Payday Loan or Panda? Any thoughts?
-
So this is a very old problem, but I'm finally getting around to trying to figure it out. My site experienced a dramatic organic traffic drop from Google (-40%) on May 17th 2014. It then drops another 30% on May 19th 2014. See graphs. According to Moz these two dates correlate with Payday Loan 2.0 and Panda 4.0.
Panda makes complete sense, as this site (www.ausedcar.com) has a large amount of content that is syndicated across other sites (used car inventory is essentially the same everywhere on the Internet). Payday Loan on the other hand, which seems to be the primary traffic drop doesn't make any sense at all. Is it possible I started getting hit by Panda on the 17th and then it completed on the 19th? I know the dates for algorithm changes are not perfect.
Next, assuming it is Panda, what are some things you guys have done to help with this? As I mentioned this content is duplicated all over the Internet, so it seems like Google arbitrarily picks winners and losers (my site is twenty years old!). I know I need unique content, but not sure how exactly to do that besides rewriting words so it doesn't appear duplicate.
-
Oh no!! So sorry to hear that Phil & sorry for the "loan" mix up. There are some great
There are some great disavow tools available. Here's a great resource to start: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool
Cleaning up those spammy backlinks will help a lot.
Best of luck!
-
Actually I just Googled backlink audit, and holy hell, what a find! Someone was definitely deliberately attacking me with negative SEO (looks like a bunch of hacked wordpress sites pointing at us with various keywords). Thank you for the idea!
-
Thank you Britney, just to be clear my site isn't about loans at all, it just showed a traffic drop when Google's "Pay Day Loan" algo went live.
-
Thank you for responding, what specifically would the back link audit entail, do you have a good resource that discusses this? Google hasn't marked me for any bad links, but the site has been around so long I'm sure some directories and things we were in back in the day which were considered white hat are now black hat etc...
-
Yes, definitely duplicate content could be your problem. I would also recommend you do a back link audit.
Also the main page content looks quite sparse (sorry, I know it property took you ages. But it's worthwhile beefing it out, if you've got a few minutes spare).
Strongly recommend you do a full site audit from the ground up and include both on and off page.
-
Hi Phil,
It would 100% be worth it to rewrite some of your content and add unique value adds (graphics, video, audio, etc.) to help round out the page, better fulfill your user intents and provide multiple consumption options for your visitors. Google also loves to see old pages updated and improved. It would also be interesting to test this out on one of your payday loan pages to see what kind of organic traffic you can gain back through some on-site content improvements.
It would be interesting to test this out on one of your payday loan pages to see what kind of organic traffic you can gain back through some on-site content improvements. Bonus points for tapping into key influencers in the loan space to try to get some natural link love that could go a long way in re-indexing your content.
Sidenote: I just did a ton of keyword research for an upcoming blog post on keyword research. Looked into "loans", there is huge opportunity for "loan calculator" content. --Lots of volume, low competition.
Hope this helps,
B
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
-
Thoughts on different base URLs for different website language?
Hello mozzers, Currently in the process of setting up a new website for a new entity. I was wondering what your thoughts were on using different base urls for different languages. Example: ABCgroup.com -> English
Technical SEO | | yacpro13
groupeABC.com -> French I've never done this before; I've been one to prefer using a subfolder structure. However, for this case, the expected visitors are truly split between 2 languages, and therefore having a base url in the visitor's language is appealing. Would this approach be detrimental if all pages have a proper hreflang tag? Thanks!0 -
I think I got hit by the latest Panda update
Hi everyone, I think one of my sites got hit with Panda. On Sept 18th the site dipped to "not in top 50" for almost all keywords. I checked GWT for the manual action email but my inbox is empty!!!!!!!!!! The lesser of 2 evils I guess. They had major server issues that week as well so it is hard to identify what caused the site to dip. My client has original content on the website but almost all content on the blog is copied. Do you recommend me deleting the non original content? Can the problem be elsewhere? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Our Panda Content Audit Process
We've put together this process over the past year that has shown success when it comes to sites that appear to be hit by Panda. The idea was to put together a process that would allow us to give our clients an understanding of the problem at hand and metrics we can use to explain how recovery is going. Would love to hear your opinion or if you have a different/similar strategy.
Technical SEO | | eyeflow1 -
Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in terms of being able to escape its clutches ?
Hi, Is being hit by Panda as hard to get out of as being hit by Penguin ? Or if you clean up all your content should you get out of it relatively quickly ? I have a very old (11 years) and established site (but also very neglected site that i'm looking to relaunch) but its on an ancient shopping cart platform which never allowed for Google analytics & GWT integration etc so i cant see any messages in GWT or look at traffic figures to correlate a drop with any Panda updates. The reason i ask is i want to relaunch the site after bringing up to date with a modern e-commerce platform. I originally launched the site in early 2002 and was perceived well by Google achieving first field of view SERPS for all targeted keywords however competitive, including 'ipod accessories', 'data storage' etc etc. These top positions (& resulting sales) lasted until about 2007 when it was overtaken by bigger brand competitors with more advanced & Google friendlier ecommerce platforms (& big SEO budgets) I originally used the manufacturers descriptions editing slightly but probably not enough to avoid being considered duplicate content although still managed to obtain good rankings for these pages for a very long time even ranking ahead of Amazon in most cases. The site is still ranking well for some of the keywords relating to products for which there is still manufacturer copied descriptions so i actually don't think i have been hit by Panda. So my questions Is, is there any way of finding out for sure if the site has indeed even been hit by Panda at all without looking at analytics & gwt ? And once i find out if it has or not: Is it best if i relaunch on same domain to take advantage of the 11 year old domain history/authority etc ? So long as i make sure all product descriptions etc are unique, if i have been hit by Panda the site should escape its clutches quite quickly ? **OR ** Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in which case is it best to start again on a new domain ? Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Does anyone have any thoughts about this site: web-archive-uk.com?
They have "archived" a lot of our content. We have high-quality content that has been copied by others. We are in the process of sending DMCA notices to the relevant search engines that have indexed these sites. As well as to the actual sites. Are we right to believe that copied content on 3rd party websites damages/diminishes the seo of our own site? (Leaving aside the straight forward theft issue.) BTW actually impressed by the swift responses from Google to DMCA requests.
Technical SEO | | dexm100 -
Anyone notices the effect of the panda update for the rest of the world?
Friday google applied the Panda Update for the rest of the world, I checked my rankings and nothing seemed to have changed , does anybody notice any of the effects already? Is it to soon to draw any conclusions after 2 days?
Technical SEO | | Arnx0 -
Is it Panda?, how to deal with AP etc newswire articles
A site I have lost 30% of its traffic in June then another 10% in July, is it Panda? The site has 10's of thousands of AP or other syndicated articles on it, they are not there for SE benefits, they are categorized and relevant to the people who read them, the site gets half of its traffic from type ins/bookmarks. Should I nofollow the articles or rel="canonical" them? what can help...... Cheers
Technical SEO | | adamzski0