Recovery Steps For Panda 3.5 (Rel. Apr. 19, 2012)?
-
I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used - especially on sites that are not large scale ecommerce sites.
Blog site hit by Panda 3.5. Blog has approximately 250 posts. Some of the posts are the most thorough on the subject and regained traffic despite a Penguin mauling a few days after the Panda attack. (The site has probably regained 80% of the traffic it lost since Penguin hit without any link removal or link building, and minimal new content.)
Bounce rate is 80% and average time on page is 2:00 min. (Even my most productive pages tend to have very high bounce rates BUT those pages maintain time on page in the 4 to 12 minute range.)
The Panda discussions I've read on these boards seem to focus on e-commerce sites with extremely thin content. I assume that Google views much of my content as "thin" too. But, my site seems to need a pruning instead of just combiining the blue model, white model, red model, and white model all on one page like most of the ecommerce sites we've discussed.
So, I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used to decide whether to combine a page, prune a page, etc.
After I combine any series articles to one long post (driving the time on page to nice levels), I plan to prune the remaining pages that have poor time on page and/or bounce rates. Regardless of the analytics, I plan to keep the "thin" pages that are essential for readers to understand the subject matter of the blog. (I'll work on flushing out the content or producing videos for those pages.)
How deep should I prune on the first cut? 5% ? 10% ? Even more ? Should I focus on the pages with the worst bounce rates, the worst time on page, or try some of both?
If I post unique and informative video content (hosted on site using Wistia), what I should I expect for a range of the decrease in bounce rate ?
Thanks for reading this long post.
-
Alan : Thanks for sharing your experience in such detail.
-
After almost 2 years of panda destruction, and constant work on my site with no recovery whatsoever, I don't know if I have anything useful to contribute yet, so take this as some input.
Large site with over 2.2 million pages.
Deleted around 1.5 million pages
Removed all duplicate titles (removed for fixed)
removed all duplicate descriptions (removed or fixed)
Removed all problem pages (extra short, damaged content, empty)
Removed all duplicate body content pages.
Prevent addition of any new duplicates and if any slip past, fix within 24 hours.
Also, checked for incoming links and discovered some sites with problems pointing in - fixed or had these removed.
RESULT after almost 2 years? - zero improvement.
Almost ready to slash wrists, but about to try subdomaining first.
It would be funny if not so sad.
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
-
Recovery from a HTTP to HTTPs migration using 302s ?
If a website did an HTTP to HTTPS migration using 302 re-directs, that were corrected to 301s about 4 months later, what is the expected impact? Will the website see a full recovery or has the damage been done? Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Rel Canonical attribute order
So the position of the attribute effect the rel canonical tags' ability to function? is the way I see it across multiple documents and websites. Having a discussion with someone in the office and there is a website with it set up as: Will that cause any problems? The website is inquestion still has both pages indexed within Google using the SITE:domain.com/product as well as SITE:domain.com/category/product
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Domain changed 5 months ago still see search results on old domain
Hi, We changed our domain from coedmagazine.com to coed.com in April'13. Applied 301 redirects on all pages, submitted 'change of address' to google but we still see site:coedmagazine.com fetching 130K results on google as opposed to site:coed.com fetches 40K results. Can anybody here throw some light on what might be going wrong? [ Site runs on wordpress, hosted with wordpress as well ] thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Penguin Recovery Problem - Weird
I had an old URL and the link profile of this URL wasn't good - I had been using article syndication and Penguin threw me to the wolves. I decided to start over with a new URL and build a new natural link profile. I specifically did NOT do a 301 redirect to the new URL and did not make any request to Google to transfer domain as I didn't want old site being associated to the new one. To redirect our old users, I put a link on the old URL index page (nofollowed) that say that we have moved. I was very surprised to find that in GWT all the links of the old URL have now been associated to the new URL....why is that? I started over to have a clean natural profile and follow Google guidelines.Has anyone heard of this before? All I can guess is that Google itself "decided" to do its own pseudo-301, since the site was the same, page for page.This has Major implications for anyone attempting a "clean start" to recover from Penguin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | veezer0 -
Bad use of the Rel="canonical" tag
Google is currently ranking my category page instead of our homepage for our key term and we would rather have our homepage rank for the term. Would it be a bad idea to rel="canonical" our category page to our homepage? Our homepage is optimized to rank for the keyword and has more PR than our category page. However, I don't really know if this will have negative repercussions. Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason_3420 -
How best to optimize for a law firm that specializes in 3 different areas
I realize the importance of keyword research and finding keywords where there IS demand and not TONS of competition and optimizing your title and descriptions etc AND content on the different pages for those same specific keywords.......... But.... What do you suggest I do to BEST optimize a site for a law firm that handles family law (divorce), bankruptcy AND criminal. It's one firm with 3 attorneys who specialize in different areas. I know SEO is challenging and ever changing and I read and study and have made significant, noticeable, improvements for some sites but I have to admit this is over my head. Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance and have a GREAT weekend! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mrupp440 -
Will ranking be improved or hurt by changing 1/5 of part numbers to key words
Note: I bold major content for your quick skim for your convenience. Does this help you decide if its a fit for your response? My site has been devastated by the Panda or unknown reasons so I need to think outside the box. I distribute industrial products with average brand recognition. I only have about 5 competitors selling this same brand. My other brand competitors are billion dollar companies that pay a lot for PPC and have sites with 10 times the product offering. Since my brand recognition is not as important as the function.I'm thinking about changing the part numbers to reflect function. This will affect about 1/5of the parts ( about 500 out of 3,000 parts) . My concern is will ranking be hurt or helped by changing these parts with these strong keywords in front of the part for such a high % of the site. The strong keywords cost $10 for a chance at a $200 sale with repeat business. Example: Current part is: 10-10 Black Plastic; which is a Big Red Truck with my brand part # as 10-10 and comes in different colors of plastic. . Keyword is Big Red Truck. I would like to put my manufactures brand in the description. My same brand competitors sell 10,000 parts and my logic is that if I have the brand in 1/5 of my parts ranking would be improved because of the % of brand per the site versus my same brand competitors.. So I would change the part # to : **Brand 10-10-Black Plastic Big Red Truck ** In conversation I would state the part as: Brand: 18 characters, Part #: 8, Material:12, Keyword: 27 If the keyword should be first I could change to: K,B P,M. Which is recommended?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wales0 -
Link Building Tactics for 2012?
Hi all! Happy New Year! Just wanted to pop in here and start a discussion to see what are some of the most effective link building techniques you'll be using for 2012? -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan1