I think this website has been hit by Panda, but I would appreciate your opinion
-
I've been asked to check a possible SEO problem with a website, that has been loosing organic traffic during more than 2 years. I have attached a screen capture from analytics, showing how the organic traffic impact.
This website publishes over 15 articles per week, and 12 of them are news with less than 150 words. I think that maybe Panda is hitting the website because of these practice. You can check the website: crazyminds.es
I would like to know your opinion about the cause of this lost of organic traffic.
On January, 21st 2013 they changed the website design, but the lost of traffic seems to have started before that date.
If panda is hitting the website, what should be the best way to correct this situation? They have began now to write news with more than 200 words, but what happens with the old news? Maybe a no-index tag? blocked by robots? how should they manage those?
Thank you!
-
Here's more info on blocking javascript and the effects it can have on ranking:
https://yoast.com/google-panda-robots-css-js/
It's certainly possible that it's affecting the site, but there could be other issues as well.
Regarding the news articles, the number of words is not what matters most but whether these are useful to people. If most of these have very low user engagement, then they could possibly cause Panda to affect the whole site.
-
Hi Danny,
google search console shows this:
- 14527 indexed pages
- 19 resources blocked (js files, wp-includes is being blocked by robots.txt)
Errors, desktop:
- 3 server errors
- 1 soft 404 error
- 51 404 errors
Errors, news:
4 errors: article fragmented and article too short.sitemap.xml (146 warnings)
14439 urls, sent
13886 urls, indexed
No security problems.
No more issues, I would like to know whay you say it comes from a technical problem... I think there must be something that is making you think that way. I would appreciate your opinion on this issue. Thank you so much!
-
Hi Marie,
Thanks for your anwser.
The news they are publising are being created by them. Not just a copy and paste from other sites, created 100% by them, but those news are just 3 or 4 parragraphs long.I have checked that there are 19 resources blocked in 3185 pages (js files as you said). I can tell them to let googlebot explore the wp-includes directory, to avoid this issue. Do you really think this can cause such a big effect?
And finally, robots.txt file has also a Crawl-delay:30. Search console show that as a warning. What do you think, should we remove that? It shouldn't be an issue... but never knows...
Thank you so much!
-
I just noticed one other thing that could potentially be an issue. You've got wp/includes blocked by robots.txt. If this is where your javascript lies, then it's a good idea to actually allow Google to crawl this directory.
-
I took a quick look at this domain.
While there does seem to be a few duplicate content issues my hunch is that it is more likely to be due to some technical issues.
I would first go take a look in Google Search Console and check whether Google is reporting any crawl, sitemap or robots.txt issues.
If that doesn't show any issues then you may need to get a full technical audit by a reputable SEO
-
This is a question that would take a few hours to answer properly. Here are my brief thoughts.
What you've described with the short news articles sounds like Panda fodder for sure to me. If they're republishing news stories without adding value of their own then this is not a good idea. Too many of these can cause Panda to demote the entire site (not just the news articles.) In most cases I'd noindex content like this. Sometimes you can consolidate content into a thorough piece of content, but usually either noindexing or removing the content is best.
Also, it's not the number of words that matters. If they decided to write 1000 word articles that were essentially repeating what could be found on other news sites this would also be thin content. If they produce content that they want to have in the Google index, then Google has to have a reason to send readers to their content rather than to the hundreds of other people who wrote about the same news story.
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
-
Redirecting acquired website: DNS or 301?
Hi all, We have taken down some infringing websites and acquired them, so far we made around 40 websites. We are using DNS to land on our website from the acquired. But I've see that recently that DNS is not a redirect and we must 301 redirect from the old site to the new site. Also there is a potential harm in employing DNS method due to the duplicate content that will harm SERP performance severely. Which is the best way? DNS or 301 redirect? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How to use MOZ to improve my website
Hi, I am new for MOZ, have no idea how to improve my website with the function of MOZ, can anyone share their experience for using MOZ service. the more detail the better! Thanks a lot in advance! John Thanks for helps for everyone, it took me some time to read each answer, and also spend few days to study MOZ. My initial conclusion is the function of MOZ is to promote the idea of SEO, but not provide any specific SEO service for specific website except for some tools and report. So I am missing or misunderstanding MOZ's service, it will be always welcome to help me out by correcting my opinion. Anyway, thanks again for all the time you've given to me, and good to you all! -John.
Algorithm Updates | | Steplead1 -
Website dropping from Page 1 pos 5 to no ranking and then back again?
Hi all, We have a very odd occurrence with a client of ours. It should be noted that they had a penalty recently removed about 2 months ago after much work from our company. Recently they started appearing back on Page 1 Google for a semi competitive keyword term. We were very happy with this and so was the client. The the ranking improved with our work to position 5, which was excellent. Unfortunately what has been happening is they have been dropping out of the rankings completely for this semi competitive keyword for a few days and then reappearing in the same position. The client is checking daily and has noticed. I thought this is just a 'hangover' from the Google penalty and perhaps a one off occurrence, but it has happened about 3 or 4 times now and seems to be happening every couple of weeks. Can anyone shed some light on this behavior? I have checked Webmasters Tools and everything is fine. Thanks Jon
Algorithm Updates | | Jon_bangonline0 -
Google Panda - large domain benefits
Hi, A bit of a general question, but has anyone noticed a improvement in rankings for large domains - ie well known, large sites such as Tesco, Amazon? From what I've seen, the latest Panda update seems to favour the larger sites, as opposed to smaller, niche sites. Just wondered if anyone else has noticed this too?Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
Google indexing my website's Search Results pages. Should I block this?
After running the SEOmoz crawl test, i have a spreadsheet of 11,000 urls of which 6381 urls are search results pages from our website that have been indexed. I know I've read that /search should be blocked from the engines, but can't seem to find that information at this point. Does anyone have facts behind why they should be blocked? Or not blocked?
Algorithm Updates | | Jenny10 -
Content on Wordpress blog inside the main website for SEO
Hi, We have our main website and our blog on blog.practo.com. Now what I see is that we wish to write in content to grow our seo keywords and links. Should we put the blog as www.practo.com/blog and then begin writing all the content or we should put the wordpress blog as www.practo.com/(wordpress blog here) and then begin writing the content. For best practices I suppose we should have content lined up as www.sitename.com/category/article name etc or www.sitename.com/article name etc - am I correct? Our main site consists of few html pages and then we have our software on a different sub domain. What are the best ways to publish content and get it crawled at a faster rate for growth? I would also wish to understand how to measure the number of growth in % to our content we are writing. Only via google analytics or some other tool? Say I wish to see the growth of 10 articles from month of may and compare it to the month of april or march 2012. So what tools could I use to see if we are progressing or not? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | shanky10 -
Has Panda update made you lose your ranks but put them back again?
I noticed recently that one of the main sites I run dropped ranks quite heavily across the board. I then noticed that with very link building during the time that the ranks were down (about 1 month) that my ranks went back up again really quickly. All this with very little link building effort, and its the same link building campaign I've been running for a while. So I'm wondering has any been experiencing ranking flux between jan and feb? I know that people reckon if you fix some things your ranks can improve again, but I barley fixed anything on the site and yet it dropped some keywords from 1st page to 3rd page and then back to 3rd page; some keywords went back to original position some were lower but non were higher.
Algorithm Updates | | upick-1623910 -
What are the first ten steps you should do with a new website
First of all i would like to say how amazing this forum is, i have learnt a lot with all the great help. I am launching a new site mainly to allow me to learn seo and to understand what is involved in building a new site and get it to the search engines. the site is here which i have started today which is a lifestyle magazine is http://www.womenlifestylemagazine.com/ What i am trying to understand is, what are the first most important steps when trying to get google and traffic to your site. the site will be complete in the next week or so but in the meantime i want to use this site to learn more about seo and how you get the site discovered by visitors and search engines and the time scale behind it. I am hoping that other people who are new to seo and are building a new site will be able to use this post to learn about what is involved and learn like me. Would be great to hear from people who have started their own site so we can all understand what are the important steps to make and which things we should do in which order. thank you everyone
Algorithm Updates | | ClaireH-1848860