Welcome to the Q&A Forum

For pages that already exist on my site, I can submit the URL to SEMrush and it will give me a list of keywords that the page already ranking for in the SERPs.  It also gives the ranking for each keyword.

If you don't have a page for a keyword, then go out and grab a competitor's page and do the same thing.

Also, if you have a short article, do the above.  Then improve the 200 word article to 2000 words, then do same thing in a couple of months.  You will be surprised and the increase in rankings and breath of keywords.

It is already indexed and I can find it on the second page of the SERPs for my keyword.  I had someone else, unrelated to my site, check and they see it there too.  I've never needed to do this before, and am surprised by what happened.  Thanks again.

Thanks again, Peter.

Thank you Kristen.

I just submitted those pages through GWT.  Thanks for the suggestion.

Thank you, Peter.  I simply link mine into my website.  Things normally get indexed right away.

If you are a retailer you probably get lots of questions about how to select a product, how to use it, how to fix it, which one is best in this situation, etc.  These are good topics to write about.  Visitors will find them on your site and not need to contact you.  If someone emails with a question, you can reply, we have an article about that here.  These articles will rank for those queries in search and the people who read them can be monetized with adsense or house ads that offer relevant upgrades and accessories.

Answer the most frequent questions, answer the important questions that people are not asking, write about interesting product stuff that people don't know.  Try to keep these articles on evergreen topics.  You want your writing to be relevant for years rather than be out-of-date in a few months.

New pages on my site usually shoot right into the index - often in under 24 hours.  Lately they are taking weeks to get into the index.  Are your new pages slow to index lately?

Thanks for anything that you can report.

Thank you!

I sometimes copy my response, but I have bad luck and don't do it at the right time.

BTW.... I was using Firefox 42.0 if that is useful.

I've had three carefully written posts disappear in the past day or so.  I push the button to "post response" and get a blank screen.  Gone.

Thanks Joe,

I have a site like HappyJoe's.  We do have all of those articles on the site and they pull in most of the traffic.  We run adsense on those pages using the DoubleClick ad server and have blocked all of the direct competitor vendor ads from showing.  We know the conversion rate and average sale in the "store" portion of the site.  That allows us to price house ads to compete with adsense for visibility.  Most of the conversions enter the site through longtail traffic landing on information pages.  Very few enter the site where we compete with the big retailers because we rank below them.  We make good money from adsense but not enough to support our staff and overhead.  So we need the retail sales and get lots of them because we sell consumables.

We get lots of email messages saying... you guys have the best website and the most information.  I would like to buy from you but Amazon has free shipping or is $7 cheaper.  We tell them that we are here to answer their questions and help them by phone if they buy from us.  If they buy from Amazon they are still invited to use our website and we will still answer their email questions, usually with a link to an article, so just look for the article that you need.  We get some of those customers but most buy from Amazon.

Some people cuss at us because we don't have a phone number for tech support on our website, or because we don't modify machines for them, or sell them half of a machine that they trashed after not learning how to use it.  But, they would never think of treating amazon that way.  They know that is the biz model of the big retailers, but they expect HappyJoe to stand on his head and juggle fire sticks for them.  

Maybe if they have no one else, they have to.

After people spend hundreds of dollars on a machine and they can't get it to work, there is no way to get help from amazon and the manufacturer will not reply to them they can get desparate and nasty.  They write telling us that they bought it from our site but we have no record of them.  If they bought it from us and needed a belt or a bolt we would send it right away for free.  We send them a link to an article that solves their problem and they don't like it.

I really like the 10X concept.  I think that it is great and everyone should keep it in mind.

I think though for economic reasons, you can't sink resources into being 10X in every facet of your business because the cost of doing that is way too high.  If you can pull off 2X or 3X, I think it will have the same impact.

Let's compare Amazon.com to HappyJoeDrillPress.com.   Amazon stomps HappyJoe on price and on free shipping. Everybody knows that almost nobody beats Amazon there.

HappyJoe has more content on his website than all of his competitors and even the manufactures combined.  His customer ratings are 4.8 stars out of five.  He has articles that rate each of the different brands and models of drill presses.  He has articles and videos that tell you how to select them, how to use them, how to increase productivity in assembly line work, how to repair them.  He sells all of the supplies and repair parts that you will ever need.  If you have a problem you can email and get a carefully considered reply from HappyJoe himself. If you buy a drill press from HappyJoe you get a phone number that you can call if you have a problem.  If a part on your drill press fails a few months after purchasing you call HappyJoe and he will send a part to you without cost (was manufacturer's fault and not covered by their warranty but HappyJoe takes care of you - that's because he is HappyJoe).

HappyJoe has a carefully optimized website and all of that content that he wrote rules the entire longtail of the drill press niche.  Nobody beats him for advice, fix it, how to, or other customer service queries.

So, Amazon is 10X on price and free shipping (they get crap marks for carefully packing your drill press, they ship it in the retail store box) but HappyJoe boxes each one carefully because he wants you to get a good one).

HappyJoe is 10x on content, 10x on offering free expertise by email and by phone, 10x on  service, 10x on being a great guy.  HappyJoe also pays his workers fair wages and respects his suppliers.

Now how do these companies compete in the SERPs?

HappyJoe owns the longtail.  Amazon, WalMart and two manufacturers rank #1 #2 #3 and #4 on the purchase intent SERPs because they are Billion Dollar Companies that Google thinks should rank up there because people would miss 'em if they were gone.  HappyJoe fights it out with HarborFreight and DrillPressesRus.com for #5 #6 or #7.   HF and DPRus have no content, you can't call them for help so, HappyJoe by default becomes unpaid customer service department for Amazon, WalMart, manufacturers, HF and DPRus, so he stops taking phone calls (just like these other guys) but still has all of that content and gives email replies to anybody and phone consultations from his paying customers).

Google just doesn't recognize the person in this space who is an expert, and a good guy, and the person who is doing all of the customer service work for everybody everywhere on every drill press topic.

HappyJoe does have a few fans who buy from him no matter what.  But he would sell 10X as much if Google ranked him in a position that reflected his position as an expert and good guy.

So, when you decide to become a 10X company, you have to decide where you are going to be 10X because you can't be 10X for everything.  HappyJoe knows that he can't charge lowest prices and he doesn't have a distribution center in every state.  But HappyJoe decided to be 10X in treating people right, and being helpful.   He is doing OK today, but that might not be enough tomorrow when the first page of the SERPs is five adwords ads and three big retailers and two manufacturers.... and when he becomes unpaid customer service for five more companies who sell drill presses but don't know a damn thing about 'em.

If you use SEMrush you can find out what queries their site appears in the SERPs and at what ranking.

Rich, you just received $5000 worth of consulting from Miriam.

Let's say you start all of these new websites.  You spend a little work on this one, a little work on that one, a little work here....  then when your customers want to review you some will go to this site, some will go to that site, some will go to another site...

What do you have after that?  A collection of hotdog stands.  Nothing impressive.  You have a bunch of websites that are not much different from your weakest competitor who didn't work very hard.

When you enter competition in the SERPs you enter a melee.  You are being attacked from the front, side, behind, above and below.  The best way to win is to go in like a Rambo and start kicking ass.  If you go in without working hard, you lose.  If you go in with a bunch of hotdog stands you lose a bunch of times.

So, if I was you, I would focus all of my efforts on one website.  EmpireElec has a long way to go.  Put good informative useful content on there for each of your service activities.  What to do before you call the electrician for lots of your most common situations.  Be generous, inform people, save them money, weave yourself a huge white hat.  No time to do that? Then buy adwords, use the YellowPages.

About those domains... I would allow them to expire and buy beer with the savings.   You have one domain.  If you don't have the time or the engergy to make it kickass you are not going to do it with a dozen of them.

would there be a difference between www and non www url preference?

One of these should be used at all times.  The one that you don't use should be eliminated by code in your htaccess file, or other controls on your server.

One of my competitors has his site redesigned about once a year.  His designers make errors like,

** upload the new site with noindex

** change all the URLs and not redirect

** use their company name in every title tag

We enjoy making his money because he usually ranks above us.  They usually catch it right away but this year the site has been noindexed for a few months now.

Other problems could be bad DNS, analytics not installed properly.

Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells.   Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.  We know that because we hear it  * Every Day * in our customer reviews.

The ads that we run do not say buy from us.  We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website.  At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses.  Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad.  Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site.

The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store.  We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot.  Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed.  We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles.  We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information.  It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products.   They can also click an ad to our competitors.  But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.

Traffic on many non-retail sites in the United States started to dip on the 19th and 20th in advance of Thanksgiving Week.  Many schools take a break that week and lots of adults plan trips for the holiday.   Traffic on my informational sites went down then, but has been nothing less than volcanic this week.  I was wondering if something happened yesterday to give me a traffic blast that continues today.  Up over 20% on a site that is already busy.

** Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?**

Bad?  No way.  It is the smartest thing that you can do.

I spend a lot of my time writing content that explains how to use, repair and select products.  These are posted on my site and they always have links or standard-size banner ads pointing to the page in our on-site store where the item can be purchased.

If you have an article on how to repair a product, and offer links to where the tools, replacement parts and supplies can be purchased then that is a genuine benefit to the reader.  It is actually useful content.   And, the reader will feel good about buying these things from you because they just learned something from reading your article.  And, because you demonstrated your expertise the buyer should be comfortable buying your recommendations rather than going to another site, searching, and questioning... "is this what I really need?".

I am spending a lot of time this month and spent a lot of time last month writing content for the purpose of driving sales.

Google monkeys with my page titles a lot.

At first I thought that they were stinking up my smart marketing, but now I think that they might use the query string and toss up a title that will better elicit clicks.

Hi Matt.  I really like this question, but even more, I like that it is pinned to the top of Q&A and hope it will stay here for a week or more.  I would like to learn what others are doing on this and other topics.   I hope that "pinned questions for discussion" become a regular thing in Q&A.

======================================================

CONTENT CREATION:

1. My site is an info site and I currently have a "future content map" that contains enough articles to keep me writing long after my death :-)Most of the articles that I write are on that map, some are not.  The thing that determines what I write today is a "motivation to write" that is triggered by an opportunity to acquire a few really nice photos or graphics to illustrate a new article perfectly.  I believe that a great photo or graphic at the top of the page can be more important to an article's success than what I write. The visitor needs inspiration to start reading and more photos to help "pull them down the page".

2. Once I have the motivation to write, I don't write.  Instead I spend one or two days reading the best information that I can find on the topic.  This might be on the web or in the collection of books at my office, which grows because I often buy a new one as I prepare for writing an article.   While reading I have a couple sheets of paper that I fill with notes.  These are ideas, topics that I want to cover in the article, sketches, calculations, etc. that can be used in the article.  Once that is finished I write a title, then the subheadings, and then arrange subheadings in order, with an effort to have a photo or graphic to illustrate each subheading - but that is not essential.

I have been active in the industry served by my website for the past 45 years, I could just jump into writing the articles, but a day or two of preparing before I write makes a big difference in the quality of what I produce.   My goal is to write a general article that contains… 1) the basics of the topic, 2) the questions that people are asking, 3) what they should know that they are not asking, 4) misconceptions that are out there, 5) a few surprises that most people don’t know about.

3. The actual "writing" is done in the HemingwayApp, which helps me keep sentences simple and spelling/grammar correct.  Writing might take one to three days, and when I get close to finishing I leave the article to work on another motivation.  Then, days, weeks, months later, I return to the article to improve it, add new ideas, new photos, etc. and bring it to completion. The interruption allows me to consider the article with a fresh mind.  At this point the article often goes to a professional editor who helps with clarity and solves any language and punctuation problems.

4. Then the article is placed on a webpage.  Lay-out is important to be sure that the photos are placed in relevant locations and ads are placed where they will be seen and engaged.  After that I read the article one final time and make adjustments to the text and image captions, so that they work well with one another.\

CONTENT DISTRIBUTION INTEGRATION and ONSITE PROMOTION

I don't distribute my content to other websites.  It is too hard to produce to give away.  So, I make sure that it is carefully integrated into my own website where it will be seen by lots of visitors.   This starts by placing an attractive image and link to the article on the homepage.  Then on its relevant category pages in an obvious position.  It will be moved in the future and placed on the page according to its click-earning ability.   It is also added (according to relevance) to "related content" boxes, "suggested reading" lists that appear on every page of the website.

When an article is highly related to another on the site I will place small ads for it within the body of the related article.  I also have lots of hypertext links on my site - similar to Wikipedia, and most new articles have dozens of those links built to them.  I am lucky that my visitors like my content and promote it for me.  That allows me to get right back to work on the next article.

RECEIVING DISTRIBUTED CONTENT

I receive lots of solicitations from people who want to contribute an article to my website.  Guest authors have contributed about 15% of them.  Most people who contact me write… “Hey Egol, I really like your website and could write a few articles for you.  Are you interested?  I can write about any topic.”

They don’t identify their expertise, they don’t say what qualifies them to write for my industry, they don’t show me relevant samples of their work.  After following up on them for a few years I learned they were a  waste of time.  If I listen to them for a minute on the phone or read the first paragraph of an article proposal, I can tell that they don’t have the language of the industry.  Now, I delete these offers.

I am not a noob in the industry, but there are a lot of topics that I refuse to write about because I don’t know enough about them.  The people who have contributed guest articles usually contact me saying…. “I don’t see anything on your site about Brass Widgets.  I have been researching/teaching/building/writing about them for the past X years and would be glad to write an article or two that explains this/that/etc.  Here’s a couple photos of my recent work”.

This person has photos, I can find info about him online, if we talk by phone or exchange a couple emails before I agree to consider an article I can tell that he isn’t a noob.  I then send a message that explains what I would like to see in their article and ask if they are still interested.

All of the articles that I have received this way have been great.  They are written by experienced people who have a “message to get out” and not by people who are trying to make a quick score.  I usually pay them and send a gift when the article is published.

I don't have any problem with multiple articles targeting the same keyword on one website as long as they are extremely different and they also target different secondary keywords.  If competition is thin you might be able to get #1, #2, #3, #4 for that keyword in google with multiple pages targeting the same keyword.  I have that for the main money keyword for one of my sites.  I have another site that has a dozen #1, #2, #3 rankings and scores of #1 and #2.

Before I produce a second article for any topic, I make sure that my first article is comprehensive, substantive, well illustrated, kickass and no less than the best on the web for that topic.

If I purchased or inherited a site with many articles targeting the same keyword then I would try to combine a few of them into the best comprehensive article about the topic.

If I was advising a company that produces some kind of software who has all of this duplication, I would tell them to start creating "how to do it".... "how to understand it"... practical stuff content that helps people use your software and shows how your software is better than the competition.

I would be publishing the reference book for accounting in that industry.  Each industry has its own accounting situations.  I would have the Bible of Dairy Queen (or whatever) accounting published on my website and everybody everywhere in that industry would be talkin' about my site and referring their bosses, employees, and other staff to my website where they can find everything anybody ever asked about Dairy Queen accounting.

Why Dairy Queen?  answer here...    And after you have read that, you will understand why accounting Bibles are needed for each industry.

If you use rel=canonical, the page on the publishing site should not be indexed by google and other search engines who recognize rel=canonical.  The page on your site remains in the index, appears in the SERPs and attracts traffic.   Any links that go to the page on the publisher's site with your article will appear in Google webmaster tools for the page where the article appears on your site.

So, it "appears" that your page (the original article page) gets all of the link equity that goes to the page on the Publisher site where you article is displayed - even links in their own navigation.

I said "appears" above.  We do not know how google counts them.  Most people believe that google passes link equity through the rel=canonical based upon what Googlers have said and published about them.  But we do not know for sure.  Also, we know for a fact that google sometimes changes their mind about stuff and doesn't tell anybody.

I can say that I have a few pages that receive rel=canonical attribution from other websites and the results have been kickass, from what I can tell.

I have a little experience with Panda on one of my sites.  I had republished content distributed to me from government agencies and universities.   I also had a blog with a lot of very short posts.  When you get hit, the hit is sitewide.  The rankings of all of your pages drop.  I was lucky and escaped quickly.

That calendar is risky in my opinion.  The event pages can be indexed.  If it was my site that calendar would have been yanked off ten seconds after I clicked into it.  I would feel great about yanking it off.

If you want to keep the calendar the event pages should be noindex follow.  I gave you a suggestion above that might turn the calendar into a traffic-pulling, link-attracting asset instead of a risk.

If this was my website, I would get rid of this calendar or use it in a different format.

The calendar is generating a lot of extra pages with almost no content.   I have done a lot of work since the first Panda to get rid of single pages with almost no content.  I believe that they are Panda bait, suck power out of the rest of your site.

Instead of a calendar like this I would make a big long page with events and their descriptions listed.  Depending upon how it is optimized and the amount of traffic in the space, that page could pull in a lot of traffic, become a "go to page" for many people, and even be linkbait.

What am I doing wrong?

It sounds like you have tuned up your website and have improved its condition.  That is the minimum entry fee for good website performance.

Now that you have done the basics, the best way to improve your organic performance is to get new high quality content on the site that is better than your competitors have published for the same topic.   If you have the ability to produce content that is shared spontaneously by your visitors then you can spend all of your time producing more content.  If you don't have that ability then you will have to promote it or hire someone to kick it up a notch.

Post the article on your site first.  After it has been there long enough to be stable in the index, then seek an agreement that another site can publish it with rel=canonical.

I normally don't give my content away under any circumstance, but if the right major website would do an rel=canonical, I would likely allow them to use it.

Read Jennifer Slegg's article on the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines.  Very important.

https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines

Most of the time, I list color, finish, size, etc. variants on the same page, but show separate photos with captions that present them.

However, if there is search and buying volume enough for "green widgets" or "brass widgets" or whatever, then I will make a separate page for them.  But, when I do that, I am willing to spend enough time to make a unique product description that generously describes and explains and shows, because a substantive page will be needed to avoid duplicate content in search engines.

Separate pages are a good idea if the potential sales can justify the cost and the competition is thick enough that separate pages are needed to become competitive for the different variants of the product.

DOMAIN RULE #1:   It is easier to double your income by improving a domain that is ranking "alright" than it is to double your money by starting two brand new domains.

I might keep those domains in my registrar account, do nothing with them, and spend any time or money that I would have put into them instead into my corporate website that is ranking "alright".

In my opinion, getting new domains is the best thing my competitor can do - especially if he is ranking below me most of the time.  If this competitor is really clueless, I might offer to sell him the domains and use the money to buy beer 

Now, if that competitor dominates the web in my niche and is ranking above me everywhere.... If she gets two new domains, I might start sweating.

Any help or pointers here would be enormously appreciated.

You are really focused on metrics.   Those metrics are good for two things (my opinion, certainly minority opinion here):  1) entertainment value; 2) diverting productive time away from the real work of running a website.

Perhaps Google is using page engagement statistics to determine that their site is 'betteer' than ours in terms of user appeal and engagment?

That is right.   Announced here ten years ago.  Take all of the time that you spend on metrics and links and start putting it into improving the website.  Have the courage to divorce yourself from these metrics for a year.  Get engaged in different battles... beating their articles, beating their images, beating their deals, beating their service.   Then look at your improved website and how many visitors are engaging it at a higher level.

You still have to pay attention to the technical and usability details explained by Alan, but if you are making genuine improvements in your website, that make it more competitive on the basis of content and benefits to visitors then your metrics will advance on their own.

Put all future work into one and allow the rest to drift.

**How would you reap the SEO value of a small network of sites that were associated? **

Merge them.

In my opinion, absolutes are not possible.  The best method to settle on page format, in my opinion, is an automated system that tries different page element formats and picks the combination that performs best.  But this only works well when you have a very high sales volume to allow that type of testing.

If you have low sales volume or want to use experience to get a head start is to hire someone like SiteTuners to make a landing page design that they believe will work well based upon their extensive experience in doing this day-in-day-out for lots of clients who own a variety of businesses.  They can give you a basic design and a list of page elements that might kick performance up upon testing.  I have used their service and thought it was educational and helpful.

You can also buy Tim Ash's (he owns SiteTuners) book, Landing Page Optimization, and learn many things that you can try on your own.  I've read it all twice and many parts of it many times.  It is helpful, but you still don't "know" what will work without testing.

If he played a major role in determining the new look, feel and function of the new design.......  I would say that the design was rendered according to his instructions and approval.   Then offer to consult with him on changes/improvements at your regular labor rate.

But, before doing any changes, I would go out looking at competitors to see if they are doing anything that would scoop his clients.   Plus know that Adwords, TV, direct mail, phone calling, could all grab clients away and not be seen in rankings.

We have some content that is shared on multiple sites.  We use rel=canonical to attribute the content to the appropriate site and transfer link equity.  We are pleased with how it works.  The visitors to both domains can view that content without leaving the website.  The pages that have the rel=canonical code do not display in the SERPs.  The pages that receive the attribution receive a small ranking boost.

Using 301 will remove the page from the SERPs and transfer any visitor that clicks a link to it onto the site that you point the 301 to.  This is not desirable for most uses.  .

The main goal though, is to drive traffic to BOTH sites via organic search using the same content. Would love to hear everyone's opinions if this is possible or unrealistic...

If this is your goal, then the best thing to do is to write unique articles for each and every website.

Visitor engagement has become a very important ranking signal.   If the design of the pages has changed, is it possible that visitors don't engage the site as strongly as they did in the past?

Small on-page changes have the greatest opportunity to be helpful when you compete for a keyword with very little competition.  However, as the level of competition increases other factors become so much more important that tweaking text adornments becomes meaningless.  This is logical because in very competitive SERPs, searchers are more concerned with content quality, reputation of the company, and other factors of visitor satisfaction, than what's in italics on the page.

I don't go through my pages bolding my keywords because I think that it looks distracting to the visitor.  However, I do bold in-content link text to call attention to it.  Doing that lets the visitor know that I have more information about those topics on other pages of my website.  It does lift visitor engagement with those links.  That increases my ad revenue and may lift my rankings because of the deeper visitor engagement.

One of my employees thinks that it looks "cartoony" and I kind of agree, but I still like the look because I am proud of the content that the visitor will find after clicking the links.

Thanks for sharing, Peter.

I'd like to see this info too!

My reply is....

When we made a couple of pages that had text revealed with a click, those pages were really really big pages, with about 5000 words total.  We just though that it would be easy for the visitor to make a short easy menu with the answers opening with a click.  It was an experiment that I had no intentions of doing other places, because I believe that text behind a click is not seen by lots of people.

So, we tried it.  Long tail traffic that was really valuable disappeared.

So, now, I put all of my text out in the open where everyone can immediately see it.

If I write text (and I write lots of it), I want it to be out there where everybody can see it.  I want them to scroll down the page, see every bit of it, whistle and say "holy smoke".

I write all of my own meta descriptions and spend good time on them.   Much of the time, my meta description is grabbed and shown verbatim in the SERPs.  In that meta description I can give a nice list of topics covered in my article or features of a product or value proposition on shipping.   I read lots of meta descriptions and use them to decide if the page is worth a click.  I don't think that I am the only person who does this,

Why would I spend three days writing an article and then not write a nice meta description?  Or, not write a description with clever marketing for a product that I sell hundreds of per year.   Why would I not shoot finely-crafted arrows when I can?

Keep in mind that Google has a mentality to do everything with an algo.

And     that     can    be     a     huge      problem.

How many people have their adsense accounts banned unjustly with no possible appeal?  How much adwords advice is given poorly?  How many times does google email me that my traffic has fallen off a cliff the day after Thanksgiving?   How many times does their program send adsense policy violations in error?   How many times do they give the wrong person credit for images in image search?  How many times does their parameter management in WMT not work and you fix it yourself using htaccess?   Google is even know to list wrong numbers for police stations in knowledge boxes!   (Stopping here, I could keep going but you get the idea.).

Google has a philosophy that "we would rather do stuff half-ass at scale, than have a human tool do it right most of the time".   Doing stuff with algos at scale is OK much of the time and Google is quite good at it..... but my advice is do not allow google to do anything important for you that you can do for yourself.

I am going to bet on me, and if you think that you are a reasonably smart person, then maybe you should bet on you.

We publish all of this information on product pages.   Many of our product pages have a short product description and a short article below explaining how to select, how to use, common maintenance.   We often have a video down there.  These pages rank well in the SERPs because they have generous amounts of unique, informative text, that might hold visitors.  All of this info might help some customers to buy the product.  At the same time it might discourage some customers who might have returned the product because they didn't have full information.

Yep, content that is opened with a click does not pull long tail traffic.  It has been working that way for at least two years.

We had pages and thought that putting some details behind a click would improve the look of the pages.  Yep, it did, then the traffic flow slowly dried up.   Put that content back into the open and the traffic very slowly grew back.

The most important thing to do is to have generous amounts of informative text.  Lots of people use the same images, you can still have a good website if the text is generous in amount, unique, and meaningful.

Most of the pages on this site simply display an image, a title, and some ads.

Some of these images and their titles appear on many other websites.

The goal of Panda is to demote sites that have skimpy content and content that appears on lots of other websites.  That is what I see at your website.

When Google decides that a website deserves a Panda hit they demote the rankings of pages all across the website.

So, if you want to get out of a Panda problem, that is going to require improving the uniqueness and substantiveness of the content.  The days that you can toss up a page with an image and a title and expect to get a lot of traffic are gone, especially when that same content is everywhere.

If you want this site to be competitive then the content has to be competitive either in uniqueness or substantiveness, or both depending upon the competitiveness of your niche.   The best way to do that is to write about each image.  An image is worth a thousand words, I am sure that you have heard that.

That's the best advice that I can give.  Getting out of Panda require either tossing out substandard content or doing a lot of work to make substandard content superior.