Is this Panda?
-
Hi,
I have a page that has been fluctuating a lot the last few days, here are the results:
5/14: #17 (this is where it had been ranking for about 2 months).
5/15: #34
5/16: #33
5/18: #9
5/19: #35
5/20: #13
5/21: #37
I have only made minor changes to the page, and the link profile seems to look good. Here's the page: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/dui.html (targeted KW: San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI Attorney).
The page has a lot of high-quality, original, and well-cited content. Any thoughts on what could be causing so much back and forth?
I should state that none of the other rankings for this site (overall) have been impacted. Just this page for DUI related searches (San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI attorney, San Diego Drunk Driving Lawyer, etc.).
-
I believe its MibuKotaro
-
Hey Sean,
Trying to PM you but the system can't find your username. Is it Sean Williams?
-
Thank you.
Yeah, San Diego DUI Lawyer and San Diego DUI attorney are highly competitive (it's CA, people like to drink and drive apparently). I'm sure it's similar in Tampa.
I'm working on Local SEO, cause you're right, it's a huge area of opportunity.
-
If you have any further questions or want a second set of eyes sent me a PM and I would be glad to assist. Done A LOT of Penalty analysis so recognizing issues is a fun hobby for me
-
Hi Sean,
Thank you for the response. A few sites were adjusted, not just mine. None of them were wiped out, except for one.
This is a tricky area, as I'm trying to rank an interior page for a category in which a lot of attorneys dedicate their entire practice (hence entire website).
I don't see a decrease in traffic (via GA), so maybe it's not Panda.
I'll keep an eye on the competition. Thanks again.
-
The only reason I would worry about the drop is if it triggers something worse. Actually, dropping 20 spots, when you were already on either page 2 or 3, probably isn't going to hurt you all the match. It looks bad in a report, but, in terms of conversion, I don't think it will effect you all that much.
If I were you, I would focus my energy on local SEO and getting reviews. Granted, I don't spend a lot of time looking into how lawyers rank in other cities, but I have done it some. I've never seen so many review sites trigger for a legal term: "San Diego DUI Lawyer." Not to mention, there is only 1 local result that shows. Perhaps this is a fluke for today, but, man, if it's not, you've got a lot of room to grow there.
-
I agree with Ruben that being only a week it is hard to tell for certain. You had said that you have been checking the rankings also, so what does the first page look like for your terms. Are you the only site seeing this flux?
Again this has been addressed but Panda is content based. Grabbing snippets of your content I only found a slight duplication but that was within your own site. The best indicator of Panda is your organic traffic through Analytics. If your Google only Organic traffic has dropped substantially it is entirely possible that it may be the case.
On the other hand it was only recently announced that the Panda updates were rolling out again and this has been happening for longer. I would watch your rankings for the next two weeks or so, but also the people who are the top 5 organically, since you are already passing them to find you. If after that you still notice you jumping a lot but they aren't maybe its time for a quick competitive analysis to see what they may be doing differently.
-
Hi Ruben,
Thanks for the feedback. I see ur in the legal industry as well.
Yes, the anchor text is too exact - I'm working on fixing that.
I guess it's good news that it's probably not Panda. But it's still tough to drop 20 spots on such an important KW.
Ok, I'll keep monitoring it to see how it goes.
Thanks again.
-
A few things:
1. Unless you scraped all that content, I highly doubt it's Panda.
2. From my understanding, Panda is mostly about content so "the link profile seems to look good," doesn't really matter.
3. Also, I do not agree that your link profile looks good (I do not mean that harshly; I have several pages that are way worse. But, I think you should know). Most of your highest quality links are no-follow and you have a bunch coming from directories. Your anchor text is pretty exact as well.
4. Good news: From everything I've read/heard in this forum or others, when people are hit with Panda/Penguin, they do not fall 20 spaces...they fall like 100. Granted, those are all anecdotal so it could be possible.
5. It's only been a week. Yes, 20 spaces is definitely something to pay attention to, but I'd just monitor it for at least another week.
I hope this helps.
Good luck,
Ruben
-
Moz Rank Tracker AND Google it myself with Google Incognito.
-
Can I ask what method you use to come up with those stats on a daily basis, and how confident you are that they are accurate? .... tom
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
-
E-Commerce Panda Question
I'm torn. Many of our 'niche' ecommerce products rank well, however I'm concerned that duplicate content is negatively effecting our overall rankings via Panda Algo. Here is an example that can be found through quite a few products on the site. This sub-category page (http://www.ledsupply.com/buckblock-constant-current-led-drivers) in our 'led drivers' --> 'luxdrive drivers' section has three products that are virtually identical with much of the same content on each page, except for their 'output current' - sort of like a shirt selling in different size attributes: S, M, L and XL. I could realistically condense 44 product pages (similar to example above) down to 13 within this sub-category section alone (http://www.ledsupply.com/luxdrive-constant-current-led-drivers). Again, we sell many of these products and rank ok for them, but given the outline for how Panda works I believe this structure could be compromising our overall Panda 'quality score', consequently keeping our traffic from increasing. Has anyone had similar issues and found that its worth the risk to condense product pages by adding attributes? If so, do I make the new pages and just 301 all the old URLs or is there a better way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saultienut0 -
Penguin & Panda: Geographic Penalities?
Has anyone ever come across information about a website appearing strongly in SERP's in one region, but poorly in another? (ie: great in Europe, not so great in N. America) If so, perhaps it is a Panda or Penguin issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Canonical tag vs 301 in this Panda situation - trying to wrap my brain around this!
Here's the situation. Let's say you have a development site that was created on a subdomain such as examplesite.webdesign.com. When the new site, examplesite.com launches, the developer forgot to remove examplesite.webdesign.com from the index. As such, two copies of the site exist. Because the development site existed first, examplesite.com ends up being affected by Panda and drops out of the search results. As a result only the development site is visible on Google searches. I've been trying to wrap my head around whether using canonical tags or 301 redirects would be best. On one hand you could insert a canonical tag on each page of the subdomain to tell Google that the correct version to index is examplesite.com. On the other hand you could do a 301 redirect from every page of the development site to to examplesite.com. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Because the new site has been flagged as a Panda site, in either case will it need to see a Panda refresh in order to be included in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Recovery Steps For Panda 3.5 (Rel. Apr. 19, 2012)?
I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used - especially on sites that are not large scale ecommerce sites. Blog site hit by Panda 3.5. Blog has approximately 250 posts. Some of the posts are the most thorough on the subject and regained traffic despite a Penguin mauling a few days after the Panda attack. (The site has probably regained 80% of the traffic it lost since Penguin hit without any link removal or link building, and minimal new content.) Bounce rate is 80% and average time on page is 2:00 min. (Even my most productive pages tend to have very high bounce rates BUT those pages maintain time on page in the 4 to 12 minute range.) The Panda discussions I've read on these boards seem to focus on e-commerce sites with extremely thin content. I assume that Google views much of my content as "thin" too. But, my site seems to need a pruning instead of just combiining the blue model, white model, red model, and white model all on one page like most of the ecommerce sites we've discussed. So, I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used to decide whether to combine a page, prune a page, etc. After I combine any series articles to one long post (driving the time on page to nice levels), I plan to prune the remaining pages that have poor time on page and/or bounce rates. Regardless of the analytics, I plan to keep the "thin" pages that are essential for readers to understand the subject matter of the blog. (I'll work on flushing out the content or producing videos for those pages.) How deep should I prune on the first cut? 5% ? 10% ? Even more ? Should I focus on the pages with the worst bounce rates, the worst time on page, or try some of both? If I post unique and informative video content (hosted on site using Wistia), what I should I expect for a range of the decrease in bounce rate ? Thanks for reading this long post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustDucky0 -
Panda/Penguin & Ecommerce Sites in similar niches
Hello, We have a few online stores that are in similar niches. How do we make sure that we don't get penalized for this (Panda/Penguin) We have the sites interlinked, but our newest one is not going to be linked to the others. Also, will rewriting descriptions help if the product is on more than one site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Panda / Penguin Testing on a Site - Has anyone see this?
Hi, Trying to diagnose the fall of our site. We fell mainly with Panda 3.4 and then a little more with Penguin. We have a main site with 200 pages and an attached blog. example domain.com/blog Then blog that was really small with only 7 posts. One keyword phrase example: "ace widget software" has ranked # 2 and 3 through the entire storm. The page that is ranking is in our main root site (not the blog). We used to rank for 200 phrases now only rank for about 10 Over the past week I stumbled on the fact that if I create a new post in my blog, those pages rank in 3 days. Good rankings, #2 on one and at least first page on the other 5 pages. One page ranked #2 in 17 hours. The test I am conducting: I am now testing to see if maybe there is some coding issue on our site, we do not use a template but a 3 column design built in Dreamweaver using older style tables etc. 1. Putting a new page on the old design. 2. Taking an existing page and putting into new design without side columns. 3. Already testest - adding new page to blog (success on this test) Seems if it was a coding issue/ design the two or three keywords phrases that stayed steady through the storm would have fallen. our site: www.TranslationSoftware4u.com Has anyone else been adding new content to see it rank really good but cannot get the other pages to bounce back up in rankings? Open to ideas of why this is happening. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70 -
Need some urgent Panda advice. Open discussion about recovering from the Panda algorithm.
I have a site that has been affected by Panda, and I think I have finally found the problem. When I created this site in the year 2006, I bought content without checking it. Recently, when I went through the site I found out that this content had many duplicates around the web. Not 100% exact, but close to. The first thing I did is ask my best writer to rewrite these topics, as they are a must on my site. This is a very experienced writer, and she will make the categories and subpages outstanding. Second thing I did was putting a NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta in place for the pages I determined being bad. They haven't been de-indexed yet. Another thing I recently did is separate other languages and move these over to other domains (with 301's redirecting the old locations to the new.) This means that the site now has a /en/ directory in the URL which is no longer used. With this in mind I was thinking to relocate the NEW content, and 301 the old (to preserve the juice for a while.) For example: http://www.mysite.com/en/this-is-a-pandalized-page/ 301 to http://www.mysite.com/this-is-the-rewritten-page/ The benefits of doing this are: decreasing the amounts of directories in the URL getting rid of pages that are possibly causing trouble getting fresh pages added to the site Now, the advice I am looking for is basically this: Do you agree with the above? Or don't you agree? If you don't, please be so kind to include a reason with your answer. If you do, and have any additional information, or would like to discuss, please go ahead 🙂 Thanks, Giorgio PS: Is it proven that Panda is now a running update? Or is it still periodically executed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VisualSense1 -
Panda Prevention Plan (PPP)
Hi SEOMOzers, I'm planning to prepare Panda deployment, by creating a check-list from thinks to do in SEO to prevent mass trafic pert. I would like to spread these ideas with SEOMoz community and SEOMoz staff in order to build help ressources for other marketers. Here are some ideas for content website : the main one is to block duplicate content (robots.txt, noindex tag, according to the different canonical case) same issue on very low quality content (questions / answers, forums), by inserting canonical redirect or noindex on threads with few answers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Palbertus1