What the Panda are we doing wrong?
-
Starting at June 8 of this year (the exact date of the Panda 3.7 update) the organic search engine traffic to our website dropped by about 30%. We're talking about a fairly new domain (about 8 months old) that has (or at least is suppost to have) pearly white SEO, and no outside parties have ever done any SEO for it. Organic search traffic was very stable in the weeks prior to June 8.
Organic search visits have dropped pretty much across the board (due to dropped ranking at the SERPS, as reported by our SEOmoz campaign). The (not provided) keyword has dropped 25%, while traffic from keywords related to our core products (joomla templates) have dropped almost 50%.
Knowing that June 8 saw a Panda update, I dug up some of the old Panda posts (never thought I'd need those for one of my own sites) to see what factors trigger a Panda hit. Based on the factors mentioned in this article at SEW, I'll briefly discuss what is going on at our website.
Affiliate links and ad units
Not a single affiliate link or ad unit can be found on our website.
Low-quality or thin content
Only 163 URLs from the www subdomain have been submitted in our sitemap, of which 152 are indexed. About 25 of those pages (the individual questions on our FAQ page) could in my opinion be characterized as 'thin content' pages.
Canonicalization
Every single page on our www subdomain has a rel="canonical". Given that the demo subdomain is based on Joomla, we have less control over those pages (and there will probably be some duplicate content issues there), but nothing more than any clean Joomla website would have.
Site speed
Our www subdomain receives a near-perfect 97/100 on YSlow, the demo subdomain scores a 83/100.
Quality
In the past months several popular resources (blogs, infographics) have been released that were well linked to by other (significant) players in our niche.
Social signals
Our site received about 25 +1's, several dozen (or more) tweets and a few Facebook Likes.
Search result pages
We don't have those.
Questions:
-
Can anybody spot potentially Panda-triggering issues on our website?
-
I'm aware that our link profile isn't perfect (not very bad either), but to my knowledge Panda was/is an on-page driven algorithm update, right?
-
We're also running a demo subdomain (click 'demo' in the menu), hosting there five full Joomla installations to showcase our products (just like virtually all other template providers do). This subdomain seems to also have taken a hit, but less than the www subdomain (about 15% decrease in organic search visits). Is it possible that the demo subdomain has triggered this issue (and if so, what changes would you advice)?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-
-
Based on a few Panda related issues I've worked on and manage to get traffic back I will post a few ideas bellow.
Hopefully it will help or at least bring some new ideas to the table.
1. Panda is related mainly to content. Even if there are several other signals that gets into play - content is the major issue.
2. Also related to content, having thin pages into the index is a no-no. I've manage to get traffic back (almost to the same level as prior to the drop - around 90%) just by setting a lot of listing pages to no index and merging some thin content pages.
3. Duplicate content is a major element associated with Panda. As a starter you have http://www.themepartner.com/index.php and http://www.themepartner.com without a 301 redirect. Maybe you have more duplicate content. Screaming frog is a very good tool to check this out.
4. Affiliate issues and other issues (seo related) are not related with panda. Separate manual action or algorithmic action (filters) can be set but not related with panda. There is a very small percentage that a separate automatic filter was applied in the same exact date as a Panda update (not impossible but highly unlikely).
Site speed, quality overall, social signals are important as you know but not related with Panda.
Another good idea is to get some fresh content on the majority of pages - if possible.
Another idea - just an idea though - get rid of some of the boiler plates from the site have a better unique content on each page.
Just a few ideas - hope you can find some ideas.
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
-
Google Showing wrong image in the SERPS
Hi Guys, In organic SERPS Google pulling incorrect product image, instead of product image its showing image from relevant products, Checked the structured data, og:image everything is set to the product image, not sure why google showing images from relevant product sidebar, any help, please?
Technical SEO | | SpartMoz0 -
Is my knowledge graph code wrong?
I inserted the Knowledge Graph code on our site last week and am still not seeing the knowledge graph in our search results. Is something incorrect with my code? <script type="<a class="attribute-value">application/ld+json</a>"> { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "Organization", "name" : "IssueTrak", "url" : "http://www.issuetrak.com/", "sameAs" : [ "http://www.facebook.com/issuetrak", "http://www.twitter.com/issuetrak", "http://plus.google.com/google.com/+Issuetrak"] } script>head> I suspect it is the alignment of the "{" and "}" but others in the company say that doesn't matter. Any other explanations for why the KG isn't showing in the results? Thanks I did test it with Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and got the "all's good."
Technical SEO | | Nobody15969167212220 -
Any penguin or panda is updating today?
Hey Friends, Please help i have a question .. could you please tell me with the answer about google updates . is there any google algo is changed. because my website has loss the position. Please help me. i checked today removalinmelbourne.com.au it was on first page and suddenly today i lost this. Please guys help me and give me some good ideas to make me back .............. 😞
Technical SEO | | Tufail0 -
Panda Recovery ETA?
I have a blog hit by Panda in 2011 and 2012. The thing is, I've no-indexed around 1000 posts out of 11xx. No-indexed tags and archives. But, Google was taking a very long time to remove them from their indexes. So, I had to do a manual removal from Google WMT. Removed /2011/ and /2013/ as directories, and removed /pages/ (this is an WordPress site) so all of them are now no longer in their index. It was a smartphone blog started in 2011 which I turned into an tech blog on a new domain (I let the old PR3 DA 30+ domain expire and now someone's asking me $200 if I am to get it). I had a team when it was a smartphone blog. Our articles had been featured on places like Engadget, PhoneArena, UberGizmo etc. So, with the loss of the domain, we've lost quite a few important backlinks as well. Also, Authorship doesn't work for the site. The Rich Snippets testing tool says everything's all right, but it never really works / shows up on SERPs. I fear it's because of a penalty. It seems to me like no one has ever thought about a penalty that affects Authorship. So, now you know the problem, and the things I did in order to fix it, could you tell me if: Google will lift the penalty whenever they wish. (And an ETA?) They'll lift it when the next major algorithmic update occurs. (I made the changes on September 28th) But I don't see how this is a possibility since Panda has now been integrated into the core algorithm. Anything else. Thanks in advance everyone!
Technical SEO | | RohitPalit0 -
Wrong pages ranking for keywords?
I've just done a search using east england document storage site:ukdocumentstorage.com and found our specific east england document storage page is ranking really low down in our list of pages compared to others. How could this happen?
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
Is it panda, pengiun, ad penalty?
I'm trying to figure out why my google traffic is going down... I see that back in Feb and then March 2011 it started to drop, which I assume was pengiun. I saw a gradual comeback in traffic until March 2012, which I assume the second drop was another pengiun update. The decline continued gradually until I saw a big drop in October 2012 which is completely dropping off in the past month today. I recreated my website on wordpress, improving content and removing google ads. Relaunched a few weeks ago and still see a big drop. Any idea what happened? I only got a message from google about a large traffic drop in march 2012 and a 404 error increase recently when I launched the new site which I fixed with 301 and removing media attachment pages that were indexed that gave a 404. Once concern is I have no idea if I have a problem with pengiun. Could I have a problem with too many links coming from my blog or soicial network? What's acceptable number of back links to not be spam? If you add pages in the blogroll is this thought of as spam with pengiun? website: http://www.dashinfashion.com Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | dashinfashion0 -
Looking for live website examples of google adsense since panda update
Hi, i am looking for some live websites that use google adsense who have changed their layout since the panda update If anyone can please point me in the right direction so i can see good examples of how sites have now changed their google adsense layout so we can learn from this, then that would be great regards
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Anyone notices the effect of the panda update for the rest of the world?
Friday google applied the Panda Update for the rest of the world, I checked my rankings and nothing seemed to have changed , does anybody notice any of the effects already? Is it to soon to draw any conclusions after 2 days?
Technical SEO | | Arnx0