How long to recover from Panda Update
-
Hi there,
I think I was affected by the recent Panda update as I had a lot of duplicate content for my product descriptions (about 300). I'm going through and rewriting these to be both helpful and unique. I was ranking quite nicely for a big spread of keywords, but have been seeing my rankings drop day after day since the update.
Is it possible to see my rankings improve again after Google re-crawls my site, or would a penalty have been applied to my site preventing me to re-gain my positions for sometime. It's probably worth noting that I have a lot of unique and helpful content, it was just my product pages that had duplicate content, but I've seen my rankings across the board drop.
Any discussion and insight would be much appreciated.
-
Weekly sounds about right. Dont forget to take a look at your places listings, and other elements while you are in the mood to update and improve!
I understand how frusterating it can be optimizing an ecom shop or store. Lots of pages, lots of time, lots of typing. Just got done doing a site that had over 3000 pages. Keep your heart in it, and you will see the results you want. I took a look at the site, seemed like you were going in the right direction.
-
Thanks Andy, and everybody else. I think I have a clear action plan to move forward now. Get the product descriptions unique - and written to be more helpful and better for converting customers, adding more to the blog (bit thin at the moment with just news rather than useful info) and creating great resources to help customers (+ giving the site linkable assets)
Many thanks
-
Hi David, I think I have it set to weekly. I was guestimating it might take a month for it to start resolving itself. Gutted really as I was just about to invest time in more content and outreach. Ohwell.
-
Once its all fixed, you should see start seeing changes in about a month or so. There really isnt any specific timeline, and all you can do is get the errors fixed, and resubmit the sitemap and use the "fetch as google" option in Google WMT. Sometime changes can happen in a week, all depends what your crawl frequency is set to. In your sitemap, do you have it set to daily, weekly, or monthly?
-
I would defiantly say its something to do with Panda
Your drop as seen on the graph, is your search visibility and while its not a great indication on its own, it still pretty useful. Your drop in % terms in the same as Ebay's.
Generally speaking people are saying Ebays drop is down to poor quality content, so if David is right about Matt Cutts saying its not affecting product descriptions I would take a look at your blog and add more content (however that does all seem unique).
I will still work on the product descriptions and making them more useful for the user, plus you win twice, higher ranking and more customer converting and they are getting the advice they need without leaving your site
-
Hi David,
I appreciate your input. I only made that assumption as the drop coincided with the update - literally the same day of the update after having massive gains for weeks (and months) prior. A lot of my rankings that dropped were for category pages and my homepage that are unique and actually quite useful for readers.
Do you think you could pinpoint the reason for the drop if it isn't due to duplicate content?
-
Thanks Andy, that's the app I'll be using.
I've seen a drop across the board for keywords, but not a complete failure. Yes this time of year is when I make the money. I've just started so put some of the fluctuations down to that too. Just need to keep plugging away at it I guess.
-
I'd be surprise if you were hit by Panda for duplicate content on product descriptions. Matt Cutts is on record saying it's not a big deal for ecommerce sites.
-
Hi Sean
I used to have a shopify store as well and there are plenty of apps, try this one I have used previously and liked:
http://docs.shopify.com/manual/more/official-shopify-apps/product-reviews
Investing in product descriptions and unique content will pay off in the long run.
I've noticed you have got some great content on your category pages (hopefully these still rank as its the time of the year when I guess you get a lot of sales) so its just the product pages which will require work.
-
Hey Andy,
Thanks for your response. Yep, you hit the nail on the head. Duplicated from the manufacturer to save time as I wanted to launch quickly. Invested my time in creating new content rather than revisiting my product descriptions. I'm pleased I'll be able to recover.
I will look to get product reviews implemented ASAP.
Many thanks,
Sean -
Hi
Yes it is possible to recover, but it wont be an overnight solution.
You are doing the right thing and tackling the issues of duplicate content. I think this update will have affected quite a few e-commerce sites as a lot I see always use the manufacturers description (duplicating content) usually for the reasons is easier and cheaper.
And good way of improving might be to ask previous people to write product reviews on the page. This is a good way of generating good unique content.
Not sure what platform you use or whether its custom built, but there is usually some good apps that will automate this process, sending emails to customers after a certain time to come and leave a review.
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
-
An immediate and long-term plan for expired Events?
Hello all, I've spent the past day scouring guides and walkthroughs and advice and Q&As regarding this (including on here), and while I'm pretty confident in my approach to this query, I wanted to crowd source some advice in case I might be way off base. I'll start by saying that Technical SEO is arguably my weakest area, so please bear with me. Anyhoozles, onto the question (and advance apologies for being vague): PROBLEM I'm working on a website that, in part, works with providers of a service to open their own programs/centers. Most programs tend to run their own events, which leads to an influx of Event pages, almost all of which are indexed. At my last count, there were approximately 800 indexed Event pages. The problem? Almost all of these have expired, leading to a little bit of index bloat. THINGS TO CONSIDER A spot check revealed that traffic for each Event occurs for about a two-to-four week period then disappears completely once the Event expires. About half of these indexed Event pages redirect to a new page. So the indexed URL will be /events/name-of-event but will redirect to /state/city/events/name-of-event. QUESTIONS I'M ASKING How do we address all these old events that provide no real value to the user? What should a future process look like to prevent this from happening? MY SOLUTION Step 1: Add a noindex to each of the currently-expired Event pages. Since some of these pages have link equity (one event had 8 unique links pointing to it), I don't want to just 404 all of them, and redirecting them doesn't seem like a good idea since one of the goals is to reduce the number of indexed pages that provide no value to users. Step 2: Remove all of the expired Event pages from the Sitemap and resubmit. This is an ongoing process due to a variety of factors, so we'd wrap this up into a complete sitemap overhaul for the client. We would also be removing the Events from the website so there are not internal links pointing to them. Step 3: Write a rule (well, have their developers write a rule) that automatically adds noindex to each Event page once it's expired. Step 4: Wait for Google to re-crawl the site and hopefully remove the expired Events from its index. Thoughts? I feel like this is the simplest way to get things done quickly while preventing future expired events from being indexed. All of this is part of a bigger project involving the overhaul of the way Events are linked to on the website (since we wouldn't be 404ing them, I would simply suggest that they be removed entirely from all navigation), but ultimately, automating the process once we get this concern cleaned up is the direction I want to go. Thanks. Eager to hear all your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Never recovered from loss of visibility in Google, what did we miss?
Hello, I hope someone can help me, or can recommend someone who could look into this in more detail a a consultancy service or something. Our client https://bit.ly/2IjLD7X experienced a bad drop in visibility early 2017 which we didn't manage to recover from. We had a problem with one main category page that wasn't indexed anymore (it was #1 for a major keyword in the Netherlands). We were able to fix the problem eventually (had to do with the .be being indexed instead due to no hreflang) but never really recovered with that page, only the entire site around that time saw a major drop in visibility. The client went to another agency (a renowned agency in the Netherlands) but after over half a year they haven't been able to recover. Organic visits are still down 45% compared to the same period last year. Another major Dutch keyword they ranked #1 for is now #9 for instance. So basically two SEO agencies (we and the other one) have tried everything we could think of for the past year, but none of us seem to know what the problem is and the owner is quite desperate (it's a small store with only 3 employees and his monthly revenue is only half of what it once was. I'm afraid a quick look into the site won't help anyone find the issue, so if someone has a good idea of how we can help this previous client I would love to hear so!
Technical SEO | | WebdesignTilburg0 -
404 Hurricane Update Page After?
Hi All, I am wondering if anyone could help me decide how I should go about handling a page i plan on removing and could possibly use later on. So, a perfect example is: Let's say a company in Florida posted a page about the stores hours and possibly closing due to the incoming hurricane. Once the hurricane passes and the store is reopened, should I 404 that page since another hurricane could come after? The url for the company is www.company.com/hurricane so this is a url that we would want to use again. I guess we could just 410 and name each url www.company.com/hurricane-irma & www.company.com/hurricane-jose for each new hurricane. I am just wonder what is the best practice for a situation like this. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | aua0 -
Sudden decrease in indexed AMP pages after 8/1/16 update
After the AMP update on 8/1/16, the number of AMP pages indexed suddenly dropped by about 50% and it's crushing our search traffic- I haven't been able to find any documentation on any changes to look out for and why we are getting a penalty- any advice or something I should look out for?
Technical SEO | | nystromandy0 -
How long does it take for Moz to discover links to pages
Hi folks, Our website is doing well in the Google rankings relative to our competitors who often have higher "Domain authority" than us as reported by Moz. I'm wondering how closely Moz's "Domain Authority" correlates with Google's. In particular, I wonder how long it takes Moz to discover inbound links. For instance our page at http://www.educationquizzes.com/ks3/english has many inbound links from pages on an outstanding educational website and yet our page authority is given by Moz as a measly "1"! Any insights would be very much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | colinking0 -
Webmaster Tools stopped updating my sites
On Feb 6th WMT stopped updating the stats for my two main sites. I have seen other people complain about this but it seems like it's not known what causes it or if it's by design. Does anyone here have any insight on this issue? Thanks, Greg Davis AntiqueBanknotes
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
Hit by the penguin update
Hi, My site @ www.mortgageadvicecenter.co.uk has been hit by the penguin update. I cannot be found at all in google for certain keywords such as mortgage advice where we ranked page 2. We still rank for certain keywords. I really don't know why we have been penalised and what to do. I have plenty of brand links and nothing out of the ordinary link distribution. This obviously affects our bottem line so do you have any idea's or time scales? Any help would be appreciated, Thanks Ryan
Technical SEO | | pensionadvice0