Is it Panda?, how to deal with AP etc newswire articles
-
A site I have lost 30% of its traffic in June then another 10% in July, is it Panda?
The site has 10's of thousands of AP or other syndicated articles on it, they are not there for SE benefits, they are categorized and relevant to the people who read them, the site gets half of its traffic from type ins/bookmarks.
Should I nofollow the articles or rel="canonical" them? what can help......
Cheers
-
Thanks again, I guess I will have to look through keywords and see what traffic these news pages are still getting from google, then weigh up whether to tag them.
-
Panda isn't a penalty per se. It is a algorithmic change to how Google ranks sites and pages. If your site has duplicated content on it, you will need to fix all of it. Once your site has been cleaned up, it will can take a month or more for Google to fully re-index your entire site and see all of the duplicated content gone or properly handled (i.e. noindex or canonicalized).
It's not as if you have 1% of duplicated content that your site is affected but no one knows for sure what exact percentage triggers this effect, so your best course of action is to clean it all up.
By using the canonical tag, these pages will be removed from the index for your site. The "harm" would be that if someone searches for the pages your site wont be listed unless you have relevant comments for the search query.
-
Thanks, is there any way that I could trial this on the site by just adding the tag to a few pages or sections? Is it domain level metrics google is using, they have decided that the site is junk now as it has so much duplicated content?
The articles are slightly changed and there are comments on them.
What harm could I cause by trialing the canonical tag? if I took it of there later could there be some recovery time?
thanks a lot
-
If this content is merely duplications of articles which exist elsewhere then yes, you can add the canonical tag pointing to the source.
You would definitely not want to "nofollow" these pages. By adding a nofollow tag you are telling search engines not to flow page rank to the other links they find on the page. That is not the result you desire.
You could noindex the pages as well. Prior to doing such I would ask if you are offering comments or other user generated comments. If you are not, then the noindex tag is fine. If you do offer UGC, then I would recommend the canonical tag.
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
-
How To Change Descriptions On Category Page 2 / 3 etc
I have a quick question that I hope someone might be able to help me with. On a wordpress website I have a lot of posts in each category. My problem is there are now several category pages. ie: https://www.mywebsite.com/category/cat-name/ https://www.mywebsite.com/category/cat-name/page2 https://www.mywebsite.com/category/cat-name/page3 The problem is on the category page I can set page title / description etc. But the problem is I cant do that on page2 / page 3 etc. Does anyone know how I can change the titles and decriptions etc on those pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Does using cufon for H-tags etc hurt SEO?
Does the use of cufon for H-tags et al affect SEO/how Google views your website?
Technical SEO | | Alligator0 -
How do I deal with my pages being seen as duplicate content by SeoMoz?
My Dashboard is giving my lots of warnings for duplicate content but it all seems to have something to do with the www and the slash / For example: http://www.ebow.ie/ is seen as having the same duplicate content as http:/ebow.ie/ and http://www.ebow.ie Alos lots to do with how Wordpress categorizes pages and tags that is driving me bonkers! Any help appreciated! Dave. seomoz.png
Technical SEO | | ebowdublin0 -
Links into website that are unnatural - a paid article
I prepared an article for another related website and posted it on my website - http://www.gardenbeet.com/garden_design_blog/garden-ideas/save-money-and-create-diversity-seeds-and-small-plants-are-better/ I was paid to write an article and provided a link to the related website at the end of the article - I declared the payment a good 10 months later the page where the article sits has become the 2nd most linked to page on my website - SEOmoz is giving it a Page Authority of 48 and all the links are coming from a wide variety of forums using one anchor text link phrase in the latest google update my homepage PR dropped by 1 - I am assuming the penalty came because of this article is it worth changing the URL to remove these spammy links to my website?
Technical SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
Have I Set my joomla site map correctly as google not picking up articles
Hi here is my site map http://www.in2town.co.uk/sitemap-xml?sitemap=1 But i am concerned that i have not set my joomla site map correctly. The reason why i think this is, because i have a lot of articles on the site and google are not picking them up in my google webmaster tools. On my old site google was quick to pick up all the articles. Can anyone offer me any help on this and let me know if my site map should be set to show all of my articles
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Are article sites a good way to generate traffic and links
I read a lot that article sites are a great way to generate links and traffic but i would like to hear from people on here to see about their experience with article sites. I have tried article sites and i have to be honest that most of them are no follow links and have also not generate any traffic. I have written over 30 articles for free article sites with no traffic coming from them and this has been done over a eight month period can anyone recommend any good article sites that can produce traffic and also ones that produce do follow If you feel i am wasting my time putting articles on free sites then please do tell me
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Removing duplicate &var=1 etc var name urls from google
Hi I had a huge drop in traffic around the 11th of july over 50% down with no recovery as yet... ~5000 organic visits per day down to barley over 2500. I fixed up a problem that one script was introducing that had caused high bounce rates. Now i have identified that google has indexed the entire news section 4 times, same content but with var=0 var=1 2 3 etc around 40,000 urls in total. Now this would have to be causing problems. I have fixed the problem and those url's 404 now, no need for 301's as they are not linked to from anywhere. How can I get them out of the index? I cant do it one by one with the url removal request.. I cant remove a directory from url removal tool as the reuglar content is still there.. If I ban it in robots.txt those urls, wont it never try to index them again and thus not ever discover they are 404ing? These urls are no longer linked to from anywhere, so how can google ever reach them by crawling to find them 404ing?
Technical SEO | | Adsau0 -
How I can deal with ajax pagination?
Hello! I would like to have your input about how I can deal with a specific page in my website You can see my page here As you can see, we have a list of 76 ski resort, our pagination use ajax, wich mean we have only one url, and just below the list, we have a simple list of all the ski resort in this mountain, which show all the 76 ski resorts.. I know it's quite bad, since we can reach the same ski resort with two différents anchors links. Thanks you very much in advance, Simon
Technical SEO | | Alexandre_0