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
-
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amarieyoussef0 -
301 redirecting a site that currently links to the target site
I have a personal blog that has a good amount of back links pointing at it from high quality relevant authoritative sites in my niche. I also run a company in the same niche. I link to a page on the company site from the personal blog article that has bunch of relevant links pointing at it (as it's highly relevant to the content on the personal blog). Overview: Relevant personal blog post has a bunch of relevant external links pointing at it (completely organic). Relevant personal blog post then links (externally) to relevant company site page and is helping that page rank. Question: If I do the work to 301 the personal blog to the company site, and then link internally from the blog page to the other relevant company page, will this kill that back link or will the internal link help as much as the current external link does currently? **For clarity: ** External sites => External blog => External link to company page VS External sites => External blog 301 => Blog page (now on company blog) => Internal link to target page I would love to hear from anyone that has performed this in the past 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keyword_NotProvided0 -
Working around Dev Site
I am working around development site. All pages are 'nofollow'. What can I advice on, when it come to SEO and is there any good article or checklist that I can go through. One thing I wanted to know is how can I check for broken links or meta data or any other SEO analytics if the page is 'nofollow' and I cannot crawl it with screaming frog or any other tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atlanticocean0 -
Blog content and panda?
If we want to create a blog to keep in front of our customers (via email and posting on social) and the posts will be around 300 - 1000 words like this site http://www.solopress.com/blog/ are we going to be asking for a panda slap as the issue would be the very little shares and traction after the first day or two. Also would panda only affect the blogs that are crap if we mix in a couple of really good posts or would it affect theses as well and possibly even the site? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
New site. How important is traffic for a new site? And what about domain age?
Hi guys. I've been building a new site because i've seen a real SEO opportunity out there. I'm a mixing professional by trade and so I wanted to take advantage of SEO to help gain more work. Here's the site: www.signalchainstudios.co.uk I'm curious about domain age. This site fairly well optimised for my keywords, and my site got pretty good content on it (i think so anyway). But it's no where to be seen on the SERP's (link at all). Is this just a domain age issue? I'd have though it might be in the top 50 because my site's services are not hard to rank for at all! Also what about traffic? Does Google want to see an 'active' site before it considers 'promoting' it up the ranks? Or are back links and good content the main factor in the equation? Thanks in advance. I love this community to bits 🙂 Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6631 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
SEO Blow-Up After Site Redesign
I contracted with a local web design firm - a highly recommended firm - to redo my law practice's Wordpress site. The redesign was done in early April. After the redesign I saw a large drop in rankings across all of my keywords, lost internal page rank, and had a big traffic drop. The site is www.toughtimeslawyer.com. There were a couple of issues that contributed to it; but I'm not sure how to rebuild. The internal URL structure changed completely. I wasn't aware of this until the site went live. I didn't have a sitemap for about a week, then the sitemap plugin they used was not very good and showing errors in Webmaster tools. Last week, I replaced it with Yoast's SEO plugin. The biggest problem is that they setup a subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com, without asking me or telling me. The subdomain had all of my content on it. It was not blocked with robots.txt; and it is being cached by Google. I just discovered it today, when I was doing something in my cpanel. I assume that this is creating a duplicate content problem with Google. I'm not sure what steps to take to recover. I am especially concerned about the subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com and the best want to handle it with the search engines. Thanks in advance, all advice is appreciated. I've been pulling my hair out for the last few weeks over my rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ToughTimesLawyer0 -
Why was I hit by the above the fold algo?
I cannot find any decent information on this update. Everybody appears to reiterate what Matt Cutts posted. I understand what the update was 'supposed' to combat and achieve. I also understand what those abusing ads above the fold, are supposed to do. But I need to know what to do, when you don't have too many ads above the fold. One of my websites was hit. Several professionals have tried to convince me it was Panda, that was released on 18th January. But I am now 99.9% certain it wasn't. I'm in the UK, traffic on the 18th was normal, little better than expected actually. Traffic on the 19th was normal until around 10pm GMT and there as a noticeable dip, compared with previous days and weeks. January 20th continued this decline and at the end of the day, there was a 25% loss. I have 1 Google ad, that is above the fold. Most of the pages have no ads at all. No affiliates or anything else. I have always prided myself in keeping my website clean and ad free. We also have the lowest bounce rates in the niche, by a mile, as far as I can tell, from speaking to other webmasters. I cannot remove this 1 ad, the servers alone, cost a couple of grand. The advertising supports the website. Nothing I can find online, gives me any indicators, as to what might be tripping this filter. But I need to figure it out, as traffic has now reached a 50% loss, which equates to about 15,000 visitors per day. I have tore my pages apart, removed functionality, added functionality and yet traffic has continued to decline. Can anybody shed light on this? I worry that perhaps Google is seeing the images on my website as ads. The images open a bigger preview in lightbox, but with JS turned off, opens a new page, with nothing but the image on it. I am at my wits end. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0