Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?
-
I operate a New York City commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Ranking and traffic have dropped steeply since early June.
Around May 20th a new Panda update was launched by Google and I wonder if that could partially explain the drop. My site contains the following:
-300 listing pages. These are product pages and often contain less than 100 words. Many have not been changed in two years.
-150 Building pages. These contain less than 220 words. Many have not been changed in two years.
-40 blog pages. We have been adding 1 or 2 per month.
-50 or 60 neighborhood and type of space pages. These contain 200-600 words.
Could our drop in traffic be due to Panda? I might add that an upgraded version of the site with new forms, a modified right rail an header was launched on June 6th. Also, we submitted a disavow file with Google on April 20th for about 100 toxic domains, one third of the 300 domains that link to us.
In order to take remedial action we need to understand what has happened. Any ideas???
Thanks, Alan
-
Were the 300 listing pages ever receiving traffic? If the answer to this question is no or if a significant number of them weren't ever receiving any traffic it might change what I would think you should do. Poor title tags will hurt your visibility in lots of ways. I would not personally tie the title tag strategy to Panda. Panda is a content algo. It seems to look for duplicate, near duplicate, thin content, poor quality content and then make sure that sites with those criteria are not ranking. If you think more broadly about it you might ask why Google would want to take the whole site down in the rankings for thin content on a few or many pages with potentially low or no traffic. I think the reason they are penalizing the whole site is because they don't want webmasters producing this type of content. If they can get content creators to think twice before creating another 20 urls about x topic then over the long haul their job will become much easier. They can fight off spam more easily because it won't work. I was very angry when Panda 4 rolled out and some sites I own got hit. However, I feel empowered now to correct the issue. My suggestion for you is to compare the urls with their links and traffic. There should be some clear cut low quality stuff that you can noindex. On the pages that drive traffic I would make sure you are providing deep, helpful content. Hard to discuss all the things you may need to do over email but I think you are probably getting the idea. PM me if you want to chat more.
-
Hi Brad:
I have had a very similar experience. Reduced ranking across the board for any competitive term, but not eliminated.
My site contains 300 listing pages (product pages). Those listing are usually short (less than 125 words). Would beefing them up to 200-300 words help? Also the title tags for these terms are not that well written. Some look like this:
"242 W. 38th St. - Manhattan, New York", "12 W. 37th St. - Manhattan, New York,"
Some are more elaborate like: "14 Penn Plaza | Great Midtown Office Rental | 2,313 SF Negotiable", "Lease 14 Penn Plaza Executive Offices | 34th Street | 4836 SF"
Could poor title tags contribute to the penalty.
Also, many listings have "Manhattan, New York" added at the end of the title tag, really impoverishing it, like: "Park Avenue South 27th & 28th Street- Manhattan, New York"
"44th Street-Eighth & Ninth Avenues - Manhattan, New York"These title tags seem really poor. Could that trigger the Panda penalty?
Also, many title tags for other page categories have "Metro Manhattan Office Space" at the end of them. Could this trigger the penalty? I think the title tags are really bad.
<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
|<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
| ||
-
Hi Egol:
Will Google remove Panda penalties once content is improved? Or does an improvement take months (like waiting for a Penguin update)
I can potentially correct two out of the three issues you mention without enormous SEO costs. I am not sure how to address the structural problems.
Thanks,
Alan -
Google has been assessing sites with the Panda algo for over two years. They are continuously changing the algo to promote sites that fit its requirements and demote sites that have content that does not.
In my opinion, your site has technical problems, thin content and duplicate content that could trigger Panda problems. Read my replies to your previous questions to find them.
-
If you saw a drop around May 19-20 then I would say it is almost certain that this was Panda. I've been in a similar experience. I own a network of content sites that had never been clearly hit by Panda on the day of launch until Panda 4 where they got hit very hard. When you consider Panda I would think of it less like an algo change and more like a filter. Panda seems to crawl the site looking for certain criteria. If your criteria meets these then all your results get filtered. Remember that Google has clearly stated that their goal with Panda is for sites with thin or duplicated content to not rank high on the page. In my case I am seeing that I still rank for everything that I used to rank 1, 2, 3 for but now I rank 8, 9, 10. I have no proof yet that I can get out from under it but I am making a lot of changes now that I believe will do the trick to fixing my own traffic issues. I found this article to be very helpful as I considered what I should do next
http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5536/google-panda-4-0-topical-authority-content-update-2014-case-study/
If you want to reach out to me privately I'd be happy to discuss in more detail.
Brad
-
Hi,
Did you get any penalty spam email? I would go through your links in webmaster tools and moz to see if your site is on and spammy sites, forums or blogs. If so ask for removal or disavow them. I would also add some good rich content to the pages that may have "thin content"
-
Hi EGOL:
Interesting. But why now? Panda updates have been rolling out frequently to no ill effect. There have been no material changes in the content in the last few months except for updating many key pages with better content.
How is this latest update of Panda different?
What would you suggest I do to escape from this penalty?
I have a bout 350 product pages with thin content (less than 120 words each). Would no indexing them or rewriting them help? What if I increased the content by 100-150 words? But I would think that Google would understand that product pages could have light content and still add value.
Thanks, Alan
-
** Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?**
I believe that some form of Panda has gotten your site.
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 have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amarieyoussef0 -
Is this Panda?
Hi, I have a page that has been fluctuating a lot the last few days, here are the results: 5/14: #17 (this is where it had been ranking for about 2 months). 5/15: #34 5/16: #33 5/18: #9 5/19: #35 5/20: #13 5/21: #37 I have only made minor changes to the page, and the link profile seems to look good. Here's the page: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/dui.html (targeted KW: San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI Attorney). The page has a lot of high-quality, original, and well-cited content. Any thoughts on what could be causing so much back and forth? I should state that none of the other rankings for this site (overall) have been impacted. Just this page for DUI related searches (San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI attorney, San Diego Drunk Driving Lawyer, etc.).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Why my site it's not being indexed?
Hello.... I got to tell that I feel like a newbie (I am, but know I feel like it)... We were working with a client until january this year, they kept going on their own until september that they contacted us again... Someone on the team that handled things while we were gone, updated it´s robots.txt file to Disallow everything... for maybe 3 weeks before we were back in.... Additionally they were working on a different subdomain, the new version of the site and of course the didn't block the robots on that one. So now the whole site it's been duplicated, even it´s content, the exact same pages exist on the suddomain that was public the same time the other one was blocked. We came in changes the robots.txt file on both server, resend all the sitemaps, sent our URL on google+... everything the book says... but the site it´s not getting indexed. It's been 5 weeks now and no response what so ever. We were highly positioned on several important keywords and now it's gone. I now you guys can help, any advice will be highly appreciated. thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
1 Ecommerce site for several product segments or 1 Ecommerce site for each product segment ?
I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella domain. Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment. Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics- Any thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Has my site been penalized?
Our site was listed on the first page for the phrase Active SEO on Google.co.uk. We suddenly find ourselves on page 4 overnight and we're not sure what's going on. We have not undertaken an Black hat techniques however the site is fairly new. Anyone have any ideas as to what is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MassivePrime0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
Migrating a site
Hello, I have what a I think it's a noob question.. I have a medium size website and need to put it into maintenance for the next 2 months, and afterwards activate a completly new site. My client asked me to do this, cause the same people whoe run the constant flow of information on the site, are the ones who are going to develop the new site, so he wants to just close it out So... what are the steps for doing this with minimum impact on any SEO advances made this past months?.. How do I tell the search engines, Hey, just under maintenance for a while....then... i'm back in the game but this is my new structure. and the old one should go here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0