Panda Update: Need your expertise...
-
Hi all, After Panda update our website lost about 45% of it's traffic from Google. It wasn't an instant drop mostly it happened gradually over the last 5 months. Our keywords (all of them except the domain name) started to lose positions from top #10 to now 40+ and all recovery attempts we have done so far didn't really help. At this moment it would be great to get some advice from the top experts like you here.
What we have done so far is that We have gone through the all pages and removed the duplicate / redundant ones. We have refresh the content on the main pages and also all pages now have an canonical tags. Our website is www.PrintCountry.com.
Thank you very much in advance for your time.
-
Any other advice from the experts?
-
Yeah... beyond what I've already said, I don't really know what to do. A sort of similar question is here, and Thomas makes some good points. Adding some of the new schema.org markup could help (they have it for products, reviews, blogs, and more).
-
Thanks again John. There are really good points here.
What would you suggest for the duplicate content? I mean we originally created those pages and mostly our affiliates took those descriptions and even titles. It's little bit out of control who can use our content but don't you think Google should know who the owner of the content is? or any advice to cope with this?
Another point is that it's very hard to create different content for the all products we have. For example some of them are the same cartridges with different colors so the descriptions and titles most of the time are very similar.When we look at the competitors they also have same content issue for the products but their ranking are still good.
In terms of content we actually have a blog (http://goo.gl/i0uXS), article site (http://goo.gl/lGtNl), testimonials and review etc...There are some great sources here and interestingly none of them got affected by the panda update. It was just the main domain.
Thanks
-
I looked a bit more. If I had to guess why you're being penalized it's because your site doesn't have much in the way of original content. For example, go to a product page, like this one for a Brother ribbon cartridge. The description reads "Brother Black Ribbon Cartridge. This brand new Brother 1230 black ribbon cartridge is manufactured by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). 100% Manufacturer Guaranteed." If you stick that in Google, you'll see that you, along with every other printer site uses basically the same description, like printert.com, 123cheapink.com, inkcircus.com, etc.
You need to provide original content on your site that doesn't appear as duplicate content to Google. The blog is a good start. Having customer reviews, testimonials, and articles custom to your site are also good.
You might try taking a look at your competitors that are doing well in searches, and see what they're doing in terms of original content on their sites.
-
Thank you John for the reply.
Like you said what is good for user should be good for Google too right? The reason there are three ways to navigate on the website is mostly because of our visitor behaviors. Some visitors like to use the selector on the right side versus some of them like to use the top navigation links.
For h2 tags I see your point. It's something relatively easy to fix. But do you think it could be the major reason for our penalty?
-
Usually, what's good for the user is good for Google. I'm a little confused by how I'm supposed to navigate your site. There are 3 ways on the page to navigate your site, on the left, top, and right? There seems to be a lot of redundancy between these. You could probably consolidate these into one form of navigation?
Also, the links to categories within the expanded top navigation are wrapped in
s. For example, if you expand Ink & Toner, Brother, Canon, Dell, etc are all in
s. This is resulting in a lot of
tags on your page. I'd remove those tags since those elements aren't headers. It looks spammy to me.
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
-
Do I need to track my rankings on the keywords "dog" and "dogs" separately? Or does Google group them together?
I'm creating an SEO content plan for my website, for simplicity's sake lets say it is about dogs. Keeping SEO in mind, I want to strategically phrase my content and monitor my SERP rankings for each of my strategic keywords. I'm only given 150 keywords to track in Moz, do I need to treat singular and plural keywords separately? When I tried to find estimated monthly searches in Google's keyword planner, it is grouping together "dog" and "dogs" under "dogs"... and similarly "dog company" and "dog companies" under "dog companies". But when I use Moz to track my rankings for these keywords, they are separate and my rankings vary between the plural version and singular version of these words. Do I need to track and treat these keywords separately? Or are they grouped together for SEO's sake?
Algorithm Updates | | Fairstone0 -
What is the new / current google algorithm update targeting and how to adapt / fix SEO approach accordingly ?
Over the past c. 3 weeks our average Google SERP rankings for a site have been as follows : week 1 : average 3rd in SERP week 2 : average 1st in SERP week 3 : average 7th in SERP Reading on sites including Moz, SEO Roundtable and looking at Moz's mozcast tool it seems there is allot of change going on with Google's algorithm at the moment. Is there a general consensus as to what the new algorithm update is targeting so that we can adapt our site / marketing accordingly ? Or is it too early to adapt ? When Google rolls out an update like this is it common to see fluctuations as they try out things or if we are currently down in the rankings should we take action now. I know there a tools that look at your google analytics data an overlay a list of major google updates such a penguin and panda, but from what ive read this is a generic algorithm change rather than a defined named update.
Algorithm Updates | | jpeg800 -
Google Mobile Algorithm update
Hi there, On April the 21st Google seems to going to update their Mobile algorithm. I have a few questions about this one. Our current mobile website is very mobile friendly. We block all mobile pages with a noindex, so the desktop pages have been indexed on mobile devices. We use a redirect from desktop page to mobile page when someone hits a result on a mobile device. My gut tells me this is not April 21st-proof so I'm thinking about an update to make this whole thing adaptive. By making the thing adaptive, our mobile pages will be indexed instead of the desktop pages. Two questions: Will Google treat the mobile page as a 100% different page than the desktop page? Or will it match those two because everything will tell Google those belong together. In other words: will the mobile page start with a zero authority and will pages lose good organic positions because of authority or not? Which ranking factor will be stronger after April 21st for mobile pages: page authority or mobile friendliness? In other words: is it worth ignoring the 21 April update because the authority of the desktop pages is more important than making every page super mobile friendly? Hope to get some good advice! Marcel
Algorithm Updates | | MarcelMoz0 -
SEPRs drop from 2nd to 4th after Panda, What steps should i take?
Hi, My blog was on the 2nd or 3rd position on Google Search for my 2 word keyword for many countries. But after Panda Update, First i noticed 500-700 visitor drop on my site daily. Then i saw my blog is now on the 4th or on the 5th even 7th position of Google Search. So what step should i take now, i ran the on-page optimization and i have 5 easy fix, i can fix 2-3 out of them, One of them suggesting this: Keyword should be in front of the title, like: Keyword: Elephant Life Blog URL: www.cuteelephantslife.com My blog title is "Cute Elephants Life | Sweet stories of elephants and more" And It should be changed into "Elephants Life | Cute Stories of elephants life and more." So, As i am already on 1st page on Google for the keyword "Elephant Life", If i change the title from "Cute Elephants Life | Sweet stories of elephants and more" to "Elephants Life | Cute Stories of elephants life and more.", Will it help my ranking or it will harmmy position on SERP ? Please, suggest me what should i do to improve my blog and get better rank.
Algorithm Updates | | rimon56930 -
Penguin Update and Long Tail Keywords
Since the Penguin update, organic traffic for our site; oxygenconcentratorstore.com
Algorithm Updates | | chuck-layton
has dropped almost 25%. The thing I cannot figure out is that when I compare April 1<sup>st</sup> to May 15<sup>th</sup> (before the update) and June 1<sup>st</sup> to July 15<sup>th</sup> (after); 8 of our top keywords are up. Our 2 main keywords are up 15% and 11%. Where we lost most of our traffic is from our longtail keywords. We have almost 1000 longtail keyword phrases that we got visits from in the April/May period that we did not get in the June/July period. Is there a reason why our top keywords would continue to improve while we most of the longtail keywords?? If Google penalized us, won’t all of our keywords be dropping and just not the longtail. Any help/info would be awesome. Thanks.0 -
Google above the fold update
Hi everyone, Ever since the Jan 19th Google 'above the fold update' I have noticed some strange ranking changes in some of my sites. 1. rankings increased dramatically (not in top 50 to page 2) on Jan 19th for about 5 days then dropped out completely from the top 50. 2. our rankings then did the same thing again around Feb 2nd for about 5 -6 days then has bottomed out ever since. We do not have any ads on the site but our pages are dominated by images for most of the 'above the fold' section then followed by the content down the page. Any insight into this would be much appreciated. Cheers, Andrew
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
SEO Test: Domain Hyphenation [Update]
In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it. Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.
Algorithm Updates | | Dan-Petrovic1 -
Google Update on the 6th July
Hi Mozzers, Has anyone noticed a Google update on the 6th July? A price comparison site I optimise has fallen off the SERPs for most generic terms, however still getting traffic for longer tail phrases. Cheers Aran
Algorithm Updates | | Entrusteddev0