Recovery Steps For Panda 3.5 (Rel. Apr. 19, 2012)?
-
I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used - especially on sites that are not large scale ecommerce sites.
Blog site hit by Panda 3.5. Blog has approximately 250 posts. Some of the posts are the most thorough on the subject and regained traffic despite a Penguin mauling a few days after the Panda attack. (The site has probably regained 80% of the traffic it lost since Penguin hit without any link removal or link building, and minimal new content.)
Bounce rate is 80% and average time on page is 2:00 min. (Even my most productive pages tend to have very high bounce rates BUT those pages maintain time on page in the 4 to 12 minute range.)
The Panda discussions I've read on these boards seem to focus on e-commerce sites with extremely thin content. I assume that Google views much of my content as "thin" too. But, my site seems to need a pruning instead of just combiining the blue model, white model, red model, and white model all on one page like most of the ecommerce sites we've discussed.
So, I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used to decide whether to combine a page, prune a page, etc.
After I combine any series articles to one long post (driving the time on page to nice levels), I plan to prune the remaining pages that have poor time on page and/or bounce rates. Regardless of the analytics, I plan to keep the "thin" pages that are essential for readers to understand the subject matter of the blog. (I'll work on flushing out the content or producing videos for those pages.)
How deep should I prune on the first cut? 5% ? 10% ? Even more ? Should I focus on the pages with the worst bounce rates, the worst time on page, or try some of both?
If I post unique and informative video content (hosted on site using Wistia), what I should I expect for a range of the decrease in bounce rate ?
Thanks for reading this long post.
-
Alan : Thanks for sharing your experience in such detail.
-
After almost 2 years of panda destruction, and constant work on my site with no recovery whatsoever, I don't know if I have anything useful to contribute yet, so take this as some input.
Large site with over 2.2 million pages.
Deleted around 1.5 million pages
Removed all duplicate titles (removed for fixed)
removed all duplicate descriptions (removed or fixed)
Removed all problem pages (extra short, damaged content, empty)
Removed all duplicate body content pages.
Prevent addition of any new duplicates and if any slip past, fix within 24 hours.
Also, checked for incoming links and discovered some sites with problems pointing in - fixed or had these removed.
RESULT after almost 2 years? - zero improvement.
Almost ready to slash wrists, but about to try subdomaining first.
It would be funny if not so sad.
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
-
Putting rel=canonical tags on blogpost pointing to product pages
I came across an article mentioning this as a strategy for getting product pages (which are tough to get links for) some link equity. See #21: content flipping: https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies Has anyone done this? Seems like this isn't what the tag is meant for, and Google may see this as deceptive? Any thoughts? Jim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle. My questions are: 1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them? 2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap? 3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandExpSteve0 -
Rel="self" and what to do with it?
Hey there Mozzers, Another question about a forum issue I encountered. When a forum thread has more than just one page as we all know the best course of action is to use rel="next" rel="prev" or rel="previous" But my forum automatically creates another line in the header called Rel="self" What that does is simple. If i have 3 pages http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3 **instead of this ** On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2 On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3: it creates this On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 So as you can see it creates a url by adding the ?page=1 and names it rel=self which actually gives back a duplicate page because now instead of just http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 I also have the same page at http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1?page=1 Do i even need rel="self"? I thought that rel="next" and rel="prev" was enough? Should I change that?0 -
Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website
There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view. Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution? - 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post - And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HireSpace0 -
Is it ok to add rel=CANONICAL into the desktop version on top of the rel="alternate" Tag (Mobile vs Desktop version)
Hi mozzers, We launched a mobile site a couples months ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL:m.example.com The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I resolved by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version. The problem here is that I still also got Dups from that got generated by the CMS. ?device=mobile ?device=desktop One of the options to resolve those is to add canonicals on the desktop versions as well on top of the rel=alternate tag we just implemented. So my question here: is it dangerous to add rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags on the desktop version of the site or not? will it disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Issue: Rel Canonical
seomoz give me notices about rel canonical issues, how can i resolve it. any one can help me, what is rel canonical and how can i remove it
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | learningall0 -
My site was a PR 5 and now is unranked?
A site that I do SEO and SMM (www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com) had a PR 5 and now it shows "unranked". I had the #1 position for many core keywords, and now they are all gone. I don't do any black hat at all. Mostly article distribution and onsite content growth. The only logical thing that I can think of is, the server was going down several times a day, for about 3 days, a few weeks ago. But I can imagine that would cause me to lose all my rankings, and a PR 5. But then again, this has never happened to me before. I am trying to find out what caused this, how to fix the problem, and how long it will take to recover. Any suggestions or help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I am willing to pay for good advice on this issue if need be. JT
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KillerProductions0 -
How permanent is a rel="canonical"?
We are rolling out our canonicals now, and we were wondering: what happens if we decide we did this wrong and need to change where canonicals point? In other words, how bad of a thing is it to have a canonical tag point to page a for a while, then change it to point to page b? I'm just curious to see how permanent of a decision we are making, and how bad it will be if we screwed up and need to change later. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoreyTisdale0