Did I get hit with a panda update?
-
I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site.
I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with.
Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.
-
It isn't like we have no traffic, we still get thousands in organic traffic a day. It just isn't as much as it used to be.
We are the largest in our industry, not near the size of Amazon or Ebay, but still pretty large. So we have customers who exclusively sell through us. Most of our sellers are small business and don't have in house technical teams, so it is easier working with us.
I understand content marketing and we are starting to do that but if we have been hit with Panda I don't know if it matters.
-
If your site is selling the same products that many other sites are, then the only way you can expect to rank well is if you are adding significant value that isn't available anywhere else.
It's not enough to say that your added value is the fact that users can find everything in one convenient place.
Let's say that I had an ecommerce store that sold camping equipment. But, everything in my store was also available on many other websites. If someone was searching for a particular type of sleeping bag, for example, why would Google want to show them my store rather than the original merchant?
But, let's say that my page that sells that sleeping bag also offers information such as the following:
-A guide to choosing the sleeping bag
-Unique customer reviews
-A video showing how to roll the bag up
and so on.
Now that I've got some good, helpful content, users may decide that rather than buying the product from the manufacturer they'd like to browse my site and get good helpful information and possibly buy from me.
In the past, you could get away with having a site that simply carried product feeds and you could rank that site well if you built enough links. But, self made links are less and less effective as Google is getting better at figuring out what is legitimate. So now, if you want to rank well, you have to truly have a site that is extremely helpful and unique...not just unique in the words on the page, but unique in the type of value you are offering to others, which is not always an easy task.
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
-
Organic searches are a roller coaster when should I get worried?
Hello Moz'ers I know organic searches go up and down and there is no way to control that. When should I be worried about search results I.E. site is being de-listed or some other SEO problem Screen-Shot-2014-12-15-at-10.08.37-AM.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanparrish0 -
My company wants to set up some blogs - what's best practice in getting started from scratch?
My company wants to set up two or three blogs (on previously unused domains) with the idea being to disseminate good content that gets picked up in SERPs and acts as a lead generator, shows us to be authorities in our market, creates brand (or individual employee who's doing the blogging) awareness etc... From scratch, what are all the boxes that should be ticked to make this work from the outset? What are the must haves?With all the ideals in place, how long could it realistically take to make this work? What are some pitfalls to look out for? Any advice in general will be appreciated. Thanks, M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
WP plugins not updating - unable to remove
how can i update plugins if i get this: Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/akismet.2.5.7.zip… Unpacking the update… Installing the latest version… Removing the old version of the plugin… Could not remove the old plugin. Plugin update failed. same for AIOSEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro90 -
What About Google Panda Update 22?
Maybe I haven't found the threads or whatever but I haven't seen lots of posts about the latest Google Panda update from November 21-22 on SEOmoz. Panda 22 is not even listed here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Until November 21st, Google killed 3 of 5 websites I own through their Panda updates (never got hit by Penguin updates as I got only original content), accounting for about 25% of my income. Fortunately, the 2 remaining websites gained more traffic throughout the summer of 2012 so my income almost got back to 100% even though I got the "Unnatural Links" warning in Google Webmaster Tools in July. Since then, I did a huge link cleanup and according to the Link Detox Tool (from another SEO service), the number of "toxic links" went from about 350 to 50. Back link reports is as follow: 8% (52) Toxic Links; 57% (382) Suspicious Links; 35% (235) Healthy Links; Out of the 382 suspicious, most of them are coming from the same domain and they are all directories to which my website has been submitted automatically (not using any specific keyword anchor). On the opposite, healthy links are coming from different domains so I like to think they have a stronger impact than suspicious links. That said, my two remaining websites were still doing well until November 21 where it got hit by the Panda. Now traffic has dropped by 55% and income has dropped by 75% (yes I'll have to look for a job within a year if I don't fix this). (I want to add that none of my websites are "thin websites". One has over 1500 pages of content and the other has about 500 pages. All websites have content added 3 to 5 times a week.) What I don't get is that all my "money keywords" are still ranked in the top 10 results on Google according to multiple tools / services I use, yet the impressions dropped from 50% to 75% for those keywords?!? I have a feeling that this time it's not only a drop in ranking. There's a drop in impressions caused by something else. Is it caused by emphasis on local search? Are they showing more ads and less organic results? But here's the "funny part": For the last 5 years, I was never able to advertise my website on Google Adwords. Each time, I got a quality score of about 4/10 only to see it drop to 1/10 within a few hours of launching the campaign. On November 22nd, I build new PPC campaigns based on the exact same PPC campaigns I had the past (same keywords, same ads, same landing pages). Guess what? Now the quality score is between 7/10 and 10/10 (most of them have 10/10) for the exact same PPC campaign! What a "coincidence" huh?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
How can I get an XML sitemap in the order that I want?
I use Screaming Frog and Xenu on a daily basis and I use them for sitemap creation, but the functionality is limited. With huge sites, it's really easy to create an ordered list of URLs for the sitemap in excel or word and upload that to Screaming Frog to crawl. The only problem is that it won't export the sitemap in the order that I uploaded it. Does anybody know of a tool that will do this or am I doomed to sit an manually arrange the URLs the way I want?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Does onsite content updates have an effect on SERPs?
Hi, Some might see this as a very (VERY) basic question but wanted to drill down into it anyway. Onsite content: Lets say you have a service website and attached to it is a blog, the blog gets updated every other day with 500 words of relevant content, containing anchor text links back to a relevant page on the main website. Forget about social signals and natural links being built from the quality content, will adding the content with anchor text links be more beneficial then using that content to generate links through guest blogging? 10 relevant articles onsite with anchor links, or 10 guest posts on other websites? I guess some might say 5 onsite and 5 guest posts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
With Panda, which is more important, traffic or quantity?
If you were to prioritize how to fix a site, would you focus on traffic or quantity of urls? So for example, if 10% of a site had thin content, but accounted for 50% of the traffic and 50% of the site had a different type of thin content but only accounted for 5% of organic traffic, which would you work on first? I realize both need to be fixed, but am unsure of which to tackle first (this is an extremely large site). Also, I am wondering if the simply the presence of thin content on a domain can affect a site even if it isn't receiving any traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
What has this subdomain done to recover from Panda?
I found that doctor.webmd.com was affected by Google Panda, and then recovered (if you look at traffic on compete.com). What do you think they did to recover?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0