Questions created by Digitator
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Panda penalty removal advice
Hi everyone! I'm after a second (or third, or fourth!) opinion here! I'm working on the website www.workingvoices.com that has a Panda penalty dating from the late March 2012 update. I have made a number of changes to remove potential Panda issues but haven't seen any rankings movement in the last 7 weeks and was wondering if I've missed something... The main issues I identified and fixed were: Keyword stuffed near duplicate title tags - fixed with relevant unique title tags Copies of the website on other domains creating duplicate content issues - fixed by taking these offline Thin content - fixed by adding content to some pages, and noindexing other thin/tag/category pages. Any thoughts on other areas of the site that might still be setting off the mighty Panda are appreciated! Cheers Damon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitator0 -
Rel=canonical vs noindex/follow - tabs with individual URLs
Hi everyone I've got a situation that I haven't seen in quite this way before. I would like some advice on whether I should be rel=canonicalzing of noindexing/following a range of pages on a clients website. I've just started working on a website that creates individual URLs for tabs within each page which has resulted in several URLs being created for each listing: Example URLs: hotel-downtown-calgary hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery?tab hotel-downtown-calgary?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/map?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area?tab Google has indexed over 1500 pages with the "?tab" parameter (there are 4380 page indexed for the site in total), and also seems to be indexing some of these pages without the "?tab" parameter i.e. ("hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews" instead of "hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab") so the amount of potential duplication could be more. These tabbed pages are getting minimal traffic from organic search, so I've got no issues with taking them out of the index - the question is how. There are the issues I see: Each tab has the same title as the other tabs for each location, so lots of title duplication. Each individual tab doesn't have much content (although the content each tab has is unique). I would usually expect the tabs to be distinguished by the parameters only, not have unique URLs - if that was the case we wouldn't have a duplication issue. So the question is: rel=canonical or noindex/follow? I can see benefits of both. Looking forward to your thoughts!
On-Page Optimization | | Digitator0 -
Alternative domains redirected with 301 to the main domain
Hi everyone I've got a website which gained a Panda penalty back in March 2012 which was because of the implementation of a range of spammy practices (keyword stuffing in titles, indexed category and tag pages, duplicate domains). I've fixed the titles and deindexed any pages that could be seen as thin or duplicate so I'm confident that any onsite Panda issues have been fixed. As mentioned above the client had also created over 40 alternative domains to the website and pointed them to their main website folders (hence duplicating the website and content 40 times over). These domains have now been redirected via 301 redirects to the main website to ensure that any links they have gained are captured. The reason for the redirection is that we initially took the domains down and saw a drop in traffic and this seemed to be the most likely reason. While Moz and Majestic are not showing any significant links to these domains (which is why they where originally taken down), past experience has told me that these tools don't always pick up all referring domains. Primary domain workingvoices.com 5 Example Alternative Domains presentationskillslondon.com workingvoiceslive.biz workingvoices.co.uk livingvoices.co.uk working-voices.net Question 1: At the same time we took down the alternative domains (and experienced the drop in traffic) we removed duplicate instances of Google Analytics code from the webpages. All the guidance that we could find stated that duplicate instances of code shouldn't affect your Analytics numbers, hence we assumed it was the taking down of the alternative domains, but maybe the guidance we found was wrong? Question 2: It is 3 months later and these alternative domains are still indexed by Google, and Panda hasn't run since October 2014 so we haven't experienced a recovery yet. Redirecting the domains will remove any issue of a Panda penalty, but now of course I am worried about Penguin - the last thing I want to do is trigger that can of worms! This whole saga has been pretty complicated and I think I need some fresh sets of eyes. What does everyone think? Could the initial drop have been due to the duplicate Analytics code being removed? Could the redirecting domains trigger Penguin? Should we take the alternative domains down and be done with them? Any other thoughts! Looking forward to hearing your opinions! Damon.
Reporting & Analytics | | Digitator0