Help for a webstore with Google Warnings for Watermark Images and Panda
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I have not had too much experience with helping websites that have been hit by Panda - any tried and tested formulas I can pass to website owner would be great. He does not want to reveal domain name - its in the area of children/baby products
'Web site featured on page 1 of Google search results for many years (website 5 years old- Australian domain) .
In April/May 2014, Google suspended our Google Shopping account because we used watermarks on all our images. We were advised that the suspension would remain in place indefinitely or until such time the watermarks were removed. We wrote back to Google to explain that these watermarks were put in place by our store back 2005 with the sole purpose of protecting our intellectual property. Needless to say, their attitude was unwavering. And as a result, revenue plummeted.
However, the perfect storm was about to hit our store without warning. In the same month, Panda 4.0 was unleashed and our store was hit once again. This update alone reduced visitor numbers by around 50% overnight.
The Panda 4.0 algorithm update was designed to target poor quality, duplicate content and unfortunately we had some of it.
We have now begun creating original content with many of the new products we're uploading onto our web site. It's slow and tedious. We have modified our web site to now include a
tag on a the home page (this was missing). We have removed many duplicate links from our footer (it was too big and contained hundreds of links that were also repeated from the header). We introduced a blog and we have engaged the services of a local seo company to disavow any bad backlinks and add missing or improve existing content to category and brand pages.
No improvement in our situation is yet visible and with Christmas just 3 months away, poor sales during our 'bread and butter' period will mean even tougher times for our store in 2015.
ANY PANDA EXPERTS who can help please email me felicity@gardenbeet.com - looking for independent freelancers rather than agencies
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Oh that certainly is tedious
It took us months, one of them took over a year, just to remove panda. All I can say is that you need to be patient and keep up the improvements. There's also a new update so keep an eye on that.
You can also setup a separate site or focus on paid/content marketing while you wait for the recovery for the mean time.
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