Did I get hit with a panda update?
-
I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site.
I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with.
Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.
-
It isn't like we have no traffic, we still get thousands in organic traffic a day. It just isn't as much as it used to be.
We are the largest in our industry, not near the size of Amazon or Ebay, but still pretty large. So we have customers who exclusively sell through us. Most of our sellers are small business and don't have in house technical teams, so it is easier working with us.
I understand content marketing and we are starting to do that but if we have been hit with Panda I don't know if it matters.
-
If your site is selling the same products that many other sites are, then the only way you can expect to rank well is if you are adding significant value that isn't available anywhere else.
It's not enough to say that your added value is the fact that users can find everything in one convenient place.
Let's say that I had an ecommerce store that sold camping equipment. But, everything in my store was also available on many other websites. If someone was searching for a particular type of sleeping bag, for example, why would Google want to show them my store rather than the original merchant?
But, let's say that my page that sells that sleeping bag also offers information such as the following:
-A guide to choosing the sleeping bag
-Unique customer reviews
-A video showing how to roll the bag up
and so on.
Now that I've got some good, helpful content, users may decide that rather than buying the product from the manufacturer they'd like to browse my site and get good helpful information and possibly buy from me.
In the past, you could get away with having a site that simply carried product feeds and you could rank that site well if you built enough links. But, self made links are less and less effective as Google is getting better at figuring out what is legitimate. So now, if you want to rank well, you have to truly have a site that is extremely helpful and unique...not just unique in the words on the page, but unique in the type of value you are offering to others, which is not always an easy task.
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
-
In Google Search Results ....Is it a site link or what? How to get this?
Hello Experts, When I search in google any keyword like abcd in search results for one website after meta description there are showing few links of website ( image attached ) Can you please let me know what is this & how to achieve such type of links? Thanks! mdJBLYb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wright3350 -
A 302 Redirect Question | Events Page Updates
Hello Moz World, I have a client that has a TON, like close to a thousand pages that have a 302 redirect set up. After further investigation, I found that every month they update their events page & Demo Request page, and the old events pages still exist but, get a 302 redirect to the updated page. From what I gather, this is a default mechanism set up by the hosting provider. My questions; is this an example of when to use a Rel=canonical? Also, is there a method for integrating this without having to go into every page and integrate the code snippet? And Lastly, How should I go about ensuring this doesn't happen in the future? Thanks ahead of time, you guys rock! B/R Will H.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
Impact of May 2015 quality update and July Panda update on specialty brands or niche retail
We are seeing the following trend in our rankings and traffic after the recent Google algorithm updates (May 2015 quality/phantom, and July 2015 Panda), and I am curious if anyone here has encountered similar and/or has any good ideas on how to react. Background - we operate in a niche segment, but compete for keywords with large home improvement stores and mass retailers. In the past, prior to May 2015, we generally ranked higher than the large home improvement stores and mass retailers for our key specific terms in our niche. We believed that it was because we have a very specialized focus and so our store was highly relevant for someone searching in that niche (for example for the name of the product category as a keyword). In general, we ranked #1-3. Along with a few of our competitors in our niche. And then would be the big box home improvement stores in spots 5-10. The change we saw starting in May is that now all the home improvement stores and also a few large multi-category retailers took over those top 5 spots and bumped all the specialty retailers and the specialty brand manufacturers (like us) down. Our direct competitors in our niche all seem to have been impacted pretty much the same as us. So, in summary it seems like these latest updates may have favored the more general retailers but with stronger domain authority than the more specific but smaller retailers. Hard to know for sure, but this is the trend we believe we see. So, that said, what are some good strategies to respond to this situation? We can't really compete on overall domain authority with these huge retailers. And our previously successful strategy of having a very focused niche, with lots of helpful content, videos, instructional guides, etc. no longer seems to be enough. Has anyone else seen similar results since this past May? Where specialty retail or brand sites lost ground to larger general retailers? And if so, has anyone found any good strategies to gain back their previous rankings, or at least partially?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewk1 -
Is this Panda?
Hi, I have a page that has been fluctuating a lot the last few days, here are the results: 5/14: #17 (this is where it had been ranking for about 2 months). 5/15: #34 5/16: #33 5/18: #9 5/19: #35 5/20: #13 5/21: #37 I have only made minor changes to the page, and the link profile seems to look good. Here's the page: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/dui.html (targeted KW: San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI Attorney). The page has a lot of high-quality, original, and well-cited content. Any thoughts on what could be causing so much back and forth? I should state that none of the other rankings for this site (overall) have been impacted. Just this page for DUI related searches (San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI attorney, San Diego Drunk Driving Lawyer, etc.).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
GWT Message - CMS Update Available
Howdy Moz, Just received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about a CMS update: "Joomla Update Available As of the last crawl of your website, you appear to be running Joomla 1.5. One or more of the URLs found were: http://www.website/custom-url/article5034 Google recommends that you update to the latest release. Older or unpatched software may be vulnerable to hacking or malware that can hurt your users. To download the latest release, visit the Joomla download page. If you have already updated to the latest version of Joomla, please disregard this message. If you have any additional questions about why you are receiving this message, Google has provided more background information in a blog post about this subject." Read through the associated blog post. According to the post a generator meta tag is created in Joomla that notes the CMS version. Here's the oddity: The site was on Joomla 1.5 over 2 years ago. 1 Year ago it was updated to Joomla 2.5. About a week ago it was converted completely to Wordpress. According to GWT the last date the Google bot accessed the site was the day before (5/1/14) the email. I went through the code, css/html, and the database and found no reference of Joomla 1.5. Has anyone seen this message? If so, how did you rectify it? Were there any adverse effects on rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
Affiliate links vs. seo (updated 19.02.2014)
UPDATE - 19.02.2014: Hi, We got another negative answer from Google pointing again to our affiliate links, so the 301 redirect and block was not enough.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu
I understand the need of contacting all of them and ask for the nofollow, we've started the process, but it will take time, alot of time. So I'd like to bring to your attention another 2 scenarious I have in mind: 1. Disavow all the affiliate links.
Is it possible to add big amount of domains (>1000) to the disavow doc.? Anyone tryed this? 2. Serve 404 status for urls coming from affiliates that did not add noffolow attribute.
This way we kinda tell G that content is no longer available, but we will end up with few thousand 404 error pages.
The only way to fix all those errors is by 301 redirecting them afterwards (but this way the link juice might 'restart' flowing and the problem might persist). Any input is welcomed. Thanks Hi Mozers, After a reconsideration request regarding our link profile, we got a 'warning' answer about some of our affiliate sites (links coming from our affiliate sites that violate Google's quality guidelines). What we did (and was the best solution in trying to fix the 'seo mistake' and not to turn off the affiliate channel) was to 301 redirect all those links to a /AFFN/ folder and block this folder from indexing.
We're still waiting for an answer on our last recon. request. I want to know you opinion about this? Is this a good way to deal with this type of links if they're reported? Changing the affiliate engine and all links on the affiliate sites would be a big time and technical effort, that's why I want to make sure it's truly needed. Best,
Silviu0 -
Reality of Panda 3.9 Refresh
I have had a 10 page website(registered in 1999) rank for my top keywords(top 5) for over 4 years. No changes have been made to the website. (Static website). July 11, 2012, most of the keywords, and all the major keywords were dropped from Google. They remain steady in Bing and Yahoo. I saw that some people referred to a Panda 3.9 refresh on that day, but also saw that Google(Matt Cutts) denied the refresh. Given the simplicity of the website and the strong backlinks, which remain, what are other reasons I could see a drastic drop in 1 day. Any ideas on where to target my search for solving this very serious issue? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FidelityOne0 -
What's the best practise for adding a blog to your site post panda? subdomain or subdirectory???
Should i use a subdomain or a subdirectory? i was going to use a subdirectory however i have been reading a lot of articles on the use of subdomains post panda and the advantages of using them instead of using subdirectories. Thanks Ari
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dublinbet0