Thought I was Hit By Panda? Regained Rankings?

[TP_Marketing]

Hello,

At the beginning of the week, traffic dropped drastically, I was under the impression that the site was hit by panda. This morning, I am seeing the keywords/pages, right back into position? Does anyone know what this could be? Webmaster had no messages, and was free of errors?

Thank you!

[CHADHARRIS]

start by using the moz campaign tool.  follow the directions, enter your keywords and keyword phrases that you are trying to rank.  Then let it crawl your site.  Wait for the report, then carefully complete the task one by one.  It's is a very time consuming, daunting task that takes hard work.  In the end, all you are doing is building a better site for the search engines to crawl and rank you.

Just go step by step.  Take the long road, no short cuts.  If someone tells you they can fix it in a day- they are full of crap.

Building a online business is harder than running a brick & mortar any day of the week.

start with the basics- read a lot and listen to people that sound reasonable- don't listen to snake oil salesmen....

Email me anytime charris@thegardengates.com- we are a real business doing this all in-house after going down the consultant road( trying to take short cuts) we spend a lot of time on this- 7 days a week.

Chad

[TP_Marketing]

Morning Chad,

In the meantime should I remove ALL of the dulplicate site wide content, and only leave titles up?  Or block these pages? I am confused as to what to do. I do have the option via WYSIWYG editor to insert dynamic tags, but content will be thin. We actually get traffic from these pages, but as you said I want to do this correctly and not have to do it again in the future?

Thank you very much!!!!!

[CHADHARRIS]

don't put site wide content on every page that looks or feels the same-  that's what I would recommend.  Why rush and do it wrong or have to redo it.  Take your time and tie your content to quality blogs-to social leveraging etc.

I would have your content writer start at top level pages and work down- it will bring the biggest results that last the longest but they will not be fast.

[TP_Marketing]

What would you recommend for a large ecommerce site with so many pages, that we cannot get content on fast enough? The editor allows us to put in "default" content which is inserted sitewide? We do have tags that switch up content slightly, I just would not want to run into any issues in the near future with an algo update.

Thank you Robert!

[RobertFisher]

You have already answered your question... You need a break  
Just kidding, but you can't draw any SEO conclusion in a day or three. You have to look at how long had the page been on page one of SERPs? If it is a newer page you will see much more fluctuation than with an established page. The same is true with lower competition keywords where most pages are low PA/DA.

So, if you want stability, my advice is to slowly add relevant content to the page in some way. You can also change the content (within your given framework) or have an area in the content where you talk about that product and link to more info on your site (this "more info" could be an ever added to blog, etc.).

As you get links to the page, show you are fresh, relevant and wanted by searchers, the fluctuation slows to a near halt.

Hope this clarifies.

[CHADHARRIS]

LBM-

I think Robert is on point.  Our site which is done by the rules- from day to day our rankings and traffic changes. We do a lot of work to make sure this doesn't happen but I think you need to look the www like the ocean.  Some days the tide rolls in as planned, other days not so much.

Not sure what you are doing ( meaning selling) but look at sales- who cares about traffic- it's about checks in the bank.  I do realize these are tied to traffic but not always.

hope that helps-

Chad

[TP_Marketing]

On one specific search it was showing on page #1 (low competition keyword) yesterday I located it on page 10. All of this happened with 2-3 days. I did see the mozcast tool show 80 yesterday.

[RobertFisher]

LittleBigman

Without a bit more info there is no answer to exactly what the problem was. Given that you mentioned pages, and the last refresh of Panda was on the 18th and effected very few queries, I would guess that it was not (and given the quick reposition).

I would look at my traffic flow in analytics, etc. to see if there is something I could be missing on. Sometimes, even with the best site there will be a traffic drop for a day that goes unexplained. You did not mention how much the rankings changed, domain, etc. so it is hard to tell what could have been the cause. Glad for you it's back.

Robert