Does this make sense to recover from panda?
-
Hello guys, our website was pandalized on 9/27/2012 and we haven't been able to recover since then.
I've fixed as much as possible when it comes to poor content, and we have been getting high quality links consistently for the past 3-4 months.
Our blog had some duplicate content issues due to categories, tags, feeds, etc. I solved those problems before the past 2 refreshes without success.
I'm considering moving the blog to a subdomain, more than PR, I'm interested in recovering from panda, and let the blog grow on its own. What do you think about that?
-
I have in mind doing 301 redirects.
-
Subdomaining will take time.
I subdomained a lot of content, and almost 2 months later, google is still looking for the content on the main domain, still reporting it as missing, still marking site health poorly because of those pages, and still showing them all in both places in the search index.
One possibility after seeing the new pages indexed, is to use the webmaster tools delete URL feature. You only have a few hundred blog pages, so that won't take long.
After two months, I wish I could tell you that it fixed my problem, but it hasn't.
Subdomaining the blog is not likely to hurt you. Remember you will need to set it up so you can have a separate robots file and a separate sitemap.
Also,
1. be sure that you've covered all the bases, that mainsite links that point to the blog now have the fully qualified URL.
2. be sure that any links on the blog that point to the main site are also fully qualified URLs, and not relative, therefore making a broken link.
-
Thank you for your comment, I'm highly considering this move.
-
Yes, for sure panda, that's what webmaster tools and analytics say. The blog does link to our main site, but only from the /blog home page. I did this on purpose, I didn't want hundreds of internal links with the same anchor text.
I'll have a look at our privacy policy on the blog and might replace it with the one from truste.
Regarding the business resources page, I agree that the content doesn't offer much for Google to see, so I might consider "noindex" for it.
Traffic loss, most of our organic traffic from Google. We are doing well on Yahoo and Bing (improving every week actually).
The poor links you see come from negative SEO done against us in may '12. Thankfully most of those comments are nofollow.
Thank you. Please keep the ideas coming!
-
Dave, are you sure that was panda?
What does your webmaster tools account tell you?
Have you fixed all duplicate titles, descriptions and pages?
What traffic have you lost?
Was it only google or yahoo and bing as well?
Here are some observations:
First, look at your link profile - it doesn't look good to me
I didn't see a link from your blog to your home page
You have no terms of use link on the blog pages
There are 2 privacy policies. One for the blog, and one for the main site, but that policy is on the truste site
The privacy policy on the blog says nothing about cookies, or collected email addresses.
The Business Resources page has no content the search engines can see.
The "Our Programs" menu item does nothing
Some pages don't have much content.
-
I agree with it, I think a fresh new blog with a new subdomain will help fix the issue. Aside from loosing PR on the blog, I don't see any real issues with it. My advice is go for it!
Hope that helps!
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
-
How to best add affiliate links in a way that minimizes panda risk?
We have a site of about 100.000 pages that is getting several million of visitors per year via organic search. We plan to add about 50.000 new pages gradually in the next couple of months and would like to add affiliate links to the new pages. All these 50.000 new pages will have unique quality data that a team has been researching for a while. I would like to add in the area under the fold or towards the end of the pages in an unobstrusive way affiliate links to about 5 different affiliate programs with affiliate links customized to page content and of real value to visitors. Since affiliate links are one of the factors that may trigger panda I am a bit nervous whether we should add the affiliate links and if there is any way of implementing the affiliate links in a way that they may be less likely to trigger panda. E.g. would you consider hiding affiliate links from google by linking to intermediate URL (which I would mark as noindex nofolllow) on our domain which then redirects to the final affiliate landing page (but google may notice via chrome or android data) ? Any other idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Handling duplicate content, whilst making both rank well
Hey MOZperts, I run a marketplace called Zibbet.com and we have 1000s of individual stores within our marketplace. We are about to launch a new initiative giving all sellers their own stand-alone websites. URL structure:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | relientmark
Marketplace URL: http://www.zibbet.com/pillowlink
Stand-alone site URL: http://pillowlink.zibbet.com (doesn't work yet) Essentially, their stand-alone website is a duplicate of their marketplace store. Same items (item title, description), same seller bios, same shop introduction content etc but it just has a different layout. You can scroll down and see a preview of the different pages (if that helps you visualize what we're doing), here. My Questions: My desire is for both the sellers marketplace store and their stand-alone website to have good rankings in the SERPS. Is this possible? Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one? Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue? Keen to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions for how we can handle this best. Thanks in advance!0 -
Panda 4.0 Update Affected Site - What should be a the minimum Code to Text Ratio we should aim for ?
Hi All, My eCommerce site got hit badly with the Panda 4.0 update so we have been doing some site auditing and analysis identifying issues which need addressing. We have thin/duplicate issues which I am quite sure was part of the reason we were affected by this even though we use rel=next and rel=prev along with having a separate view all page although we don't concanical tag to this page as I dont' think users would benefit from seeing to many items on one page. This led me to look at our Code to Content Ratio. We have now managed to increase it from 9% to approx 18-22% on popular pages by getting rid of unnecessary code etc. My question is , is there an ideal percentage the code to content ratio should be ?.. and what should I be aiming for ? Also any other Panda 4.0 advice would also be appreciated thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Panda Recovery Question
Dear Friends, One of my customers was hit by the Panda, we were working on improve the tiny content on several pages and the remaining pages were: 1 NOINDEX/FOLLOW 2. Removed from sitemap.xml 3. Un-linked from the site (no one page on the site link to the pour content) As conclusion we can't see any improvement, my question is should I remove the pour content pages (404)? What is your recommendation? Thank you for your time Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Launching 20 new URLs to branch out from a multi brand website. How do I make sure the rankings stay?
I have a client with a multiple brand website currently. The site has landing pages and directories for each of its 20 brands under one URL. The plan is to build 20 separate brand websites with new domains and have the old content redirect to its corresponding new URL. The problem that I envision is being able to successfully carry all of the existing indexed content over while only using 301 redirects and submitting the new domains to Webmaster tools. Has anyone done this in the past successfully and do you have any recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Empower_MediaMarketing0 -
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash? www.example.com/services Or www.example.com/services**/** Does Google consider these to be the same link or does Google treat them as different links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
Hello folks The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ferray
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website... Any suggestions?0