Panda Update - Challenge!
-
I met with a new client last week. They were very negatively impacted by the Panda update. Initially I thought the reason was pretty straight-forward and had to do with duplicate content. After my meeting with the developer, I'm stumped and I'd appreciate any ideas.
Here are a few details to give you some background.
The site is a very nice looking (2.0) website with good content. Basically they sell fonts. That's why I thought there could be some duplicate content issues. The developer assured me that the product detail pages are unique and he has the rel=canonical tag properly in place.
I don't see any issues with the code, the content is good (not shallow), there's no advertising on the site, XML sitemap is up to date, Google webmaster indicates that the site is getting crawled with no issues.
The only thing I can come up with is that it is either:
Something off-page related to links or
Related to the font descriptions - maybe they are getting copied and pasted from other sites...and they don't look like unique content to Google.
If anyone has ideas or would like more info to help please send me a message.
I greatly appreciate any feedback.
Thank you, friends!
LHC
-
Mmm... yeah hard to guess without looking at the site then, on my own experience / research, these are some of the issues I found in many of the sites affected by Panda:
•Intrusive advertising, excessive use of Adsense, sites created only for Adsense or to solely promote a product•High amounts of duplicate content / scraped content•Bad user interface / “ugly” design•Usage data - low click-through-rate, low time-on-site, 100% bounce rate•Content analysis - not usable/readable/easily-consumable content•Excessive internal linking to one or two pages only
And I don't mean your site to be spammy, but some cases, like news sites with advertising, sometimes they get articles out with just a couple paragraphs of content, so that single page becomes more advertising than content.
Consider posting your site, it would be nice to take a look
and there is also the last reason: your site is innocent and just got hit by mistake, it happens.
-
Hi, Andrés-
They weren't running any AdSense - no advertising at all and the site isn't spammy.
-
Hi Lisa, besides what was already mentioned, one of the reasons many sites were affected is related to ads, if you have Adsense or any other kind of ads in an excessive way, where in some pages you have more ads than content, then that could be a signal of low quality.
-
We're seeing massive changes in rankings now. Not so much drops but far less in rises, and a few drops. This seems to be happening more recently and not immediately after the update.
We've guesstimated that it is down to the update, despite the delay in effects.
We've come to the conclusion that a lot of the links (both existing links and ones we've been building since) are not holding anywhere near as much weight as they once were. Especially links that were "easier to come by" i.e. blog comments, articles, etc...
Due to the fact that the sites the links were and are on, have been hit themselves it's logical to assume those links are now devalued. Lots of article sites were hit, and "low value" sites. Thankfully not all links were from such sites but some were, which explains the drops I think.
-
Hi Lisa, It will be a little tricky without actually looking at the website but my starting point would be what you have done, duplicate content elimination. If the rel=canonical is in place I would double check that it is a 301 re-direct. I would certainly take a look at the content to see if it is duped on third part websites. Some SEO firms just copy and paste segments of the website and add links. Another concern i would have is the backlink hosts status so I.E a website which seemed appropriate at the time has also been hit by the panda update and is now classed as spam. I would run a backlink checker + search for the content to see if it’s duped. Let me know how you get on with this, it will be interesting to see what the culprit is.
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
-
Huge Dip in Traffic Last Week - New Algo Update?
Hi Mozzers, We experienced a huge dip in traffic on Thursday, 8/14, across our entire site. It was not a specific set of pages, it was sitewide. Google Webmaster Tools notes our impressions are down as well. The traffic has not recovered. It appears our pages are still indexed in Google, just not ranking well. Here are some questions I have to help isolate the cause: We recently completed a major redesign of our entire website on 7/26. We did not notice any dip in traffic after the new design launch - in fact, it actually increased a bit. Is it possible that only now Google sees our new site design and this is the reason for our dip? Is there a way to see Google's past cache dates? Did anyone else experience a similar dip in traffic since Thursday? Was there a recent Google update? It would be much appreciated if someone takes a look at our site - www.consumerbase.com for any glaring SEO errors (missing necessary meta tags, etc.). What steps do you guys suggest I take to isolate the cause in this dip in traffic? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Are Incorrectly Set Up URL Rewrites a Possible Cause of Panda
On a .NET site, there was a url rewrite done about 2 years ago. From a visitor's perspective, it seems to be fine as the urls look clean. But, Webmaster tools reports 500 errors from time to time showing /modules/categories... and /modules/products.... which are templates and how the original urls were structured. While the developer made it look clean, I am concerned that he could have set it up incorrectly. He acknowledged that IIS 7 on a Windows server allows url rewrites to be set up, but the site was done in another way that forces the urls to change to their product name. So, he has believed it to be okay. However, the site dropped significantly in its ranking in July 2013 which appears to be a Panda penalty. In trying to figure out if this could be a factor in why the site has suffered, I would like to know other webmasters opinions. We have already killed many pages, removed 2/3 of the index that Google had, and are trying to understand what else it could be. Also, in doing a header check, I see that it shows the /modules/products... page return a 301 status. I assume that this is okay, but wanted to see what others had to say about this. When I look at the source code of a product page, I see a reference to the /modules/products... I'm not sure if any of this pertains, but wanted to mention in case you have insight. I hope to get good feedback and direction from SEOs and technical folks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help
My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com Hello Mozers, I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site? In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines. In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side. Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iderma
Adam Paddock0 -
What Wordpress Update Services Should You Be Using on Your Wordpress Blog?
I have been told that pingomatic.com is all that you need however yesterday I went to a conference and others were recommending to have a good list of pinging services to cover all your bases Here are 4 that have been recommended: pingomatic technorati blogsearch.google.com feedburner Any others that should be included on this list? My goal is not to spam these ping lists however want to make sure my content is getting indexed quickly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Is google rolling out a huge update this week?
I am seeing some huge shifts in SERPS at the moment, for some keywords such as web design. Nearly every single result on the homepage is a different company than 2 weeks ago. We are seeing some clients have huge jumps in ranks but also some are dropping. Seems like we could have a big Panda/Penguin like update rolling out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tempowebdesign1 -
How can this site rank post panda/penguin?
I am doing link building for an adult dating comparison website. One of the main competitors though, having checked their backlink profile have anchor text that is not varied at all. In fact many, many links that are all the same. How can they possibly rank in the post panda/penguin era? In fact they're at number 2! The site is an adult site and it www.f hypen buddy.co.uk if anyone wants to runa backlink check on OSE. Any help greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
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 -
Are widgets dangerous after the Panda update?
My site provides widgets (online polls) which were developed so that each one would embed a do follow text link into the customers website. With Panda's unnatural link algorithm now in place should I modify these links to be nofollow and give up on this strategy or alternatively just set the text as my sites domain name? The only other option I could think of was to only embed links where the customers site had a certain page rank or above? Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish1