Whether our shared articles caused Panda hit to our high quality site
-
Hello,
We are a quality site hit by Panda
Our article collection:
http://www.nlpca(dot)com/DCweb/NLP_Articles.html
is partially articles written by the site owners and partially articles that are elsewhere on them web.
We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.
Could this be why we were hit by Panda? And if so, what do we do? We've dropped way down in rank but have worked our way half-way back up.
Two of our main keywords are:
NLP
NLP Training
Thanks!
-
You have some valid points to consider... things seem to be improving and the articles that you might cut do pull in some traffic.
I can't tell you how to make your decision but here is how I made mine..
I had hundreds of republished articles but a lot more that I had written myself. Deleting lots of republished articles would cut my traffic and cut my income. Noindexing them would cut my traffic and cut my income. However, although those were serious losses they were small in comparison to other content on my site. So, knowing that google does not like duplicate content I got rid of them. There is still lots of great content on my site, visitors still find stuff to read, I know which of the things that I cut I should author a customized version for my own site.
The upside.... My site is more compact but still has thousands of content pages and the content that remains should be a lot stronger. After making the cuts my rankings, income and traffic increased. Not quite to previous levels but back to nice numbers.
I have reduced risk and am pleased with that. Everything that I cut was redirected to similar content. The most valuable of what was cut will be replaced with custom content with 301 redirects from the old content.
============================
How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.
What from this is unique? Definitely keep that. Keep what is not struggling in Google. Keep what is essential to your site but replace with better that you create yourself.
Do you see further risk in future panda updates?
Yep... that's why I cut off my foot.
My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles,
YES... In the past I wanted all of my content to be anonymously written. I have changed my mind on that and used rel=author on the best stuff.
no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles.
heh.... Here I would be chopping off two of those sites and merging them into one. I would have done that years ago before panda was ever heard of.
I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.
I agree.
-
Hi EGOL,
We are getting a lot of traffic off of some of these articles, so the site owners are not sure they want to no-index them just in case that's not causing the problem. Our rankings have come up from 40 to 26 on our main term, and similar for other terms, even though we still have duplicate content. We were originally at 19 before a big drop in November/December
How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.
What would you suggest I let the owner's know? Do you see further risk in future panda updates?
My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles, no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles. I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.
However, it's not my decision, your thoughts?
-
I don't know. Everything that I have done is an experiment.
If you are really scared, delete... if you have some tolerance for uncertainty then play around with noindex or canonical. I deleted from a really important site.... used canonical where I the ranking loss was small and the risk was not jugular.
-
Hi EGOL,
When is no-indexing enough and when would you suggest deletion?
-
Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Or is some deletion necessary?
On one of my sites I deleted a lot and noindexed followed everything else that was a duplicate. We saw rankings recover in about a month.
On another site i had a lot of .pdf documents that were used to control printing of graphics. We used rel=canonical on them. That works very very slowly to remove them from the index. We are seeing slow recovery on that site.
if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?
If the article belongs to someone else then I would noindex or delete. (Just saying what I would do it if was on my site). If it was my content I would set up a google + profile and use rel=author and rel=me to attribute them to a verified author.
-
Perhaps you could add a link to the original source on some of these where you have the permission. This should send a signal to google that you are showing it on your site for the convenience of users, but it is from a different source.
-
Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Is that enough to save our arse? Or is some deletion necessary?
I assume if we are not first in google for the content and title of an article, it is a potential duplicate content problem, correct? For example, if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?
Any advice is appreciated. You're one of the best EGOL.
-
We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.
Google probably does not know and certainly does not care. If you have duplicate content on your site you are a potential target.
What type of link-building have you been doing? You might have been hit by the overoptimization penalty.
I was republishing some third-party content on a couple of my sites. I deleted most of it and no indexed the rest. Cut off your foot to save your arse.
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
-
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Does Automated High Quality Content Look Like Low Quality to Search Engines?
I have 1,000+ pages that all have very similar writing, but different results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Example:
Nr of days on market
Average sales price
Median sales price
etc etc etc All the results are very different for each neighborhood. However, as per the above, the wording is similar. The content is very valuable to users. However, I am concerned search engines may see it as low quality content, as wording is identical across all these pages (except the results). Any view on this? Any examples to back up such views?0 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Why Did My Site Go Limp On Me?
One of my clients was once in the #1 position for "Philadelphia interior designer" and other related terms, but her site has dropped significantly. Still it is on the first page, but far from its former glory. http://www.interiorsbydonnahoffman.com is the site. What really confuses me is why in her home turf search of "Bucks County Interior Designer" a competitor, http://www.miriamansellinteriors.com, is above her in the SERPS. According to OSE her competitor has a PA of 32 vs my client's 39. My client has 35 Linking Root Domains (and some of high quality) compared to just 11 for the competition. In all aspects her competitor looks weaker and less relevant to me. Her site has been weak in the SERPs since May/June. We are redesigning her site- she has a high bounce rate compared to my other interior design clients, something like 55%. Any insights from y'all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfhytrwy0 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
Hello, I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places. Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site? There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to find pages hardest hit
I have been hearing that panda can penalize a website for low quality pages. I have run duplicate content check and done my best to go through the whole website. I hear many people talking about deleting hardest hit pages, or fixing hardest hit pages. My question is how can I find which pages on our website are hardest hit? Is there anyway to check a website for pages that might score low. We do have a ecom section to the website which I am concerned might be considered low quality for each product page. Any advice would be a great help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0