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
-
Insane traffic loss and indexed pages after June Core Update, what can i do to bring it back?
Hello Everybody! After June Core Update was released, we saw an insane drop on traffic/revenue and indexed pages on GSC (Image attached below) The biggest problem here was: Our pages that were out of the index were shown as "Blocked by robots.txt", and when we run the "fetch as Google" tool, it says "Crawl Anomaly". Even though, our robots.txt it's completely clean (Without any disallow's or noindex rules), so I strongly believe that the reason that this pattern of error is showing, is because of the June Core Update. I've come up with some solutions, but none of them seems to work: 1- Add hreflang on the domain: We have other sites in other countries, and ours seems like it's the only one without this tag. The June update was primarily made to minimize two SERP results per domain (or more if google thinks it's relevant). Maybe other sites have "taken our spot" on the SERPS, our domain is considerably newer in comparison to the other countries. 2- Mannualy index all the important pages that were lost The idea was to renew the content on the page (title, meta description, paragraphs and so on) and use the manual GSC index tool. But none of that seems to work as well, all it says is "Crawl Anomaly". 3- Create a new domain If nothing works, this should. We would be looking for a new domain name and treat it as a whole new site. (But frankly, it should be some other way out, this is for an EXTREME case and if nobody could help us. ) I'm open for ideas, and as the days have gone by, our organic revenue and traffic doesn't seem like it's coming up again. I'm Desperate for a solution Any Ideas gCi46YE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muriloacct0 -
Server update to ipv6, SEO consequences
Hi all, I read the article from 2014 on MOZ regarding ipv6.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
https://moz.com/blog/ipv6-cblocks-and-seo Our technical department is about to change our server from ipv4 to ipv6.
Are there any things we have to consider regarding SEO / rankings / duplicate content etc.. with this transition? I hope you have a little spare time to answer this question. Regards,
Tom1 -
Would a mass data update have a negative effect on SEO?
We have a large eCommerce site with the ability to do an export, change data, and import new data in mass. Over the 15 years that this site has been growing, it has accumulated several inconsistencies in product titles, descriptions, title tags, etc. The question is: If we were to update thousands of product titles ( 's on those pages) and some of the descriptions, would it have a negative SEO impact because of the groundbreaking number of products effected? Or would it only be for the better if they were all technically improvements (both in SEO and UX)? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | frankandmaven0 -
Ecommerce catalog update: 301 redirects?
Hello mozers, We run an ecommerce store and are planning a massive catalog update this month. Essentially, 100% of our product listings will be deleted, and an all new catalog will be uploaded. The new catalog contains mostly new products, however there are some products that already existing in the old catalog as well. The new catalog has a bunch of improvements to the product pages, included optimized meta titles and descriptions, multiple language, optimized URLs and more. My question is the following: When we delete the existing catalog, all indexed URLs will return 404 errors. Setting up 301 redirects from old to new products (for products which existing previously) is not feasible given the number of products. Also, many products are simply being remove entirely. So should we go ahead and delete all products, upload the new catalog, update the sitemap, resubmit it for crawling, and live with a bunch of 404 errors until these URLs get dropped from Google? The alternative I see is setting 301 redirects to the home page, but I am not sure this would be correct use of 301 redirects. Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro130 -
A 302 Redirect Question | Events Page Updates
Hello Moz World, I have a client that has a TON, like close to a thousand pages that have a 302 redirect set up. After further investigation, I found that every month they update their events page & Demo Request page, and the old events pages still exist but, get a 302 redirect to the updated page. From what I gather, this is a default mechanism set up by the hosting provider. My questions; is this an example of when to use a Rel=canonical? Also, is there a method for integrating this without having to go into every page and integrate the code snippet? And Lastly, How should I go about ensuring this doesn't happen in the future? Thanks ahead of time, you guys rock! B/R Will H.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
Panda penalty removal advice
Hi everyone! I'm after a second (or third, or fourth!) opinion here! I'm working on the website www.workingvoices.com that has a Panda penalty dating from the late March 2012 update. I have made a number of changes to remove potential Panda issues but haven't seen any rankings movement in the last 7 weeks and was wondering if I've missed something... The main issues I identified and fixed were: Keyword stuffed near duplicate title tags - fixed with relevant unique title tags Copies of the website on other domains creating duplicate content issues - fixed by taking these offline Thin content - fixed by adding content to some pages, and noindexing other thin/tag/category pages. Any thoughts on other areas of the site that might still be setting off the mighty Panda are appreciated! Cheers Damon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitator0 -
Updated My Business Profiles & Still Not Ranking in Local SEO... What Next?
I have used Get Listed and a few other services to update my profiles for my company Health Care Associates (its a home health care agency). http:healthcareassociates.net. I have added pictures, categories, descriptions, key words, etc. and it doesn't seem to help. We are still not ranking in the search engines for "home care grand rapids", "home health care" etc. What else can I do to optimize the local search? Todd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | t1kuslik0 -
Penguin/Panda/Domain Purchase
If I move forward with the acquisition: 1. Should I, if there is a way, just acquire the domain and then attempt to unlink existing links? 2. Can I just buy the domain, completely kill the site, and then build again from scratch? Even if I do that, the links to the domain will still be out there. 3. Should I even move forward with the purchase if I know these tactics have been used? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0