Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?
-
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
-
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.
-
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>
| ||
-
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 -
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.
-
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
-
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"
-
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
-
** Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?**
I believe that some form of Panda has gotten your site.
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
-
Site Migration
Hi, I have been researching the best way to migrate six sites into one, since I have never done it, and I am frankly overwhelmed. Some resources say to do it incrementally, and a/b test; but I would prefer not to have to do it, as won't it present a disjointed representation for visitors? The previous sites are older and a bit clumsy compared to the new design and functionality in the new site. Can someone please tell me the right way to approach this? Or tell me the best resource for a step-by-step prep, migrate, and watch process? Thanks so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer1230 -
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Panda penalty removal advice
Hi everyone! I'm after a second (or third, or fourth!) opinion here! I'm working on the website www.workingvoices.com that has a Panda penalty dating from the late March 2012 update. I have made a number of changes to remove potential Panda issues but haven't seen any rankings movement in the last 7 weeks and was wondering if I've missed something... The main issues I identified and fixed were: Keyword stuffed near duplicate title tags - fixed with relevant unique title tags Copies of the website on other domains creating duplicate content issues - fixed by taking these offline Thin content - fixed by adding content to some pages, and noindexing other thin/tag/category pages. Any thoughts on other areas of the site that might still be setting off the mighty Panda are appreciated! Cheers Damon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitator0 -
Support docs on a separate site?
Hello, A client has a large ecommerce site (www.mydomain.com) for technical products that require a number of technical documents. Most of these are PDFs, some 3D PDFs drawings and renderings - all good for indexing. We are considering 2 possibilities for these: 1 - a separate site (www.mydomain2.com or docs.mydomain.com), catalog style (probably wordpress) to store the files, with links from product pages at (www.mydomain.com) to the relevant PDFs. This will be much easier to maintain than the second possibility. 2 - storing the files at www.mydomain.com (in /docs/ folder, for example) with links from the product pages to the relevant PDFs. Is there an advantage one way or the other? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tlw0 -
Implications from portfolio site
I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio. The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably. The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little. What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered. This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages. Would you go for it and isolate anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Panda / Penguin Testing on a Site - Has anyone see this?
Hi, Trying to diagnose the fall of our site. We fell mainly with Panda 3.4 and then a little more with Penguin. We have a main site with 200 pages and an attached blog. example domain.com/blog Then blog that was really small with only 7 posts. One keyword phrase example: "ace widget software" has ranked # 2 and 3 through the entire storm. The page that is ranking is in our main root site (not the blog). We used to rank for 200 phrases now only rank for about 10 Over the past week I stumbled on the fact that if I create a new post in my blog, those pages rank in 3 days. Good rankings, #2 on one and at least first page on the other 5 pages. One page ranked #2 in 17 hours. The test I am conducting: I am now testing to see if maybe there is some coding issue on our site, we do not use a template but a 3 column design built in Dreamweaver using older style tables etc. 1. Putting a new page on the old design. 2. Taking an existing page and putting into new design without side columns. 3. Already testest - adding new page to blog (success on this test) Seems if it was a coding issue/ design the two or three keywords phrases that stayed steady through the storm would have fallen. our site: www.TranslationSoftware4u.com Has anyone else been adding new content to see it rank really good but cannot get the other pages to bounce back up in rankings? Open to ideas of why this is happening. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70 -
Does Google punish sites for Backlinks?
Here is Matt Cutts video, for those of you who have not seen it already. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4dAWb5jUws (Very Short) In this Video Matt explains that Google does not look at backlinks. Many link spamming sites have detected, there have been many website receiving warning messages in their Google web tools to deindex these links, etc.. My theory is that Google will not punish sites for backlinks. However, they manually check for "link farming sites" and warn anyone affiliated with them, just in case these links were built from a competitor. This way they can eliminate all the "Bad Link Farm" sites and not hurt anyone who does not deserve to be hurt. Google is not going to give us all their information to rank, they dont want us to rank. They want us to PPC. However, they do want to have the best SERPs available. I call it Google juggling! Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0