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
-
Panda penalty removal advice
Hi everyone! I'm after a second (or third, or fourth!) opinion here! I'm working on the website www.workingvoices.com that has a Panda penalty dating from the late March 2012 update. I have made a number of changes to remove potential Panda issues but haven't seen any rankings movement in the last 7 weeks and was wondering if I've missed something... The main issues I identified and fixed were: Keyword stuffed near duplicate title tags - fixed with relevant unique title tags Copies of the website on other domains creating duplicate content issues - fixed by taking these offline Thin content - fixed by adding content to some pages, and noindexing other thin/tag/category pages. Any thoughts on other areas of the site that might still be setting off the mighty Panda are appreciated! Cheers Damon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitator0 -
Should I use a rel=canonical to the home page
Hi guys, I have a site where the homepage is ranking for the term 'industrial flooring' around position 30 and the actual level 2 industrial flooring page is ranking well below at around position 60. I'm happy for the homepage to rank for this term and would like to see it improve, so here are my questions: 1: Is the existence of the level 2 page preventing the homepage from ranking higher due to keyword cannibalization etc.? 2: Would the use of the rel=canonical tag pointing from the level 2 page to the home page have a positive or negative impact on the homepage's rankings for 'industrial flooring'? 3: Is there anything else I'm missing? Greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
Bing still not listing my site after 3 weeks, Google ranks very very low
I am scared that somehow the search engines are penalizing me for something, but I don't know what. The site can be found at http://www.hypnotherapy-guide.com It is a business directory/advice/guide site listing a lot of hypnotherapists (9000). Is it possible that such a large site popping up over night is flagged by the SE as spam? I don't know what I am doing wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tguide0 -
REL canonicals not fixing duplicate issue
I have a ton of querystrings in one of the apps on my site as well as pagination - both of which caused a lot of Duplicate errors on my site. I added rel canonicals as a php condition so every time a specific string (which only exists in these pages) occurs. The rel canonical notification shows up in my campaign now, but all of the duplicate errors are still there. Did I do it right and just need to ignore the duplicate errors? Is there further action to be taken? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ocularis0 -
Rel canonical issues on wordpress posts
Our site has 500 rel canonical issues. This is the way i understand the issues. All our blog posts automatically include a rel=canonical to themselves.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | acs111
eg a blog about content marketing has: Should this tag point to one of the main pages instead so the link juice is sent back to our home page?0 -
List Your Top 3 SEO Strategies to Get Your Rankings Back
Hey guys, can you list your top 3 strategies (what you've been focused on - SEO) to get your rankings back, or rank well in general, in Panda. Don't be vague saying link building...we all know that, what type of link building specifically, for example. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0 -
Major Website Migration Recovery Ideas?
Since starting our business back in 2006 we've gone through alot of branding, and as a result URL and architectual migrations. This has always something that has been driven by usability, brand awareness and technical efficiency reasons, while knowing that there would be SEO hits to take from it....but ultimately hoping to have a much stronger foundation from an SEO perspective in the long run. Having just gone through our most recent (and hopefully final) migration, we are now about 15% down on traffic (although more like 35% - 40% in real terms when seasonality is stripped out). Below is a timeline to our structural history: 2007 - 2009 = We operated as a network of inidividual websites which started as 1, www.marbellainfo.com, but grew to 40, with the likes of www.thealgarveinfo.com, www.mymallorcainfo.com, www.mytenerifeinfo.com, www.mymaltainfo.com etc.. 2009 - 2010 = We decided to consolitdate everything onto 1 single domain, using a sub-domain structure. We used the domain www.mydestinationinfo.com and the subdomains http://marbella.mydestinationinfo.com, http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com etc.. All old pages were 301 redirected to like for like pages on the new subdomains. We took a 70% drop in traffic and SERPS disappeared for over 6 months. After 9 months we had recovered back to traffic levels and similar rankings to what we had pre-migration. Using this new URL structure, we expanded to 100 destinations and therefore 100 sub-domains. 2011 = In April 2011, having not learnt our lesson from before :(, we undwent another migration. We had secured the domain name www.mydestination.com and had developed a whole new logo and branding. With 100 sub-domains we underwent a migration to the new URL and used a sub-directory folder. So this time www.myalgarveinfo.com had gone to <a></a>http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com and was now www.mydestination.com/algarve. No content or designs were changed, and again we 301 re-directed pages to like for like pages and with this we even made efforts to ask those linking to us to update their links to use our new URL's. The problem: The situation we fine ourselves in now is no where near as bad as what happend with our migration in 2009/2010, however, we are still down on traffic and SERPS and it's now been 3 months since the migration. One thing we had identified was that our re-directs where going through a chain of re-directs, rather than pointing straight to the final urls (something which has just been rectified). I fear that our constant changing of URL's has meant we have lost out in terms of the passing over of link juice from all the old URL's and loss of trust with Google for changing so much. Throughout this period we have grown the content on our site by almost 2x - 3x each year and now have around 100,000 quality pages of unique content (which is produced by locals on the ground in each destination). I'm hoping that someone in the SEOmoz Community might have some ideas on things we may have slipped up on, or ways in which we can try and recover a little faster and actually get some growth, as opposed to working hard and waiting a while just for another recovery. Thanks Neil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neil-MyDestination0 -
Recovery during domain migration
On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1