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 suspect that a site's total page count affects SEO?
I've been trying to find out the underlying reason why so many websites are ranked higher than mine despite seemingly having far worse links. I've spent a lot of time researching and have read through all the general advice about what could possibly be hurting my site's SEO, from page speed to h1 tags to broken links, and all the various on-page SEO optimization stuff....so the issue here isn't very obvious. From viewing all of my competitors, they seem to have a much higher number of web pages on their sites than mine does. My site currently has 20 pages or so and most of my competitors are well in the hundreds, so I'm wondering if this could potentially be part of the issue here. I know Google has never officially said that page number matters, but does anyone suspect that perhaps page count matters towards SEO and that competing sites with more total pages than you might have an advantage SEOwise?
Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC1 -
Site has disappeared since Panda 4 despite quality content, help!
Our site www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk has lost over 20 first page rankings since the end of May. I assume this is because of Panda 4.0. All content on the site is high quality and 100% unique, so we did not expect to get penalised. Although I read somewhere that if Google can't read particular js anymore they don't rank you as high. The site has not been blacklisted as all pages are showing in Google's index and there are no messages on webmaster tools. We have not taken part in any link schemes and have disavowed all low quality links that were pointing there just in case (after the penalty). Can anybody see anything on www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk that may have cause Panda update to affect it so negatively? Would really appreciate any help.
Algorithm Updates | | search_shop0 -
Did anyone else notice all their keyword rankings go down after the last Panda refresh on January 17th 2013?
Even before January 17th I noticed my keyword ranking slowly going from the top 3 to around 8, 9 and 10. Then between January 15 and January 30th, (SEO MOZ) is not showing the exact date) they all went down to the second page and worse. The rankings dropped for an e-commerce website petsspark.com. They sell a tear stain removal product which is a pretty competitive market. After January i started to notice that Google was starting to rank blogs, forums, overal product review websites and of course amazon, better than me and my competitors. Was anyone else effected by the panda refresh or have any idea what may have gone wrong? Please help ScreenShot2013-04-10at50852PM.png?t=1365628252
Algorithm Updates | | DTOSI1 -
Has anyone seen this before? One domain dominates the entire first page!
Do a google search for "sober college" and tell me you don't see the entire page filled with one domain. (except the last result)
Algorithm Updates | | EmarketedTeam0 -
Old Site But No Traffic - Can Anyone Tell Reason ?
Hi , Can anyone please tell me why this site http://www.travelscience.com is not getting any traffic? Its 13 years old domain having 2340 indexed pages and Its Alexa rank is 6186158 Can anyone please identity the problems with it. I found it from Google doing the keyword research on the Travel topics. I am curious to know the potential problem with this site. Thanks in advance for your time. Regards
Algorithm Updates | | kywebsol0 -
Google.co.uk vs pages from the UK - anyone noticed any changes?
We've started to notice some changes in the rankings of Google UK and Google pages from the UK. Pages from the UK have always typically ranked higher, however it seems like these are slipping, and Google UK pages (pages from the web) are climbing. We've noticed a similar thing happening in the Bing/Yahoo algorithm as well. Just wondered if anyone else has anyone else noticed this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
Panda Update 2.5
All right mozers... What do you think? Apparently Google has just realized the next wave of "Panda" .... I'd love to hear your experiences with the new Panda Update. Have you experienced any decline in organic traffic?
Algorithm Updates | | NerdsOnCall0 -
When Panda's attack...
I have a predicament. The site I manage (www.duhaime.org) has been hit by the Panda update but the system seems fixed against this site’s purpose. I need some advice on what i'm planning and what could be done. First, the issues: Content Length The site is legal reference including dictionary and citation look up. Hundreds (perhaps upwards of 1000) of pages, by virtue of the content, are thin. The acronym C.B.N.S. stands for “Common Bench Reports, New Series” a part of the English reports. There really isn’t too much more to say nor is there much value to the target audience in saying it. Visit Length as a Metric There is chatter claiming Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value. Fair enough but, a large number of people that visit this site are looking for one small piece of data. They want the definition of a term or citation then they return to whatever caused the query in the first place. My strategy so far… Noindex some Pages Identify terms and citations that are really small – less than 500 characters – and put a no index tag on them. I will also remove the directory links to the pages and clean the sitemaps. This should remove the obviously troublesome pages. We’ll have to live with the fact these page won’t be found in Google’s index despite their value. Create more click incentives We already started with related terms and now we are looking at diagrams and images. Anything to punch up the content for that ever important second click. Expand Content (of course) The author will focus the next six months on doing his best to extend the content of these short pages. There are images and text to be added in many cases – perhaps 200 pages. Still won't be able to cover them all without heavy cut-n-paste feel. Site Redesign Looking to lighten up the code and boiler plate content shortly. We were working on this anyway. Resulting pages should have less than 15 hard-coded site-wide links and the disclaimer will be loaded with AJAX upon scroll. Ads units will be kept at 3 per page. What do you think? Are the super light pages of the citations and dictionary why site traffic is down 35% this week?
Algorithm Updates | | sprynewmedia0