When Panda's attack...
-
I have a predicament. The site I manage (www.duhaime.org) has been hit by the Panda update but the system seems fixed against this site’s purpose. I need some advice on what i'm planning and what could be done.
First, the issues:
Content Length
The site is legal reference including dictionary and citation look up. Hundreds (perhaps upwards of 1000) of pages, by virtue of the content, are thin. The acronym C.B.N.S. stands for “Common Bench Reports, New Series” a part of the English reports. There really isn’t too much more to say nor is there much value to the target audience in saying it.
Visit Length as a Metric
There is chatter claiming Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value. Fair enough but, a large number of people that visit this site are looking for one small piece of data. They want the definition of a term or citation then they return to whatever caused the query in the first place.
My strategy so far…
Noindex some Pages
Identify terms and citations that are really small – less than 500 characters – and put a no index tag on them. I will also remove the directory links to the pages and clean the sitemaps. This should remove the obviously troublesome pages. We’ll have to live with the fact these page won’t be found in Google’s index despite their value.
Create more click incentives
We already started with related terms and now we are looking at diagrams and images. Anything to punch up the content for that ever important second click.
Expand Content (of course)
The author will focus the next six months on doing his best to extend the content of these short pages. There are images and text to be added in many cases – perhaps 200 pages. Still won't be able to cover them all without heavy cut-n-paste feel.
Site Redesign
Looking to lighten up the code and boiler plate content shortly. We were working on this anyway. Resulting pages should have less than 15 hard-coded site-wide links and the disclaimer will be loaded with AJAX upon scroll. Ads units will be kept at 3 per page.
What do you think? Are the super light pages of the citations and dictionary why site traffic is down 35% this week?
-
Traffic (and income) is now down over 55% which is really too bad. The content is unique and highly valuable to the target market.
Any advice about why would be really appreciated.
-
All content is unique. Much of it is 10 years old.
It gets duplicated/syndicated to other sites: some legit, others we constantly fight to have removed. One in India completely copied the site from a few years ago and changed most of the links to internal addresses.
However, the owner wrote all of the non-quote or referenced material.
-
"Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value"
Perhaps, but I wouldn't stress about that metric in particular. As you correctly pointed out, a visitor who is looking for a specific item and finds it will leave a site rather quickly.Is the content unique or duplicate?
EDIT: According to a quick check on Copyscape, your content is duplicated across other sites. You definitely need unique content as a starting point.
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
-
I'm hearing rumours of a Braod Core update
I'm hearing the jungle drums banging away about a broad core update this week. Anyone else heard this? Usually its retrospective and an oh my I've dropped/gained but I don't usually hear about it beforehand. Anyone else heard this?
Algorithm Updates | | Libra_Photographic0 -
What is the feeliing of "Here's where our site can help" text links used for conversions?
If you have an ecommerce site that is using editorial content on topics related to the site's business model to build organic traffic and draw visitors who might be interested in using the site's services eventually, what is the SEO (page ranking) impact -- as well as the impact on the visitors' perceptions about the reliability of the information on the site -- of using phrases like "Here is where [our site] can help you." in nearly every article. Note: the "our site" text would be linked in each case as a conversion point to one of the site's services pages to get visitors to move from content pages on a site to the sales pages on the site. Will this have an impact on page rankings? Does it dilute the page's relevance to search engines? Will the content look less authoritative because of the prevalence of these types of links? What about the same conversion links without the "we can help" text - i.e., more natural-sounding links that stem from the flow of the article but can lead interested visitors deeper into the ecommerce section of the site?
Algorithm Updates | | Will-McDermott0 -
Google's Mobile Update: What We Know So Far (Updated 3/25)
We're getting a lot of questions about the upcoming Google mobile algorithm update, and so I wanted to start a discussion that covers what we know at this point (or, at least, what we think we know). If you have information that contradicts this or expands on it, please feel free to share it in the comments. This is a developing situation. 1. What is the mobile update? On February 26th, Google announced that they would start factoring in mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. The official announcement is here. Of note, "This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results." 2. When will the update happen? In an unprecedented move, Google announced that the algorithm update will begin on April 21st. Keep in mind that the roll-out could take days or weeks. 3. Will this affect my desktop rankings? As best we know - no. Mobile-friendliness will only impact mobile rankings. This is important, because it suggests that desktop and mobile rankings, which are currently similar, will diverge. In other words, even though desktop and mobile SERPs look very different, if a site is #1 on desktop, it's currently likely to be #1 on mobile. After April 21st, this may no longer be the case. 4. Is this a boost or a demotion? This isn't clear, but practically it doesn't matter that much and the difference can be very difficult to measure. If everyone gets moved to the front of the line except you, you're still at the back of the line. Google has implied that this isn't a Capital-P Penalty in the sense we usually mean it. Most likely, the mobile update is coded as a ranking boost. 5. Is this a domain- or page-based update? At SMX West, Google's Gary Ilyes clarified that the update would operate on the page level. Any mobile-friendly page can benefit from the update, and an entire site won't be demoted simply because a few pages aren't mobile friendly. 6. Is mobile-friendly on a scale or is it all-or-none? For now, Google seems to be suggesting that a page is either mobile-friendly or not. Either you make the cut or you don't. Over time, this may evolve, but expect the April 21st launch to be all-or-none. 7. How can I tell if my site/page is mobile-friendly? Google has provided a mobile-friendly testing tool, and pages that are mobile-friendly should currently show the "Mobile-friendly" label on mobile searches (this does not appear on desktop searches). Some SEOs are saying that different tools/tests are showing different results, and it appears that the mobile-friendly designation has a number of moving parts. 8. How often will mobile data refresh? Gary also suggested (and my apologies for potentially confusing people on Twitter) that this data will be updated in real-time. Hopefully, that means we won't have to worry about Penguin-style updates that take months to happen. If a page or site becomes mobile-friendly, it should benefit fairly quickly. We're actively working to re-engineer the MozCast Project for mobile rankings and have begun collecting data. We will publish that data as soon as possible after April 21st (assuming it;s useful and that Google sticks to this date). We're also tracking the presence of the "Mobile-friendly" tag. Currently (as of 3/25), across 10,000 page-1 mobile results, about 63% of URLs are labeled as "Mobile-friendly". This is a surprisingly large number (to me, at least) - we'll see how it changes over time.
Algorithm Updates | | Dr-Pete15 -
301'ing away from an exact match domain.
Hi Moz Community! My website gets just over 50% of its traffic from ranking in the top 3 in over 10 countries for my exact match keyword domain. 80% + from keywords related to the exact match domain. We are now looking at doing a to 301 re-direct to a new domain to start a fresh branding to the site to increase scope and expand. This would involve removing the keyword from the homepage and domain entirely . However. Considering all competitors ranking for our main keyword, have the keyword in their domain as either a subdomain to or in their root domain and in their homepage content, would this make ranking without the keyword in domain & content hard? I have found a very similar example that has done so, so I guess the answer to that question is no its not. about 65-70% of our anchor text on our backlinks is for our domain keyword. Can anyone advise how best to go about maintaining rankings after 301ing or how best to go about 301ing to make sure that we can maintain the rankings for our main keyword! Any advise at all would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | howiex10 -
Guides to determine if a client's website has been penalized?
Has anyone come across any great guides to pair with client data to help you determine if their website has been penalized? I'm also not talking about an obvious drop in traffic/rankings, but I want to know if there's a guide out there for detecting the subtleties that may be found in a client's website data. One that also helps you take into account all the different variables that may not be related to the engines. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | EEE30 -
Does Schema.org markup create a conflict with Power Reviews' standard microformat markup for e-commerce product pages?
Does anyone have experience implementing Schema.org markup on e-commerce websites that are already using Power Reviews (now Bazaar)? In Google's documentation they say that it's generally not a good idea to use two types of semantic markup for the same item (reviews in this case), but I wouldn't think that there would be a problem marking up other items on the page with Schema such as price, stock status, etc... Anyone care to provide some insight? Also in a related topic, have you all noticed that Google has really dialed back the frequency in which they display rich snippets for product searches? A few weeks ago the site that I'm referring to had hundreds of products that were displaying snippets, now it seems that only about 10% (roughly) of them are still showing. Thanks everybody.
Algorithm Updates | | BrianCC0 -
SinglePlatform's Restaurant Menu Across Web Properties vs "SEO-Optimized"
Surprised I wasn't able to find an existing answer given that SinglePlatform apparently serves 500,000 SMBs with menus that appear on over 150 publisher websites. Given Panda's razor-sharp intolerance for duplicate content, am I safe to assume that any claim of SinglePlatform's menu on a local restaurant being beneficial to your SEO is now spurious? If so, what's best way to handle this as a potential SEO liability while still having one of their nicely formatted restaurant menus on your site? For reference: http://www.openforum.com/articles/using-singleplatform-to-build-a-digital-presence Update May 7, 2012 Connected directly with the folks at SinglePlatform, and the answer here is a lot simpler than my over-thinking of it. The menu usually sits within an iFrame or widget so that's that. But the ability to truthfully show an up-to-date menu for any given establishment is a legit way to address the healthy amount of local search intent that seems to be directed at exactly that. Overall a pretty slick platform, looking forward to seeing how they grow into the SMB, local & mobile in the coming months, I think the space is ripe to benefit from products/services that take advantage of these sorts of economies of scale.
Algorithm Updates | | mgalica0 -
Google removing pages from Index for Panda effected sites?
We have several clients that we took over from other SEO firms in the last 6 months. We are seeing an odd trend. Links are disappearing from the reports. Not just the SEOmoz reports, but all the back link reports we use. Also... sites that pre Panda would show up as a citation or link, have not been showing up. Many are these are not Indexed, and are on large common Y.P or other type sites. Any one think Google is removing pages from the Index on sites based on Panda. Yours in all curiosity. PS ( we are not large enough to produce quantity data on this.)
Algorithm Updates | | MBayes0