Moving Part of a Website to a Subdomain to Remove Panda Penalty?
-
I have lots of news on my website and unlike other types of content, news posts quickly become obsolete and get a high bounce rate.
I have reasons to think that the news on my website might be partly responsible for a Panda penalty so I'm not sure. There are over 400 news posts on the blog from the last 4 years so that's still a lot of content.
I was thinking of isolating the news articles on a subdomain (news.mywebsite.com)
If the news play a part in the Panda penalty, would that remove it from the main domain?
-
Not necessarily. I run a news website that covers current affairs. And as my site is in a small niche but has good domain authority, it ranks well for many random search terms. My bounce rate is about 83% but still ranks #1 for all my main keywords.
Naturally, I'd prefer if it were lower, but it does show that it's not a critical factor. I'm pretty sure it counts a lot more when Google calculates your quality score in AdWords however.
-
-
It's not low or thin content but I thought Google was using the bounce rate as an indicator of low quality content.
-
My understanding is that panda is about low quality and thin content. Are your news posts either thin or low quality content? If not why worry?
I can understand the problem with bounce rate, but two points: 1) your article might still be interesting for the person who searched for it. 2) you can promote your latest news stories at the bottom of the post and in the right nav, e.g. look at how the dailymail.co.uk right nav is filled with juicy news stories which I'm sure increase the pages read on their site and decreases the bounce rate, e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2326088/Prince-Harry-delights-staff-surprise-visit-Chelsea-Flower-Show.html
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
-
Buying a disused website and using their content - penalty risk?
Hi all, I'm in the process of setting up a new website. I have found various old websites covering a similar topic and I'm interested in purchasing two of these websites for their content as it is very good, despite those sites struggling to make ends meet. One of these websites is still live, the other one hasn't been live for 2 years. Let's say I bought these websites for their content, then used that content on my new domain and made sure the two websites where this content came from were offline, would I run a risk of getting penalised? Does Google hold onto content from a website even if it is now offline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1590 -
Interstitial Penalty?
We have an ecommerce website, and we show a popup for first time visitors to our desktop site to join our email list. Google has cached pages with the popup. Can I assume that this is a problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Is it Penguin or is it just a shoddy website?!
Right, I'm struggling and could really do with a different perspective on a website I am working on http://www.data-contracts.co.uk/ This is an Analytics image for March through to July of organic unique visitors http://imgur.com/Y2zaekP The page for concrete repair is struggling in the rankings and is currently residing somewhere like page 15 on Goooooogle. Is there anyway back??? Y2zaekP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
Follow or nofollow to subdomain
Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!0 -
Recovering from an Automatic penalty
My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords) I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site. The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update). If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover? Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Looking for guidance on transferring and incorporating content from a purchased website into an existing website
One of my client’s recently purchased a competitor’s website, and we would like to transfer the content from the competitor’s website (http://www.wilson-hardness.com) to our client’s existing website (http://www.buehler.com); at the same time we want to minimize loss in keyword rankings the competitor’s website has established. The two websites work in similar fields: one measures and offers products in scientific measurement and analysis of various materials. The other website offers products that are in similar field: hardness testing equipment. Looking for suggestions on how to proceed or recommended reading on the topic. I’ve tried to do research, but haven’t found anything, so I’m not sure what to topic-names to search. Any guidance would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Strange recovery from Panda
I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up? Thx Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0