Whether our shared articles caused Panda hit to our high quality site
-
Hello,
We are a quality site hit by Panda
Our article collection:
http://www.nlpca(dot)com/DCweb/NLP_Articles.html
is partially articles written by the site owners and partially articles that are elsewhere on them web.
We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.
Could this be why we were hit by Panda? And if so, what do we do? We've dropped way down in rank but have worked our way half-way back up.
Two of our main keywords are:
NLP
NLP Training
Thanks!
-
You have some valid points to consider... things seem to be improving and the articles that you might cut do pull in some traffic.
I can't tell you how to make your decision but here is how I made mine..
I had hundreds of republished articles but a lot more that I had written myself. Deleting lots of republished articles would cut my traffic and cut my income. Noindexing them would cut my traffic and cut my income. However, although those were serious losses they were small in comparison to other content on my site. So, knowing that google does not like duplicate content I got rid of them. There is still lots of great content on my site, visitors still find stuff to read, I know which of the things that I cut I should author a customized version for my own site.
The upside.... My site is more compact but still has thousands of content pages and the content that remains should be a lot stronger. After making the cuts my rankings, income and traffic increased. Not quite to previous levels but back to nice numbers.
I have reduced risk and am pleased with that. Everything that I cut was redirected to similar content. The most valuable of what was cut will be replaced with custom content with 301 redirects from the old content.
============================
How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.
What from this is unique? Definitely keep that. Keep what is not struggling in Google. Keep what is essential to your site but replace with better that you create yourself.
Do you see further risk in future panda updates?
Yep... that's why I cut off my foot.
My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles,
YES... In the past I wanted all of my content to be anonymously written. I have changed my mind on that and used rel=author on the best stuff.
no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles.
heh.... Here I would be chopping off two of those sites and merging them into one. I would have done that years ago before panda was ever heard of.
I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.
I agree.
-
Hi EGOL,
We are getting a lot of traffic off of some of these articles, so the site owners are not sure they want to no-index them just in case that's not causing the problem. Our rankings have come up from 40 to 26 on our main term, and similar for other terms, even though we still have duplicate content. We were originally at 19 before a big drop in November/December
How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.
What would you suggest I let the owner's know? Do you see further risk in future panda updates?
My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles, no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles. I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.
However, it's not my decision, your thoughts?
-
I don't know. Everything that I have done is an experiment.
If you are really scared, delete... if you have some tolerance for uncertainty then play around with noindex or canonical. I deleted from a really important site.... used canonical where I the ranking loss was small and the risk was not jugular.
-
Hi EGOL,
When is no-indexing enough and when would you suggest deletion?
-
Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Or is some deletion necessary?
On one of my sites I deleted a lot and noindexed followed everything else that was a duplicate. We saw rankings recover in about a month.
On another site i had a lot of .pdf documents that were used to control printing of graphics. We used rel=canonical on them. That works very very slowly to remove them from the index. We are seeing slow recovery on that site.
if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?
If the article belongs to someone else then I would noindex or delete. (Just saying what I would do it if was on my site). If it was my content I would set up a google + profile and use rel=author and rel=me to attribute them to a verified author.
-
Perhaps you could add a link to the original source on some of these where you have the permission. This should send a signal to google that you are showing it on your site for the convenience of users, but it is from a different source.
-
Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Is that enough to save our arse? Or is some deletion necessary?
I assume if we are not first in google for the content and title of an article, it is a potential duplicate content problem, correct? For example, if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?
Any advice is appreciated. You're one of the best EGOL.
-
We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.
Google probably does not know and certainly does not care. If you have duplicate content on your site you are a potential target.
What type of link-building have you been doing? You might have been hit by the overoptimization penalty.
I was republishing some third-party content on a couple of my sites. I deleted most of it and no indexed the rest. Cut off your foot to save your arse.
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Duplicate URLs on eCommerce site caused by parameters
Hi there, We have a client with a large eCommerce site with about 1500 duplicate URLs caused by the parameters in the URLs (such as the sort parameter where the list of products are then sorted by price, age etc.) Example: www.example.com/cars/toyota First duplicate URL: www.example.com/cars/toyota?sort=price-ascending Second duplicate URL: www.example.com/cars/toyota?sort=price-descending Third duplicate URL: www.example.com/cars/toyota?sort=age-descending Originally we had advised to add a robots.txt file to block search engines from crawling the URLs with parameters but this hasn't been done. My question: If we add the robots.txt now and exclude all URLs with filters - how long will it take for Google to disregard the duplicate URLs? We could ask the developers to add canonical tags to all the duplicates but these are about 1500... Thanks in advance for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
Troubled QA Platform - Site Map vs Site Structure
I'm running a Q&A forum that was built prioritizing UX over SEO. This decision has cause a bit of a headache as we're 6 months into the project with 2278 Q&A pages with extremely minimal traffic coming from search engines. The structure has the following hiccups: A. The category navigation from the main Q&A page is entirely javascript and only navigable by users. B. We identify Google bots and send them to another version of the Q&A platform w/o javascript. Category links don't exist in this google bot version of the main Q&A page. On this Google version of the main Q&A page, the Pinterest-like tiles displaying individual Q&As are capped at 10. This means that the only way google bot can identify link juice being passed down to individual QAs (after we've directed them to this page) is through 10 random Q&As. C. All 2278 of the QAs are currently indexed in search. They are just indexed very very poorly in SERPs. My personal assumption, is that Google can't pass link juice to any of the Q&As (poor SERP) but registers them from the site map so it gets included in Google's index. My dilemma has me struggling between two different decisions: 1. Update the navigation in the header to remove the javascript and fundamentally change the look and feel of the Q&A platform. This will allow Google bot to navigate through Expert category links to pass link juice to all Q&As. or 2. Update the redirected main Q&A page to include hard coded category links with 100s of hard coded Q&As under each category page. Make it similar, ugly, flat and efficient for the crawling bots. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need to find a solution as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Do follow or no follow on wordpress site?
I have read many different opinions on what links to make do follow on a wordpress website versus which ones to leave as no follow. (internal and external) There does not seem to be any consensus among the inputs to date. Any perspectives on this would be appreciated. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
3 Sites Covering Similar Topics & Panda
My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes: I have 3 blogs on the same server: 1. personal finance blog; 2. credit card blog; 3. prepaid credit card blog. The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage. By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog. In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google. This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request. Of course, they don't say why. I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck. Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered. While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards. We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel). The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth. There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other. However, all content is unique. I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links. If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions: 1. Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise? 2. If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do? Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options. One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time. Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist? Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me. Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too. I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people. In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now. If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site? For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful. But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option. Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bergerlaw0