Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?
-
I operate a New York City commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Ranking and traffic have dropped steeply since early June.
Around May 20th a new Panda update was launched by Google and I wonder if that could partially explain the drop. My site contains the following:
-300 listing pages. These are product pages and often contain less than 100 words. Many have not been changed in two years.
-150 Building pages. These contain less than 220 words. Many have not been changed in two years.
-40 blog pages. We have been adding 1 or 2 per month.
-50 or 60 neighborhood and type of space pages. These contain 200-600 words.
Could our drop in traffic be due to Panda? I might add that an upgraded version of the site with new forms, a modified right rail an header was launched on June 6th. Also, we submitted a disavow file with Google on April 20th for about 100 toxic domains, one third of the 300 domains that link to us.
In order to take remedial action we need to understand what has happened. Any ideas???
Thanks, Alan
-
Were the 300 listing pages ever receiving traffic? If the answer to this question is no or if a significant number of them weren't ever receiving any traffic it might change what I would think you should do. Poor title tags will hurt your visibility in lots of ways. I would not personally tie the title tag strategy to Panda. Panda is a content algo. It seems to look for duplicate, near duplicate, thin content, poor quality content and then make sure that sites with those criteria are not ranking. If you think more broadly about it you might ask why Google would want to take the whole site down in the rankings for thin content on a few or many pages with potentially low or no traffic. I think the reason they are penalizing the whole site is because they don't want webmasters producing this type of content. If they can get content creators to think twice before creating another 20 urls about x topic then over the long haul their job will become much easier. They can fight off spam more easily because it won't work. I was very angry when Panda 4 rolled out and some sites I own got hit. However, I feel empowered now to correct the issue. My suggestion for you is to compare the urls with their links and traffic. There should be some clear cut low quality stuff that you can noindex. On the pages that drive traffic I would make sure you are providing deep, helpful content. Hard to discuss all the things you may need to do over email but I think you are probably getting the idea. PM me if you want to chat more.
-
Hi Brad:
I have had a very similar experience. Reduced ranking across the board for any competitive term, but not eliminated.
My site contains 300 listing pages (product pages). Those listing are usually short (less than 125 words). Would beefing them up to 200-300 words help? Also the title tags for these terms are not that well written. Some look like this:
"242 W. 38th St. - Manhattan, New York", "12 W. 37th St. - Manhattan, New York,"
Some are more elaborate like: "14 Penn Plaza | Great Midtown Office Rental | 2,313 SF Negotiable", "Lease 14 Penn Plaza Executive Offices | 34th Street | 4836 SF"
Could poor title tags contribute to the penalty.
Also, many listings have "Manhattan, New York" added at the end of the title tag, really impoverishing it, like: "Park Avenue South 27th & 28th Street- Manhattan, New York"
"44th Street-Eighth & Ninth Avenues - Manhattan, New York"These title tags seem really poor. Could that trigger the Panda penalty?
Also, many title tags for other page categories have "Metro Manhattan Office Space" at the end of them. Could this trigger the penalty? I think the title tags are really bad.
<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
|<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
| ||
-
Hi Egol:
Will Google remove Panda penalties once content is improved? Or does an improvement take months (like waiting for a Penguin update)
I can potentially correct two out of the three issues you mention without enormous SEO costs. I am not sure how to address the structural problems.
Thanks,
Alan -
Google has been assessing sites with the Panda algo for over two years. They are continuously changing the algo to promote sites that fit its requirements and demote sites that have content that does not.
In my opinion, your site has technical problems, thin content and duplicate content that could trigger Panda problems. Read my replies to your previous questions to find them.
-
If you saw a drop around May 19-20 then I would say it is almost certain that this was Panda. I've been in a similar experience. I own a network of content sites that had never been clearly hit by Panda on the day of launch until Panda 4 where they got hit very hard. When you consider Panda I would think of it less like an algo change and more like a filter. Panda seems to crawl the site looking for certain criteria. If your criteria meets these then all your results get filtered. Remember that Google has clearly stated that their goal with Panda is for sites with thin or duplicated content to not rank high on the page. In my case I am seeing that I still rank for everything that I used to rank 1, 2, 3 for but now I rank 8, 9, 10. I have no proof yet that I can get out from under it but I am making a lot of changes now that I believe will do the trick to fixing my own traffic issues. I found this article to be very helpful as I considered what I should do next
http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5536/google-panda-4-0-topical-authority-content-update-2014-case-study/
If you want to reach out to me privately I'd be happy to discuss in more detail.
Brad
-
Hi,
Did you get any penalty spam email? I would go through your links in webmaster tools and moz to see if your site is on and spammy sites, forums or blogs. If so ask for removal or disavow them. I would also add some good rich content to the pages that may have "thin content"
-
Hi EGOL:
Interesting. But why now? Panda updates have been rolling out frequently to no ill effect. There have been no material changes in the content in the last few months except for updating many key pages with better content.
How is this latest update of Panda different?
What would you suggest I do to escape from this penalty?
I have a bout 350 product pages with thin content (less than 120 words each). Would no indexing them or rewriting them help? What if I increased the content by 100-150 words? But I would think that Google would understand that product pages could have light content and still add value.
Thanks, Alan
-
** Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?**
I believe that some form of Panda has gotten your 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
-
Why Did My Google Crawls Hit A Wall?
Hello, One my the sites I work with, http://www.oransi.com, has seen a significant decrease in crawl Googlebot activity in the last 90 days. See screenshot. This decrease in crawl stats runs in conjunction with less Kb downloaded per day & an increase in how much time it took Google to download a page. The client did just go through a redesign, however that happened on 4/16/15, which was after the decrease in Googlebot activity, so that should not be the issue. Same could be said for the mobilegeddan algorithm change. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 5u1lM6B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
E-Commerce Panda Question
I'm torn. Many of our 'niche' ecommerce products rank well, however I'm concerned that duplicate content is negatively effecting our overall rankings via Panda Algo. Here is an example that can be found through quite a few products on the site. This sub-category page (http://www.ledsupply.com/buckblock-constant-current-led-drivers) in our 'led drivers' --> 'luxdrive drivers' section has three products that are virtually identical with much of the same content on each page, except for their 'output current' - sort of like a shirt selling in different size attributes: S, M, L and XL. I could realistically condense 44 product pages (similar to example above) down to 13 within this sub-category section alone (http://www.ledsupply.com/luxdrive-constant-current-led-drivers). Again, we sell many of these products and rank ok for them, but given the outline for how Panda works I believe this structure could be compromising our overall Panda 'quality score', consequently keeping our traffic from increasing. Has anyone had similar issues and found that its worth the risk to condense product pages by adding attributes? If so, do I make the new pages and just 301 all the old URLs or is there a better way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saultienut0 -
Bing seriously hitting our website
Hi I have a strange query, Bing in the last four weeks have been seriously crawling our site, and while at the moment this isn't affecting our servers, coming into the busy time of the year I am just wondering if anyone else is seeing this. They are basically crawling the entire site (including nofollow pages) even though according to Bing Webmaster tools, they know our sitemap. Is anybody else seeing any unusual activity with the Bing bot. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Is my site penalized by Google?
Let's say my website is aaaaa.com and company name is aaaaa Systems. When I search Google aaaaa my site do not come up at all. When I search for "aaaaa Systems" it comes up. But in WMT I see quite a few clicks from aaaaa as keyword. Most of the traffic is brand keywords only. I never received any manual penalty in WMT ever. Is the site penalized or regular algorithm issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
We haven been hit by penguin 2.0 what to do?
Hi, Last week we got hit bij penguin 2.0. Our sites dropped on most keywords on average 10 places. We had a steady place for 2 to 3 years. We have site-wide links in the top of our websites to the other websites ( about 9 e-commerce sites). Today i have put rel= "nofollow " tags in all these links (accept on the hompages). To prevent spammy links. Is there anything else we can do ? Url ww.klokkenpaleis.nl most important keyword = klokken ( previous position, 2nd place) search engine = google netherlands Thanks a lot for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTGshops0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Network Of Sites...
Hi Guys, Just wondering if anyone can help me out... We have recently been hit by the Google penguin update and I'm currently working though all the bad / spammy backlinks that previous SEO companies have built for us. I have come across 1 particular domain www.justgoodcars.com they seem to have a lot of different domain names: <colgroup><col width="390"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
| http://www.justpulsarcars.com/nissan-pulsar-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
| http://www.justpumacars.com/ford-puma-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
| http://www.justpuntocars.com/dutch-site/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom |
| http://www.justpuntocars.com/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom | Now all of theses domains names have exactly the same IP Address?? Above is just a few I would say there are 100s of them. Do you think this could have an affect on us? Thanks, Scott0