Panda Penalty Recovery?
-
My site: www.stephita.com, is based in Toronto, Canada.
It used to rank top 3 in local and national searches for "wedding invitations" and "wedding invitations toronto". I've now been placed on the dreaded page 2 ;|
I didn't keep up with the times and news, and wasn't aware of Google Panda Penalty until earlier this year
So, I've cleaned up most of my site with what I suspect what caused me to drop:
a) Cloaking pages - I had PHP script generate about 1000 pages of "cloaked" pages. This has been removed, and I've used Google webmaster tools to "remove" the directory as well.
b) Duplicate Content pages - (not cloaked, but I've done content writing on the majority of my product pages)
The 2 items above is what I "assume" caused a Google Penalty... I started this cleanup endeavour late January, and with the content writing to remove what MOZ tools notices as duplicate pages.
I've read online that Panda is now part of the search algorithm. So does that mean, ideally, I should start seeing "better" ranking results now? Or is there a process I should be following and submitting my site for "reconsideration"?
Thanks all!
-
If it is Panda then cleaning up the site to make it more useful is your best bet.
- Make sure the design is clean.
- Make sure the writing is answering the user's question, and that it's well written.
- Make sure that the function of the page matches the search query.
Fixing these things should result in an eventual improvement in rankings.
If you were cloaking, that could be a penalty all by itself. Make sure to fix anything shady, and consider whether non-standard implementations or architecture could have confused Googlebot or made it look like you were trying to manipulate rankings. Check Webmaster tools for any warnings or manual penalties for sure.
You can also cross-reference drops in traffic to what others have seen on similar dates to make sure it was Panda.
-
There may be other technical issues or algorithm updates in play here. If you haven't done so already, you should check your Analytics against the dates of any algorithm updates using one of the links below.
If you're confident that it's a Panda issue, one of the best guides I've seen is http://www.thesempost.com/understanding-google-panda-definitive-algo-guide-for-seos/.
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
-
Mystery Penalty
I have a client site that seems to have been penalized with a huge drop in rankings site wide for all keywords. I would like to hire an expert that could figure out what the issue may be.
Technical SEO | | execubob
HOWEVER, I've done all the standard audit items, including submitting a huge disavow file. Nothing is reported in GSC and the site is built out in pure HTML, so not a WordPress issue. I don't need a basic audit, I need someone with expertise in finding a possible penalty.0 -
Slowly recovering from algorithm penalty
Hi , over the years a website we took over was hit by an algorithm penalty (a combination of penguin and panda). We managed to bring rankings back (after 6 months) from page 5/6 to page 2 after we used the google disavow tool. now for the past 9 months we have been stuck on page 2.. is there anything you think can be done to bring it back to page 1? we are building quality links now and moved away from low quality links other link builders were making. We are managing the process much closer and ensuring we maintain good standards of links. also making the pages flatter and merging short page content to larger content pages now we are looking at site structure and creating structured internal link flow is there anything we should be aware of and any recommendations to get back on page 1.. this is a tailor-made travel related website with a small selection of destinations
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Rankings after manual penalty removal
I've just started working on a ecommerce website that was hit by Penguin 2.0 in May (It was ranking 2nd for it's major keyword at the time) and it hasn't been indexing for that keyword since After a lot of link removal, the reconsideration request was accepted and the manual penalty had been removed. Rankings haven't really improved and that specific keyword has not been reindexed The site does have a lot of not found errors (It was 5.5k but recently taken down to 4k) but it was still ranking before the penalty. Is there anything you believe I'm missing? Is it the onsite errors that are flagging the site as unreliable? I thought it would still appear for the keyword if that was the case
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
How to avoid duplicate content penalty when our content is posted on other sites too ?
For recruitment company sites, their job ads are posted muliple times on thier own sites and even on other sites too. These are the same ads (job description is same) posted on diff. sites. How do we avoid duplicate content penalty in this case?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
301 on ALL 404 for Pagerank Recovery, bad idea?
Its a bad idea to do a 301 to the home page of the site on all 404 pages as a way of pagerank recovery? If so, why? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Bligoo0 -
From your perspective, what's wrong with this site such that it has a Panda Penalty?
www.duhaime.org For more background, please see: http://www.seomoz.org/q/advice-regarding-panda http://www.seomoz.org/q/when-panda-s-attack (hoping the third time's the charm here)
Technical SEO | | sprynewmedia0 -
Google Panda and ticketing sites: quality of content
Hi from Madrid! I am managing the Marketing Department of a ticketing site in Europe similar to Stubhub.com. We have thousands of events and, until now, we used templates for their descriptions. A lot of events share the same description with minor changes. They also have a lot of tickets on sale, so that's unique content different on each event. Now the last Google Panda update hit Europe and I was wondering if that will affect us a lot. It's hard to tell for now, because we are in the middle of the summer and the volume of searches in our industry depends decreases a lot during this time of the year. I know that ideally we should have unique descriptions but that would need a lot of resources and they are not important for our users: they just want to know the venue, the time and the price of the tickets! Have you experienced something about Google Panda update with a similar site or with another e-commerce industry? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0
