Panda and Large Web Presence
-
I'm experiencing some recent significant drops in rankings across the board for a client of mine and I suspect that it's probably related to Panda. Their internet presence features completely unique, useful, well written content by certified industry experts. Further, all content is of proper length and again serves a core purpose, providing helpful information to their viewers. Where I think things potentially go wrong is that they have around 20 micro sites in operation, including multiple web 2.0 blogs. There are also multiple sites in operation that target more specific areas of the same city. Again all of the content is unique, but they all feature content that's of the same industry and broad topic.
Despite everything being 100% unique, I fear it's too excessive. Anyone know if Panda may target this type of approach even if the quality and uniqueness is appropriate?
-
Panda updates have hit microsites where content across the sites was either duplicated or "thin", although thin is often in the eye of the beholder. Keep in mind, and I mean this kindly, that "unique" is not always high-quality, and the quest for technical uniqueness can lead to practices where microsites are just spinning out versions of content with slightly different keyword concepts or ordering, etc. In other words, it's technically "unique", but most people wouldn't view it as valuable.
Early Panda updates did hit certain kinds of spun-off content hard, including geo-located content. In other words, you spun out your plumbing services page for 5,000 cities and it only differed by city names and a few basic facts (even if technically unique), that's definitely something Panda came down hard on.
Truthfully, though, it's really tough to tell without specifics. I'm more on EGOL's side of the fence - my gut feeling is that 20 micro-sites is excessive and I'd strongly suspect quality issues.
Some questions that might help you pin things down:
(1) Has traffic dropped across the entire cluster of sites or just the main site?
(2) Can you pin traffic drops down to any given date, set of keywords, or pages? Drill down as far as you can - that's always the most important first step, IMO.
(3) Are some of your micro-sites essentially dead - no traffic or ROI? You might not have to go all-or-none here. Odds are that some small % of your micro-sites are creating a large % of your value (let's call it an 80/20 rule). It's likely you could kill 10-15 of them with very little harm - at least that's what I typically see. You don't have to drop all 20 cold-turkey.
-
Where I think things potentially go wrong is that they have around 20 micro sites in operation...
Did they built all of these outhouses because they thought they would be a source of "links" ?
The first thing that I would do is to be sure that the content that is in use on their site today, right now, is unique content that originated with the company. If that is not the case, then it is time to throw things overboard or noindex the items that are not original and unique. If everything is original and unique then I would get into an "improvement & consolidation" mode, pulling good content out of the outhouses, improve it to the point of being Great Content, and posting it on the main site.
Keep in mind that problems related to Panda, Penguin, or other algos occur when you are crossways with one or more Google Principles. These can be really hard to diagnose and require a full site audit requiring many hours, done be someone who really knows their stuff. What you will get here with a generalized question is not much more than kibitzin'.
-
Hi Jay,
Do you have any dates that you can refer to in Analytics that show drop that might coincide with a penalty / algorithm update?
-Andy
-
Thank you everyone. I agree as well that it isn't the right approach. Moving forward though it would be extremely beneficial to pinpoint the exact cause of this recent decrease in ranking. It's peculiar to witness strong and reliable gains prior to a significant drop across the board on the heels of this update.
Let's say someone is creating multiple pages that target minor variations of the same keyword. Using unique, but essentially re-written content for all pages. If this was all hosted on the same site it would then be a clear violation of Panda.
"Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?" - Amit
It would not be duplicate content but could be seen as redundant articles on similar topics.
However, if re-written content that's similar in scope is spread across multiple domains as opposed to being hosted on the same site, would it not fall into the same Panda category?
-
I agree with Andy, your description of the setup sounds pretty excessive. Plus, just because content is unique and professionally written doesn't mean that it's high quality. If the sites all say the same thing but in different ways, then none of them are contributing anything meaningful. And your branding is diffused across a zillion different sites to boot.
-
Hi Jay,
Anyone know if Panda may target this type of approach even if the quality and uniqueness is appropriate?
No, this doesn't sound to me like Panda at all.
You mention they have microsites and blogs in operation - presumably this has been done to try and rank for additional phrases? I can't see many other reasons why this would be done.
My opinion here is to pull both the microsites and blogs back in and just create a blog on their own site (if they don't already have one). I wouldn't bother 301ing any external sites / posts back to those they might want to re-published on their current site either. You need to be advising them to start from scratch and ditch the chaff. If these external sites have all had a part to play in their current problems, then I would just distance yourself from them altogether.
...they all feature content that's of the same industry and broad topic
When looking at their own site, you need to also be advising them not to create blogs posts for the sake of it. Rather than creating 4-5 articles a week, tell them to create just 1 or two really high quality (and longer) articles weekly.
I hope this helps.
-Andy
-
Hi Jay,
Its a difficult question to answer however I can point you in a direction John Mueller of Google Switzerland has a hangout on Fridays at his g+ hang out below You can pose the question to him at times if he cant get an answer he will come back to you. Hope this helps
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts
https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours
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
-
Is it good practice to still pay for Best of the Web Directory (BOTW) and other similar one's you have to pay for?
I know that paid for links are hit by Google, but in the past these directories were okay. What about now? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
How to handle pagination for a large website?
I am currently doing a site audit on a large website that just went through a redesign. When looking through their webmaster tools, they have about 3,000 duplicate Title Tags. This is due to the way their pagination is set up on their site. For example. domain.com/books-in-english?page=1 // domain.com/books-in-english?page=4 What is the best way to handle these? According to Google Webmaster Tools, a viable solution is to do nothing because Google is good at distinguishing these. That said, it seems like their could be a better solution to help prevent duplicate content issues. Any advice would be much welcomed. 🙂
Technical SEO | | J-Banz0 -
Branding in a post EMD/Panda world?
How do non-business websites think about exact match domain names and branding after EMD and Panda? What is an EMD and what is a "brand" when there's no business or commercial brand involved? And does it impact your SEO outcomes? I have a Thailand travel blog which is a personal crusade of mine. I like Thailand, I love travelling there and I like sharing my experiences and knowledge. I don't have a business name, so when I started the blog I just used the best phrase I could find that was available as a domain name - at the time it was "bangkoktravelthailand.com". Late in 2011 I thought this sounded a bit spammy, so I found a new domain name "traveltipsthailand.com" and 301'd across to that. All went well and traffic grew consistently thanks to good writing and some basic SEO, until in late September 2012 the site got 'whacked' by Google - possibly due to EMD, but I think more likely due to Panda and some accidental poor quality backlinks (I posted a reply on another travel site, pointing back to my site, but it ended up becoming 100s of low value backlinks because of the way that site managed it's "latest comments" widget). Since then I've been trying very hard to rebuild my traffic, but it's a tough gig. I am now averaging better than I was in Sept 2012, but nowhere near where I was on trend to be by now. I have a small social media profile (800 Twitter followers plus Google+, Facebook and Pinterest) and I am slowly building some supporting pages on prominent Web 2.0 sites and seeking out quality guest post opportunities. But I still worry about the domain name. Does Google see it as an EMD? I don't use the domain name words at all in my page titles (I use xxx | Thailand travel blog) and I try not to use it in anchors either (I tend to use "Thailand travel blog" or my own name. But I still have a few old backlinks that say "Travel Tips Thailand" and I use that phrase as my brand when talking about the website. So how should sites like mine think about "brand" and "EMD"? Is it an issue or not? Is my domain name holding my site back? I have others I can use like "1travelthailand.com" and "thailand-travel-blog.com" but I'm just sitting on them, not sure where to go. I also have "asiantraveltips.com" and a long term view of rolling this site up with other blogs I'm slowly developing about China, Cambodia and Vietnam. But again, not sure where to go any more. Anyone care to share their thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Problem indexing web developed with Ruby on Rails
Hi there! Here we are again, we are having problems indexing one of our clients, which website has been developed with Ruby on Rails. It doesnt get the titles right from almost all our pages...Has anyone had the same problem? Any feedback would help a lot... Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Comunicare0 -
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 -
How to block my web from SeoMOz Crawler
Hi, I want to block mysite.com/forum from SeoMoz Crawler, how do i do that? i just want to block the forum and let the other part of my site still crawlable by seomoz. Thanks Regards
Technical SEO | | Gomu20 -
More than one web domain
Hi What is best when considering using more than one domain on a website, what the best policy ? it's a question I get asked a lot, usually because prior to any seo efforts the main domain name purchased is not keyword rich or an abbreviated company name etc. what impact do new domains have on SEO compared to older existing domains- is it worth changing a generic company named domain for a keyword rich domain? if having multiple domains pointing to the site is beneficial how best is it to configure? How do i inform Google? How do both domains get index when there is only one physical site? How should i monitor it, Analytic s, SEO moz? Will the domain compete against each other and effect SEO rank? Are they best used for marketing purposes on external sites, adverts driving traffic to the main site. I'm aware there are lots of questions above, any answers/ opinions , links to further info would be greatly appreciated. cheers
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
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!
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL1