Panda 4.1 - Regained rankings by making changes on my site
-
So thought I would share this with others as it 'might' help.
So I got around 40 pages, all of them have taken a dive in rankings so on average from Pg1/2 to Pg5/6.
I took one page and started working on content upgrades, I had around 50 words of boiler plate content above the fold and 750 words of unique content way down the page so maybe 600px below the fold before you hit it.
I removed the boiler plate content and produced 75 words of unique content to replace it, I shuffled things around and managed to get the 750 words maybe 250px below the fold then chucked another 100 unique words into the mix.
Fetched the page in GWMT's and resubmitted the URL - hour later that page alone, the page I upgraded had recovered its rankings back to the original position before Panda 4.1 hit.
Will the rankings for this page drop back down again, not sure but interesting this page was Pg6/7 since the 23rd and doing the above within an hour regained rankings back to Pg2 middle.
-
Interesting. I didn't know position was an SEO factor for content but can see it makes sense.
Thanks again for sharing!
-
Duplicate on my site, well almost I replaced a few words for each page. It wasn't the main content just an intro paragraph but it was the highest piece of content on the page.
I've basically put it down to poor/thin content above the fold, which I replaced with unique better content which is more relevant to the subject of the page.
-
Curious what you meant by "Boiler Plate"? Was this content duplicated elsewhere on your site or the web?
Thanks for posting your experiences.
-
Ok so an update.
Regained rankings for that page I upgraded have remained stable and for some queries better position.
Most importantly I applied the same method/process to 2 other pages and they also regained position - ive put these pages on monitor, ill give it a week to make sure they stay stable then roll out the upgrade to the other 35ish pages.
-
hey thanks for sharing, I have a site that I need to work on one of these days, and this data will help for sure.
Vijay
-
Thank you for sharing this. I haven't been hit by Panda 4.1, but as you say, this info might help someone. Good for you for being so giving! I salute you!
-
Thanks Andy,
I'm in the process of getting the copywriter to produce unique content for the other pages so will post the outcome on here once those pages have been resubmitted also.
-
Will the rankings for this page drop back down again
This is impossible to say I'm afraid. They could drop, or the changes may have satisfied Google and you will stay where you are.
Try making similar changes to the other pages and see if you can replicate your success. Unique content is always great, so as an exercise, it is a win-win anyway.
-Andy
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
-
Site Structure question?
Hey guys, Sorry for posting this again but the last thread got a bit too wayword. I'll sum it up better here. We're producing a WordPress theme every 3-6 months. Each is differently niched (eg: ecommerce, restaurant, magazine, etc...) Which option is better for our products going forward (even the ones we've yet to launch...eg...which method will get future projects more "trust juice" from google): A: create a subfolder for each theme eg: http://bigbangthemes.net/TicketLab_WP/wordpress-ticket-system & http://bigbangthemes.net/Showoff_WP/landing-page/ **This is currently what we're doing.**B: have them all under bigbangthemes.net/wordpress-themes/ eg: bigbangthemes.net/wordpress-themes/wordpress-ticket-system & bigbangthemes.net/wordpress-themes/showoff-startup-agency-theme Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
Content with changing URL and duplicate content
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time. We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”. My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in. http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all. We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content? Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile. Or maybe the canonical tag can be used? I look forward to your input. Cheers, Christian
On-Page Optimization | | Christian_T2 -
Keyword in URL: Ranking Factor?
I've got a site about a specific topic, which we'll call "themes" for the sake of this discussion. I personally like to keep the url structure short and clean (for usability purposes, but mainly because I'm a perfectionist and a minimalist). I feel that adding "themes" to the url structure is a bit redundant. However, nearly every keyword phrase that my site should rank for includes the word "themes." So I'm wondering how much I'm handicapping myself by not including the keyword "themes" in the url? The domain name itself sort of includes the keyword . . . although it's in Italian (I chose the domain for it's brand-ability, not for the keyword). A quick example: My Url Structure: www.themo.com/topic/abc My Competitor's Url Structure: www.sitesample.com/themes/topic/abc For many of the keywords, the competitors with the keyword in the url rank highest. But, I'm not sure how much emphasis to place on this, because from my understanding Google doesn't pay as much attention to url keywords anymore . . . and those sites might just be ranking high because they've been around for so long (which also happens to be the reason why they coincidentally also include the keyword in the url, because they started the site when that was a high ranking factor). Thoughts? Should I just trash my perfectionism and add the keyword to the url structure? (By the way, the site is only a couple months old and doesn't have any significant backlinks to inner pages yet, so changing the url structure wouldn't be a big deal if I decided to do that).
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
Site Cleanup Operation
Hi, I hope you can help, I have been asked to look at a friends site that is simply shocking, but somehow ranks for its main target keywords, mainly because they are easy. But going through the site he has like 350 links on his menus that are all follow so I need to change them to nofollow, but should anything else normally be marked such as no index etc on a menu link. Also upon doing a Moz scan there are something like 250 missing meta descriptions from old blog posts. When I looked closer they had been using the blog section for posting relevant news headlines, but thats it, So he has 250 useless, low quality blog posts. My question is, what should I really do with them, ie delete, redirect, canonical etc. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks Paul
On-Page Optimization | | propertyhunter0 -
Should I link my 3 E-Commerce sites?
Good Morning, I have 3 E-Commerce sites that all sell the same products, but have unique content on them (unique text, unique urls, same products).... Up until now, I have not put any links from one to any of the others... I just started to wonder about that since these are all related to the same industry, and are owned by 1 company, what would be the downside to linking them... Does anyone have any advice on if I should link to each site from the other 2 sites? Also, if you think I should be linking them, please advise how you would do it (on which pages, how many links, anchor texts, etc...) Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
You notice rankings go up when..
you link out to wikipedia? I feel there are always benefits to linking out to authority sites like this
On-Page Optimization | | imageworks-2612900 -
Some of my pages are ranking for terms which I want other pages to rank for. What can I do to effectively switch the ranking?
Some of the pages are ranking for terms I have optimised other pages for. The pages which are ranking are quite rightly falling, because they aren't optimised for the terms they're showing for. However, I have pages which are optomised for those terms. How do I switch the SERPS to the page I want?
On-Page Optimization | | GlobalLingo1 -
Is 1 design better than another?
I'm tracking two of my sites joeandcindy.com and minnesotashortsaleteam.com, both sites were done in wordpress however by different web designers. the Minnesota short sale site has gotten high rankings for several key terms without doing any link building or really any other off site optimization. I'm getting ready to have another site built and I'm wondering if there is something simple in the basic architecture of the site that is superior with the minnesota short sale site vs the joeandcindy.com site. If you could take quick glance and point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. Thanks www.Joeandcindy.com www.Minnesotashortsaleteam.com
On-Page Optimization | | jjwelu0