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
-
Thank you
-
Ivan, Panda is a page-level user experience algorithm. Ask yourself: do content pages that result in high bounce rates, low average site visits OR result in "pogosticking" (users click on the pages then immediately use the back button and return back to search results) REALLY qualify as quality pages? The answer is no, they don't.
I would urge you to visit the list of 23 questions I initially linked to above and ASK these of your current content options. Further, if you do visit this link, take a look at this quote from Amit Singhal on the same page:
"low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content."
Directly from the horse's mouth. Can't get any clearer than that.
-
Hi,is this really true about this: bounce rate of 100% OR an average visit of less than 30 seconds should be reviewed closely for complete removal from your site. Even a small amount of these type of pages can drag down an entire site algorithmically.
thank you
-
Dear Casey,
Thank you for your prompt response, I want to share with you he url http://goo.gl/4QBVjR please take a look an will be welcome all your feedback
Thank you
Claudio
-
Absolutely! Think of your site as a book. It used to be (pre-Panda) that adding new pages to your site was the right result. More pages, even low-quality pages, allowed for your site to better trigger long tail keywords which generated more traffic. This traffic may not have been super-targeted though and tended to generate very high bounce rates.
Now, post-Panda, it's clear that even a SMALL amount of low-quality, thin, or poor user experience content will drag down your entire domain. That's how Panda works -- it's a page-level quality algorithm. So pruning or removing that content is definitely a consideration to which you must give serious thought. Ask yourself: does your client's content answer a question, fulfill a need, or provides a unique viewpoint all of which work together to provide a full quality user experience? If not, then either re-write (usually a complete waste of time) or remove it completely from your site.
When Google pushed out Panda waaaaay back in 2011 they published a list of 23 questions that site owners should be asking themselves when auditing their site for content and user experience. Read this list and take a hard look at your site and content practices with an eye to understanding how Google may see your site.
Then, I'd suggest you go into Google Analytics under Behavior, choose Site Content, then All Pages, and then sort that content by Bounce Rate. Any page that has a bounce rate of 100% OR an average visit of less than 30 seconds should be reviewed closely for complete removal from your site. Even a small amount of these type of pages can drag down an entire site algorithmically.
Finally, if you do remove the pages from your site, I'd suggest a 410 GONE status code. These seem to be processed much faster than regular 404s and it's a clear sign to Google that these pages are NEVER coming back!
I hope this was helpful Claudio. Good luck with your client's site!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Silly Question still - Because I am paying high to google adwords is it possible google can't rank me high in organic?
Hello All, My ecommerce site gone in penalty more than 3 years before and within 3 months I got message from google penalty removed. Since then till date my organic ranking is very worst. In this 3 years I improved my site onpage very great. If I compare my site with all other competitors who are ranking in top 10 then my onpage that includes all schema, reviews, sitemap, header tags, meta's etc, social media, site structure, most imp speed, google page speed insight score, pingdom, w3c errors, alexa rank, global rank, UI, offers, design, content, code to text raito, engagement rate, page views, time on site etc all my sites always good compare to competitors. They also have few backlinks I do have few backlinks only. I am doing very high google adwords and my conversion rate is very very good. But do you think because I am paying since last 3 year high to google because of that google have some setting or strategy that those who perform well in adwords so not to bring up in organic? Is it possible I can talk with google on this? If yes then what will be the medium of conversation? Pls give some valuable inputs I am performing very much in paid so user end site is very very well. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
Noindexing Thin News Content for Panda
We've been suffering under a Panda penalty since Oct 2014. We've completely revamped the site but with this new "slow roll out" nonsense it's incredibly hard to know at what point you have to accept that you haven't done enough yet. We have thousands of news stories going back to 2001, some of which are probably thin and some of which are probably close to other news stories on the internet being articles based on press releases. I'm considering noindexing everything older than a year just in case, however, that seems a bit of overkill. The question is, if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar? Also, if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlfredPennyworth0 -
YouTube hosting question
The "How it works" video that is embedded on my sites homepage is currently linked to an individual YouTube account not our company account. I would like to change the ownership so that the company profile can enjoy the added views (currently 13K +). Is there a way to move the video to a different account without losing the views it has already accumulated? Also, a related technical question - our R&D team says the video is slowing down the site. It links to YouTube but there is nothing in the source of our page about YouTube. Any suggestions for embedding it more effectively?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Removing Content 301 vs 410 question
Hello, I was hoping to get the SEOmoz community’s advice on how to remove content most effectively from a large website. I just read a very thought-provoking thread in which Dr. Pete and Kerry22 answered a question about how to cut content in order to recover from Panda. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/panda-recovery-what-is-the-best-way-to-shrink-your-index-and-make-google-aware). Kerry22 mentioned a process in which 410s would be totally visible to googlebot so that it would easily recognize the removal of content. The conversation implied that it is not just important to remove the content, but also to give google the ability to recrawl that content to indeed confirm the content was removed (as opposed to just recrawling the site and not finding the content anywhere). This really made lots of sense to me and also struck a personal chord… Our website was hit by a later Panda refresh back in March 2012, and ever since then we have been aggressive about cutting content and doing what we can to improve user experience. When we cut pages, though, we used a different approach, doing all of the below steps:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
1. We cut the pages
2. We set up permanent 301 redirects for all of them immediately.
3. And at the same time, we would always remove from our site all links pointing to these pages (to make sure users didn’t stumble upon the removed pages. When we cut the content pages, we would either delete them or unpublish them, causing them to 404 or 401, but this is probably a moot point since we gave them 301 redirects every time anyway. We thought we could signal to Google that we removed the content while avoiding generating lots of errors that way… I see that this is basically the exact opposite of Dr. Pete's advice and opposite what Kerry22 used in order to get a recovery, and meanwhile here we are still trying to help our site recover. We've been feeling that our site should no longer be under the shadow of Panda. So here is what I'm wondering, and I'd be very appreciative of advice or answers for the following questions: 1. Is it possible that Google still thinks we have this content on our site, and we continue to suffer from Panda because of this?
Could there be a residual taint caused by the way we removed it, or is it all water under the bridge at this point because Google would have figured out we removed it (albeit not in a preferred way)? 2. If there’s a possibility our former cutting process has caused lasting issues and affected how Google sees us, what can we do now (if anything) to correct the damage we did? Thank you in advance for your help,
Eric1 -
Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website?
Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website and the methodology they used? I have a PR 5 website that lost more than 50% of the traffic in Google. I removed some of the wide site links at the best of my ability but I see little or no results so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S.Adrian0 -
What Questions Should I Be Asking?
I just read a discussion that was originally posted by Steve Ollington on May 22, 2011 where he states that many people are asking the wrong types of questions on this forum. He said that he wonders if he will see a shift from people asking questions on "how to rank" to questions dealing with "how to work out the best KPIs" (Key Performance Indicators - yes I had to google it). I was once told we learn more by asking questions about a topic than by just listening. I've also been told that sometimes the right question to ask is, "What questions should I be asking?" So here is my question, what types of questions should I be asking to be better at SEO? Perhaps these are some of them: Is it possible to be good at SEO when it is not a full-time job? It is very tempting to look for easy answers when you only have limited time. What are considered KPI's? Are they different for every industry? How do you know what is junk information vs what is truly good SEO advice? Is it just simply trial and error? It seems to me that if people find truly good SEO information, they aren't going to be sharing it so easily. It's the whole, "You get what you pay for". Maybe some of you can tell me more of the questions I should be asking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadesmith1 -
Analytics Question?
Is there a way to see in GA traffic from other IP address's. I want to subtract all the times I visit the site from my IP and get a real traffic %.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0 -
Does poor quality on a subdomain affect a domain (with regards to Panda)?
We are considering moving some thin content from our site to a subdomain as a potential "panda" fix. But, we are unsure if Google will treat the subdomain as a completely separate domain or not. Does anyone have any data / Google info that might answer this question? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0