How to fight the Panda/Farmer update?
-
I have been suffering majorly from the Google algo change, as I lost more than 50% of my traffic of my largest site. Since then I have been focusing on rewriting pages, and adding new ones. New pages are all of high quality up to 2,000 words each, and the improved pages used to be thin content pages, rewritten to about 1,000 words. All content is 100% unique. I have noticed Google still has the old pages cached, dated to more than a month back, despite new pages (linking to some of the old) being indexed. Anyway, I am pretty much desperate by now, and coul really use some advice how to fight this. FYI, I got some budget available and a writer stand-by. Thanks, Giorgio
-
You mention adding and rewriting content, but are you adding it to existing pages or to new pages. Adding new pages may actually make Panda problems worse, even if they have original content. At some point, you're going to need to reduce your indexed pages (maybe dramatically) and canonicalize the new content to the old, thin content. Just adding content is probably a bad idea.
If the crawlers aren't getting into your deeper content, you may have to focus on some deep link-building, either external/inbound or internally by featuring certain pages (and possibly rotating until they get re-cached). You've got to give Google a push to re-crawl and simply adding content to a page they think is low-value probably won't be enough. Injecting solid links at various levels of the site architecture could help.
The tough part of this is that the update cycle for Panda-related problems is out of sync with the main index. What might traditionally take days or a couple of weeks to fix could take many weeks with Panda. They seem to be apply a separate data adjustment or possibly a machine-learning algorithm, and it's not part of the main algorithm. So, it's possibly you're on the right track, but simply getting pages re-cached isn't going to automatically reverse a Panda problem.
-
I want to bump this question, as by now I have added numerous of new pages, and loads of content. Furthermore I have also updated many pages which didn't look very valuable to me, for instance pages with 300 words or less. Where others would have one page of a specific subject, I created a complete guide with several sub pages, up to 15. All pages between 1000 and 3000 words 100% unique written by native English speakers (Canadian and US) which deliver content of the highest quality. Al together I must have added like 50 new (static) pages.
The effect of all of this was:
- Pages tend to be indexed a tad quicker;
- There has been some movement for my top two keywords, but the slightest - 26 to 18 and back to 20 for my main keyword.
I also did some article exchanges (I delivered my articles and picked good sites to exchange with, aka some of them being Google News sites, others related, but decent quality blogs (not Indian spam or the like).
I am still adding as many pages as I can, but since the site is not really moving anywhere (at least not where significant) I am slowly running out of funds.
Oh and I am also 100% sure that this has been caused by the Panda update.
Any more ideas to fight this beast?
-
I did in fact resubmit the sitemap, but no positive results so far. My sitemap is auto generated, but has no date or priority to it. I just went into WMTs to hit the resubmit link. To be more specific, one page I rewrote, site wide linked from the menu, as well as linked to from a couple of new posts in the site's blog section, still isn't recached. It still has a cache dating from January 9th. In this specific category I added 10 articles of each 1,500-2,000 words, all of high quality, and 100% unique. And 2 new articles of the same size are added weekly. Furthermore I ordered a first hiarchy layer category, which has only 2 very thin pages, to be rewritten. This will become a comprehensive guide of a total of 12,500 words spread out in about 10 pages. Something similar will be done for another category. To conclude, I am adding new pages to existing categories, where each existing page will be rewritten with the purpose of bringing more value for the visitors I hope to regain. I also niticed that my traffic started to drop before the actual Panda update. So there could be another reason..... Hopefully I will manage to recover as my site has much more value than most of the current top 10 rankings for my main targetted key phrase. Its been #4 for years and now #23 from US IPs, and 13 from the Netherlands (both Google.com) Any more ideas? Thanks, Giorgio
-
Giorgio, I'm wondering if you've re-submitted your XML site map, and if you've started to see any positive changes yet from the better content.
-
I've got the same situation, with foreign aggregators and scrapers ranking ahead of ever new article I put up. Now lest you say it's about links, I can give you examples where my smaller, less authority, clearly vacuous sites in the same niche are going gangbusters and getting ranked well without a link or tweet to their articles. The authority site that was hit has links, has tweets, has FB likes, has a huge link profile. Yet it is outranked by aggregators for fresh content. The aggregators I am seeing are foreign, with link backs to my article. How does that make sense?
@Jeff, one article I refer to has links to studies on the subject as well as to media articles (for reference).
-
If the links you have to your site were effectively devalued by the update as they came from sites that were hit by the update then you will need to look at strengthening your link profile not just adding more content to your site.
-
With the changes you have made, even though you don't refer to adding any pages, have you re-submitted your XML sitemap?
Putting a new site map up at least sends an alert that you have changed something.
Without being aware of what is on your site content wise, the other thing that might make a difference is a few well chosen out bounds links to authority or reference type sites in your industry (maybe a news article about your subject) not your competition.
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
-
I want to swop a site to an existing domain. i.e. it was http://A.com and now want it to be B.com...please help
The company I have started working for as two main websites. The main website (A) is out of date and not very functional but has the companies prime domain name. The other site (B) has their ecommerce engine. I'd like to make B the prime site i.e. take over A's domain name. Huge warning bells are going off regarding the SEO of this decision. Any advice or suggestions in how to go about this without destroying the company's SEO would be greatly valued.
Content Development | | SoutherlySwell0 -
Embed WordPress blog into site or /blog?
Hi, Just a quick question - I assumed it would be a better to have a WordPress blog in a sub folder rather than a sub domain however I just wondered would it offer any more / less value if I just embedded the WordPress blog into my existing code? Thanks, Dan
Content Development | | Sparkstone0 -
Short Meme/Image Posts on Blog - Will this hurt me?
Hey guys, I use Hootsuite to cross-post to twitter/facebook/google+/wordpress. It's mostly short one-sentence posts (http://minecraftserverfinder.wordpress.com/). But it's updated about 5-6 times a day and the images are relevant and interesting to my followers. Currently the wordpress page is not hosted on my main site minecraftserverfinder.com, it just links to it. I do have another blog on minecraftserverfinder.com/blog that has a couple of lengthy articles. My questions are thus: Should I keep going with these posts? Should I consolidate the blogs and host them on my main site? Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | HamburgerHelper0 -
Should I put the date on a new content page to show users when it was written or updated?
I've been asked this question at work and not certain of the answer. Personally if I see an 'old' date in a meta description on Google I often scan for more recent articles. In other words it can act as a deterrent. We are a very big social networking site with a large content section. For some of our content the date might be relevant, such as legal information, but often it isn't. Are there any SEO factors in dating content?
Content Development | | CecilyP0 -
Panda and Thin Content
Hi Guys, I have a quick question. We have a website and in the wake of Panda, we are worried about our video news section. We produce about 10 videos news a month on a templated page and beneath it is a small extract of the words spoken in the video. The text below each video is about 180 words each. Currently the video news section makes up and 1/5 of the content on the site. I.e Out of 500 pages, we have about 100 video news articles. Should I be worried about being wacked by Panda for this? Can I tell Google this is a news section?
Content Development | | VividLime0 -
How often should content be updated
With all of Google's recent algo updates (or ranking updates, whatever they're calling it now), we've obviously been looking into changing our content strategy and shifting it from quantity to quality. How often would you say is ideal for website content updates? i.e. should we be updating once a month? Once every couple of months? This isn't a blog - just a regular services-oriented site. My take on it is that it should be as often as organically possible - and that means something different for everyone. At the same time, we want Google coming back frequently to crawl the site. Thanks!
Content Development | | eyecarepro0 -
Multisite Worpress Environment / Community
Hello fellow SEOMOZ rs. We are building out a platform on WordPress that provides a free blog for a market niche in a multi-site WordPress environment. The client we are building this solution for now wants the people signing up for the free blogs to be able to search for each other (based on categories and keywords), to build a list of favorites from other bloggers in this community (sort of like building a team), review each other (leaving a publicly viewable review and score of each other) as well as create a forum that is outside the blogs that each of them have. Here is a summary of the goals for the WordPress Plug in (s) 1. Search for other sites within the multi-site environment
Content Development | | webindustry
2. Scoring / Review system for other users (who also have blogs on the system)
3. Ability to build and maintain a list of other users in the community (like a prefered list or team list)
4. A shared Forum area that we could admin from the multi-site platform that they could log in with using the same credentials as their multi-site blog credentials. My question for you all is: Does anyone have experience in a single plugin that will work in a multisite environment that would handle some or most of the goals listed? If not a single plugin, how about recommendations for individual plug ins that might help with this? Thanks for any recommendations!1 -
For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings? I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices? Content is expensive. Thanks
For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings? I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices? Content is expensive. Thanks
Content Development | | CSOD19990