Has anyone recovered from Panda?
-
My two websites were unaffected by the original and 2.0 panda updates, but istring in June my traffic has been down around 30%. In analyzing it appears that my long tail searches have been greatly impacted. So it looks like I am a victim of the mighty panda.My main site, www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com is in my opinion a decent looking site, with unique content and no ads, etc., but for whatever reason it has been negatively affected. There might be some duplication of content between certain pages and also my links are all or practically all directory links, though a lot are pretty heavy duty directories.
I see a lot of stuff written giving advice on how to recover from Panda. Has anyone actually done so? How did you do it?
thx
Paul
-
I looked at the links Interestingly someone said that Wordpress sites have been hit particularlyhard. I know that wordpress sites do tend to have problems with duplicate content due to the categories and tags, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Also someone else said that even if your site is not hurt if the sites linking to you are, that this would hurt your traffic. This might be my situation as my decline in traffic is more moderate than what others have reported whose own sites were bitten by Panda.
Does anyone else have any ideas?
-
The only thing that I think a lot of people would have a problem with is your statement that using wordpress is spammy
I believe WordPress had a recent blog post that said around 10% of websites on the Internet are using their platform. That's not the problem of course! Using the free themes (I see a link in your footer) degrades a website. The sitewide link is taking value from each page, and then of course being a free theme it begs the question if the business is legitimate.
I'll be honest: I only paid mind to the first Panda update. I haven't been affected by the first or subsequent updates so I stopped following it, so I can't give you specific advice on how others have seen it through.
Here is a discussion to get you started, though:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4305793.htm
Here is a poll that shows interesting results about recovery:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-recovery-poll-13456.html
Juicy content from SEOmoz:
-
I very much appreciate the honest critique. The only thing that I think a lot of people would have a problem with is your statement that using wordpress is spammy. The rest of your remarks make a lot of sense. But what I am looking for is not just anecdotal "makes sense" speculation type stuff but does anyone have any "hard" experienced of how they redic their site to recover from Panda? It seems that all there is out there is a lot of guesswork based upon Google's public statements, which most of us take with a grain of salt. But once again, very good and helpful response.
Paul
-
Put yourself in Google's shoes: doesn't your website structure and content look familiarly like a content farm? I'm not saying your website is one, but it gives the vibe for several different reasons.
First, the domain is clearly overly-targeted towards keywords. That's a big giveaway that the website is probably not a legitimate business. If you are an attorney, you should instead have a domain registered for your company name. Have branding.
You are using a free WordPress theme. Content farms largely run WordPress because it's so easy to install across many different domains and manage them all with little effort. Content farms grab free themes because, well, they are free. Shouldn't a legitimate business have it's own web design?
You don't have a business listing in Google. When I search for your address I don't see your domain come up. Create one and verify your business number.
Give your website a more personal touch. Your admin name is uncontesteddivorceny. Create an author bio if you plan on having multiple authors, but at the very least use your real name.
To sum up the onpage stuff: it looks like you tried too hard to game the system. If I saw this listing in Google when searching for an actual attorney, I would quickly press back and block your website from appearing in my results again. I mean this criticism constructively.
And then of course there is the external SEO. I only took a brief glance, but it looks like all of your links are from directories, video channels, and comment spam. None of this looks good. Get endorsements from any organizations and websites you can that are actually authoritative. I don't know your industry well enough to give specific advice on this, however.
To answer your question, yes people recover from Panda. But if you are doing SEO right you never had to recover in the first place. SEOmoz has great articles to help you out if you aren't sure where to start.
Cheers.
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
-
Anyone else notice a traffic drop around June 28th 2016?
Hey guys, i know there is a lot of chatter about a potential google update on / around June 28th... well, one of the sites I manage was hit pretty bad. I have attached an image showing what our ranking looked like before and after the unconfirmed update. As you will see, we plummeted that day and have not yet recovered. Has anyone else experienced drops? I'm trying to identify potential causes. I've started an SEO audit and so far I have identified 1 big fish and a few niggly bits. Big Fish: non-www version of site had redirect rule overwritten by CloudFlare page rules and is using a 302 redirect instead of a 301. Now could this be the cause? Niggly bits: technical SEO issues and optimisations like having unique meta titles etc. If you have noticed drops or think you can shed some light on my situation that will help me then I would love to hear from you 🙂 Thanks upload.png upload.png
Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK0 -
Was there a recent secret Panda update? Help.
Our site http://www.entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk has had a fairly significant drop in organic traffic this past week. Going from 3.8k to 3.k Can't see any reported updates on the major SEO websites, we'd had steady growth all year then appear to have back-peddled. One post in particular, our UK venture capital list was page1 for a number of VC related keywords such including 'venture capital' (google.co.uk) but it's completely dropped out of the index for that one and others. Does anybody have any ideas? We haven't done any link building at all, we've focussed entirely on on-site SEO and high quality in depth articles/posts/lists and historically we've always seen small increases at every algo update. 2CG25iv
Algorithm Updates | | entrepreneurhandbook0 -
Help for a webstore with Google Warnings for Watermark Images and Panda
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
Algorithm Updates | | GardenBeet0 -
Did anyone else get a massive drop off in Bing recently?
Only for one set of my keywords. But I fell from first page to off the map in one fell swoop. Did this happen to anyone else? Should I be worried?
Algorithm Updates | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Does anyone know what it takes to get your Google Plus statuses to show up under the Knowledge Graph?
I've been looking into G+ and how to get the information and status updates in to the Knowledge Graph for small companies and have not been able to. Does anyone know exactly how to do it?
Algorithm Updates | | DragonSearch1 -
Did we get hit by Panda? What do we do?
Hello, here's our site: nlpca(dot)com We had a big drop in rankings, going from about 19th to about 43rd for our main keyword and having significant drops in other keywords. This happened roughly 6 weeks ago We thought it was being caused by either: Placing keywords in titles before we had them in the content. or Trying to rank for Utah keywords - we're the NLP Institute of California and we are in both places now, but the site talks about mainly California. We changed both these things, and we're still at the low rankings. Will we move back up? What do we do? Will a backlink campaign be effective at this point?
Algorithm Updates | | BobGW0 -
Has anyone notice their website page rankings in Bing and Yahoo slipping lately?
My websites for the most part rank higher in Yahoo and Bing than in Google. Now, ranking within those search engines (Yahoo/Bing) are settling in to where my websites rank in Google. Any thoughts? Anyone else experiencing this? Thank you for your time!
Algorithm Updates | | APICDA0 -
Classifieds and Google Panda
It seems Google's Panda update is targetting low quality sites with little unique content (I know there's more to it than that). It makes sense that they may want to do this but what about classified sites. They may use some scraped content as well as unique ads, and the ads may lack content as they rely on the users writing the ads. However, they are helpful to the people that use classifieds. Because of these factors, these sites are suffering with the release of the latest Panda update. Any advice for classified sites and how they can combat the rankings drops???
Algorithm Updates | | Sayers0