Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?

[Kingalan1]

I operate a New York City commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Ranking and traffic have dropped steeply since early June.

Around May 20th a new Panda update was launched by Google and I wonder if that could partially explain the drop. My site contains the following:

-300 listing pages. These are product pages and often contain less than 100 words. Many have not been changed in two years.

-150 Building pages. These contain less than 220 words. Many have not been changed in two years.

-40 blog pages. We have been adding 1 or 2 per month.

-50 or 60 neighborhood and type of space pages. These contain 200-600 words.

Could our drop in traffic be due to Panda? I might add that an upgraded version of the site with new forms, a modified right rail an header was launched on June 6th. Also, we submitted a disavow file with Google on April 20th for about 100 toxic domains, one third of the 300 domains that link to us.

In order to take remedial action we need to understand what has happened. Any ideas???

Thanks, Alan

[bradwayland]

Were the 300 listing pages ever receiving traffic?  If the answer to this question is no or if a significant number of them weren't ever receiving any traffic it might change what I would think you should do.  Poor title tags will hurt your visibility in lots of ways.  I would not personally tie the title tag strategy to Panda.  Panda is a content algo.  It seems to look for duplicate, near duplicate, thin content, poor quality content and then make sure that sites with those criteria are not ranking.  If you think more broadly about it you might ask why Google would want to take the whole site down in the rankings for thin content on a few or many pages with potentially low or no traffic.  I think the reason they are penalizing the whole site is because they don't want webmasters producing this type of content.  If they can get content creators to think twice before creating another 20 urls about x topic then over the long haul their job will become much easier.  They can fight off spam more easily because it won't work.  I was very angry when Panda 4 rolled out and some sites I own got hit.  However, I feel empowered now to correct the issue.  My suggestion for you is to compare the urls with their links and traffic.  There should be some clear cut low quality stuff that you can noindex.  On the pages that drive traffic I would make sure you are providing deep, helpful content.  Hard to discuss all the things you may need to do over email but I think you are probably getting the idea.  PM me if you want to chat more.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Brad:

I have had a very similar experience. Reduced ranking across the board for any competitive term, but not eliminated.

My site contains 300 listing pages (product pages). Those listing are usually short (less than 125 words). Would beefing them up to 200-300 words help?  Also the title tags for these terms are not that well written. Some look like this:

"242 W. 38th St. - Manhattan, New York", "12 W. 37th St. - Manhattan, New York,"

Some are more elaborate like: "14 Penn Plaza | Great Midtown Office Rental | 2,313 SF Negotiable", "Lease 14 Penn Plaza Executive Offices | 34th Street | 4836 SF"

Could poor title tags contribute to the penalty.

Also, many listings have "Manhattan, New York" added at the end of the title tag, really impoverishing it, like: "Park Avenue South 27th & 28th Street- Manhattan, New York"
"44th Street-Eighth & Ninth Avenues - Manhattan, New York"

These title tags seem really poor. Could that trigger the Panda penalty?

Also, many title tags for other page categories have "Metro Manhattan Office Space" at the end of them. Could this trigger the penalty? I think the title tags are really bad.

<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
|

<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
|   |

|

[Kingalan1]

Hi Egol:

Will Google remove Panda penalties once content is improved? Or does an improvement take months (like waiting for a Penguin update)

I can potentially correct two out of the three issues you mention without enormous SEO costs.  I am not sure how to address the structural problems.

Thanks,
Alan

[EGOL]

Google has been assessing sites with the Panda algo for over two years.  They are continuously changing the algo to promote sites that fit its requirements and demote sites that have content that does not.

In my opinion, your site has technical problems, thin content and duplicate content that could trigger Panda problems.  Read my replies to your previous questions to find them.

[bradwayland]

If you saw a drop around May 19-20 then I would say it is almost certain that this was Panda.  I've been in a similar experience.  I own a network of content sites that had never been clearly hit by Panda on the day of launch until Panda 4 where they got hit very hard.  When you consider Panda I would think of it less like an algo change and more like a filter.  Panda seems to crawl the site looking for certain criteria.  If your criteria meets these then all your results get filtered.  Remember that Google has clearly stated that their goal with Panda is for sites with thin or duplicated content to not rank high on the page.  In my case I am seeing that I still rank for everything that I used to rank 1, 2, 3 for but now I rank 8, 9, 10.  I have no proof yet that I can get out from under it but I am making a lot of changes now that I believe will do the trick to fixing my own traffic issues.  I found this article to be very helpful as I considered what I should do next

http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5536/google-panda-4-0-topical-authority-content-update-2014-case-study/

If you want to reach out to me privately I'd be happy to discuss in more detail.

Brad

[benjaminmarcinc]

Hi,

Did you get any penalty spam email? I would go through your links in webmaster tools and moz to see if your site is on and spammy sites, forums or blogs. If so ask for removal or disavow them. I would also add some good rich content to the pages that may have "thin content"

[Kingalan1]

Hi EGOL:

Interesting. But why now?  Panda updates have been rolling out frequently to no ill effect. There have been no material changes in the content in the last few months except for updating many key pages with better content.

How is this latest update of Panda different?

What would you suggest I do to escape from this penalty?

I have a bout 350 product pages with thin content (less than 120 words each). Would no indexing them or rewriting them help? What if I increased the content by 100-150 words? But I would think that Google would understand that product pages could have light content and still add value.

Thanks, Alan

[EGOL]

** Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?**

I believe that some form of Panda has gotten your site.