is that I think it's possible that Google is trying to bubble up authoritative content and not reward content that is not written by an expert.  With that being said, I looked at a few of your articles and they definitely read as factual and authoritative.  I don't know how Google decides whether a medical site is trustworthy in its advice, but I'd probably be reviewing things like grammar and spelling and making sure there aren't pages on my site that contain dated advice.

As EGOL mentioned, there is a fair amount of duplication of your articles on the web.  However, I believe that if you are the author of this content then it is unlikely that Google is penalizing you for duplication because others stole your content.  With that being said, if you have content that is copied from other sources then that needs to be noindexed or removed.

You do have thin pages on your site such as the following:

http://www.ddc.musc.edu/professional/education/atlases/EUSvideo/loadvideos/CBDstone_WMlarge.html

http://www.ddc.musc.edu/professional/education/atlases/EUSvideo/abnormal/biliary.htm

http://www.ddc.musc.edu/professional/education/atlases/ERCP/introduction/index.htm

I'd consider noindexing any page that has little written content on it or that you really wouldn't expect people to be looking for when they are typing in search queries to Google.  Or, for your video pages you could consider writing substantial content to go with them.

Also, have you made any changes recently?  I've seen a number of sites that thought they were hit by Panda but really they had problems with their tracking code or they changed their urls and didn't institute the proper redirects or other technical things like that.

[EGOL]

Compare your page

http://www.ddc.musc.edu/public/symptomsDiseases/diseases/pancreas/gallstones.cfm

to this....

http://www.virtuallrc.com/content/health_medical/gallstones.html

There are huge blocks of text.  Hundreds of words that are absolutely verbatim.  Somebody is copying sombody.

If you have content that has huge blocks of text taken verbatim from other sources then you are at risk from Panda or from filtering.

If you click through to the search results in my post above there are hundreds of other pages on the web that have the same content.  Verbatim.

Google doesn't like that.

[hamackey]

Very interesting. So I ran some pages against plagspotter.com. Does anyone have a preference for this type of tool?

The results indicate about 2-6% duplicate content, mostly sentences that specifically describe a condition or symptom Working on those.

We did discover some wonderful links that we just disavowed. We don't cleanse anything. Or zap anything.

We also deleted the reference to the in-house blog until I can find a way to resolve to the name, and not the ip. Is this a big no-no? We ran into this problem when we configured VMHosts on that server.

We are also racking our brains to try and figure out what might have changed last week. The only thing that comes to mind is that we demoted some links to make google push more powerful subjects to the top. We revoked those this morning.

Thanks for all the advice, from all parties. It has been very helpful. I will post another response if what we try makes any difference.

Harry

ATVvFkk.png

[EGOL]

For a lot of your big articles, either your guys copied the work of other people or other people copied you.

Look here.

Over 1,100 websites have content that is verbatim to yours.

If this was my site I would either....

A) noindex that content

B) delete that content

C) noindex and rewrite, removing the noindex as the new versions are published.

I think that this site might have other problems.  If you really want to fix it I would get someone who really knows penalty recovery to do a deep dive and prepare a "to do" list for you.

[BCutrer]

Here is my only thought on that (and you may be correct),

From his data screenshot and what he said this site has already escaped numerous Panda updates. The drop doesn't coincide with a published change. It could be a small tweak sunk them, but if it was Panda wouldn't this be an end of May hit?

[hamackey]

I don't see what you are seeing. When I cut and paste my copy to Google, I see my site. Those below it are marginally related.

However, most medical sites describe symptoms and diseases. If what you are saying is true, all medical sites would have experienced the same drop.

What we did in this site was try and write to people without medical degrees. Most medical sites are dry. They cannot hold the reader long.

Thanks, I will study your comments.

Harry

[EGOL]

Finally... a lot of the deep content is duplicated on hundreds of other websites.  See here.

When Panda attacks you gotta get original content or die.

[EGOL]

In my opinion, this site is a candidate for Panda problems.  Much of the content is skimpy and very similar in wording to content that is published on other websites.

When you have lots of pages with one paragraph and can grab a sentence from the page, copy paste it into google between quotes and find it verbatim on a number of other sites that is how you get a Panda problem.

Also, at the bottom of each page there is a "Digestive Health Blog".   All of that content resolves on an IP address.

[hamackey]

Many thanks, good advice.

Starting the process already. GWT gave us no indication that we were doing anything wrong, however, it seems a two sites that have no content have linked to us thousands of times. Tried to look at their source, and there is none! WTF?

I did not need this.

Harry

[David-Kley]

We have seen some movement, also in our own rankings. Here is how we have been proactive:

1. Look at all major competitors that have seen a ranking increase.
2. Run a backlink profile on the sites in question.
3. Take a look at link results, and compare to ours.
4. Compare on page content, and back end seo structure
5. Do a wide search around a certain keyword, and its multiple variants.

Implement what needs to happen, based off of results. Strangely enough, we have seen a competitor rise very high in the rankings, that has TONS of spammy links. Even if we go to page two, we refuse to implement that same tactic. Porn sites, Korean and Chinese sites. The thing is, we dont see that ranking result as being sustainable. Google has been rolling out a lot of updates and tweaks, and we dont think that its over. The results you see now, should be compared to those a month from now. Could be that they are still in the middle of implementing the update, and the results are not stable.

If you want the full breakdown on how to analyze the competition, take a look here:
Illustrated Guide to Competitor Analysis

[BCutrer]

I'm not saying the links are not legit, I'm just saying ahrefs  is seeing a high volume of the same anchor text that's not branded coming inbound on a short period of time. It could have triggered something algorithmically. It's a large volume of growth of links compared historically for your site from multiple domains (several are coming from a site without a written domain) with the same anchor text. I could see something triggered in Google for that. I'm just shooting from the hip from the data you shared and your impressions.

If you wanted to test it have the MUSCHealth site change the Anchor text or throw a non follow on for a test.

I would also look at landing pages from the site and see what ones dropped off turing that period.

[hamackey]

Both of those are legit. One is the main patient site for the Hospital. The other is a blog we maintain. Really has me puzzled.

We started re-writing our pages last summer, and ran the site up from 23K hits a month to over 100K. We used h2 tags based on the information we had, and keyword planner. No major changes to the structure. All good copy with no black arts involved. We run a clean site! We have no reason to do otherwise.

Moz dings me for 3 pages with duplicate content, but a lot of my pages have the keyword over-used. It is inherent in the information. If you are talking about diabetes, you say that word a lot. Hard to find synonyms for medical terms. We discourage them!

We have never had a situation like this, so I don't know where to begin to look for reasons. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

[BCutrer]

I would also think about your backlink profile. I ran the site through ahrefs. I'm not sure if it was intentional but there was a lot of newly discovered links all using the anchor text "Digestive Disease Center". There is the Site Wide one from http://muschealth.com/ but there are others and one with a dotted quad url http://128.23.34.205/blog/2013/10/ that is using that exact anchor text. You are currently on page 3 now for that phrase.

[TimHolmes]

It could possibly be the second update that was apparently rolled out last week (12th I believe) for Payday loans, however there is talk that it may be a change to the Panda 4 update.... check out more on http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-update-or-18709.html - but sounds like you have taken a hit.