"I eat bamboo and crap sites"
Contents
The First Signs of Recovery Came Early
After being struck down by Panda on April 11th 2011 I got to work and made a whole bunch of on-site changes. I made a small recovery quickly, however, soon learned that there was still a lot of work to do.
Apr 19, 2011
Glad to report that this morning it seems that the work I have been doing over the last week is paying off.
One of the sites that I manage saw a drop in traffic after the UK Google Panda update last Monday (11th April, 2011). Since then I have been working relentlessly, pretty much around the clock, to try to learn what went wrong and then to resolve the problems.
Google Panda is essentially a website quality update. It is the first step towards search engines returning quality sites that are not based on webmaster votes (i.e. links).”
I have been working about 12 hours a day, probably more some days, and have a change log with over 500 entries.
I spent a lot of time reading through the various Google webmaster forums and speaking to people that were trying to recover. The general concensus was always that “nobody recovers from Google Panda”, however, it seems that this is not true.
Labnol reported that they recovered after making a few changes to their site, it took them 2 weeks. My recovery is starting just 1 week after the UK Panda Update.
So what did I do? Simple – I followed Google’s Quality Guidelines. To the T. Admittedly the recovery is not a full one at the moment, but I am clawing my way back up, each day gets a little better, touch wood!
I will be writing more, in fact there may be a special report written shortly for those that want it. In short – build the best website possible for your users, and do not live in denial! Google Panda is essentially a website quality update. It is the first step in towards search engines returning quality sites that are not based on webmaster votes (i.e. links).
A Graph From A Slightly Recovered Site That I Manage
Still not fully recovered but moving in the right direction:
On the final day of this graph traffic finally exceeded the post Panda Slump, but not fully recovered yet. The green line is the traffic in the week running up to the Panda update, end of the line being the Tuesday 12th, and the blue line is the traffic for the week following the update.
Pagerank, Links and SEO
What Google did years ago was revolutionary – they developed a search engine that ranked pages based on how popular those pages were in the web community. When people linked to a page, in the days before Pagerank, it was because they liked a page, wanted to share it, or referenced it. So it was logical to use that data to determine which pages were best.
The alternative was human edited directories. Search engines before Pagerank were dire, using META keywords and descriptions to determine what a site was about and then listing all websites in order of relevance. This was spammed to death.
For a while Pagerank stopped spammy sites appearing in the search engine as simple META keyword spamming no longer worked. However, this lead to a whole new industry of SEO (search engine optimisation) which saw people swapping, trading and stealing links to enhance their website pagerank. The most aggressive SEO’s generally got their sites to the top of the search engines.
Also, in its early day the only way a link would be added to a site was by the webmaster himself (or herself). When “Web 2″ came along, comments, forums and wikis all suddenly provided a way for people to add their own links to another persons website. Spam was invented. Once again, poorer quality sites featured at the top while well researched and written sites were left buried.
Along Came A Panda
So over the last year or so (by all accounts) Google started working on a major update to its search engine. First called Google Farmer update by the professional SEO community, and then Google Panda by Google (apparently named after one of the brains behind it all), the new update was rolled out in the USA last month, and then hot all other English language sites on April 11th.
“This is an algorithmic change and it doesn’t have any manual exceptions applied to it” Michael Wyszomierski, a Google Employee.
The result was that many websites saw a major drop in Google search traffic, from between 30% to up to 99%. The site I manage dropped by around 68%, which was pretty major, especially as the pages that many advertisers targeted were hit hardest.
So How Did I Start My Recovery a from the Panda Penalty?
Without going into too much detail now, this was my approach (bear in mind that this is really a condensed version of about 80+ hours of work).
- I first searched for information on the sites that lost and those that gained. There are many websites and blogs talking about Panda, although many have data that is a little dubious (some websites report to have been listed as the biggest losers and yet say that they are doing just fine).
- I then read the Google Guidelines all over again, looking for any updates they were sharing
- I read the Google Webmaster forum threads to see more about they types of sites suffering.
- I ignored everyone that said “it is impossible to recover from Google Panda”
- I instead believed Google when they said that it was a totally algorithmic update and no sites are manually targeted.
So what did all this teach me? It taught me one simple (although I am sure Google would not like to hear me call it simple) fact – quality counts more than anything.
There were (or still are) many theories and rumours that I think are false about Panda:
- Google Panda does not downgrade a site based on its CMS. WordPress sites are only affected so much because so many people use them.
- Google Panda does not mind if you have a reasonable amount of advertising on a page. Many people stripped out all their ads and then noted that traffic did not recover. Advertising may be an issue, but generally it is not, in my opinion.
- Collateral Damage – this may still be partly true. Many SEOs think that one problem is that many sites dropped in ranking because their links (the Pagerank votes) from other sites have been reduced in value as a result of those sites being penalised by Google Panda. There may be some truth in this, although the only way to know is to test it by creating 2 identical and excellent websites and then creating the same number of links from equally pageranked sites, but one set considered “low quality” and the other set considered “high quality”. Of course, nobody in their right mind will ever test this. And first, you need to know what “quality” is.
So, where does that leave us in finding the solution? Simple – quality content.
When Google Panda first rolled out in the USA I started investigating a little, and asked over in the Google forums for suggestions on how we find low quality pages on our sites. No answers came. Just these words:
“If you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.” said Michael Wyszomierski (a.k.a. Wysz) here (warning, there are already 1800 replies to this thread, only start reading if you have a week to spare!).
So I was left to try to determine how I could seek low quality pages. I created some rules that I felt could be followed by a program (search engine) and then went about manually finding pages on my site and adjusting them. It seems to have worked.
On Site SEO Alive and Well
For so long many people have relied too heavily on off-site SEO (link building) and not done enough work on their on site SEO (site architecture, content, copy, structure, navigation, usability, design etc.). All of this is now a factor, and all of it needs to be changed for the better to make your site rank well.
Soon I will reveal all, however, I have not washed for about 24 hours and so to celebrate the return of my page into the higher search positions in Google, I will have a shower and maybe also a nice cup of tea. Also I do not want to shout too much about how I recovered until I have at least a few days of data in the bank, and some steady positions. So off to the shower I go, for an early bath.
Wednesday 13th and Wednesday 20th Traffic Comparison
Traffic Change from Wednesday 13th to 20th April
(Many thanks to J. Patrick Fischer for sharing the photo of the panda).
How To Optimise A Website Post Google Panda / Farmer
Another positive update, but again, things did get worse! A real roller-coaster ride!
Apr 19, 2011
Finally some promising news post-Panda – we have managed to regain much of the traffic that was lost after the UK Google Panda Update, on one of the sites we manage. Not all traffic has been recovered, but the changes that we are making are having a positive effect.
We are now in the process of putting together a document that will guide other webmasters through the steps that we took to aid our recovery from the Google Panda update.
Please note that Webologist is not the site that we have been working on. The site in question is a medium sized information website, with between 1000-1500 pages and a global audience. It has several revenue streams from advertising and has a daily reach in the region of 20K pageviews. Target audience is the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and it also receives readers from various other countries to a lesser extent. However, as we do not wish to reveal our updates to our direct competitors we can only provide the information in a premium eBook.
The eBook should hopefully be available for purchase by next week. If you would like to know as soon as the book is available then simply leave a comment below and tick the “subscribe to comments” box (you will only get notifications for this thread – this is a standard WordPress feature and you can unsubscribe to comments at anytime). Once the book is ready I will update the comments list and you will be notified.
I will not be charging the earth for the book, but will offer a 25% discount to anyone that “signs up” below before it is published. I estimate the retail price to be just £30 (discounted to £22.50 for all of you!).
What Will The Panda Book Cover?
It will cover all the information that I have obtained from speaking with numerous SEO’s and Google employees (on their public forums) over the last month. It will cover the best practices that need to be followed to not only lift your Panda penalty but also to ensure that going forward any website that you develop will be optimised best for Google.
The book will cover all the steps that I took to repair some of the damage on a website that I manage. It will show the proof (in the form of Google Analytics screenshots – one will be posted on this blog entry shortly once all the data is in).
It will cover some essential site architecture improvements that have helped me. Although the work that I carried out was done a WordPress blog, the rules should apply to all websites.
More technical websites with a wide range of media (photographs and videos) may need to take slightly different action to what is taken for more information rich websites.
What I must warn is that the changes that are needed to recover from Panda are hard changes to make and also require a lot of hours work. There are no easy fixes. Some people have tried and failed to recover from the Panda update and believe that for some websites recovery is simply not possible.
However, in the last week I have proved that a partial recovery at least is possible within a week when you are willing to make some major changes to your site. This will of course be explained in detail, with some examples in the text. I am still making more changes and hoping to make a full recovery, the greatest task is finding the problems to then be able to correct them.
The Aim Of the Panda Recovery Manual
The aim of this eBook is simple: to provide the average webmaster the information and task list required to “clean up” their site and meet Google’s new quality guidelines.
You will probably need to put in a lot of hours to get your site fixed, but £30 for an eBook as a lot cheaper than hiring a pro SEO for a week. If you do wish to hire a pro SEO for a week, I do know some in the UK that may have some availability, use the contact form in that instance. Unfortunately I am not for hire at the moment.
So far results look promising, although we have not recovered all traffic. We are still experiencing a “Post-Panda Google Dance” which indicates that Google are making new changes each day and also that there are ranking updates resulting as the changes we have made are factored in as more of the pages are crawled.
It is possible that for any website there will be some issues that go beyond the scope of this document. We cannot guarantee that following the advice in the book will lead to your site bouncing back, all we can say is that it worked for our information website – a website that is dominated by content and works on an advertising business model - precisely the type of website that has generally been hammered by The Panda.
Fighting Pandas With Platinum SEO Pack 1.3.7
N.B. Since writing this post in April 2011 I moved from Platinum SEO Pack to the Yoast WordPress SEO. They are very similar but I felt that Yoast has a few further advantages.
Apr 13, 2011
OK, so one of the sites that I manage has been badly hit by the Google Panda update (previously known as Farmer Update). I have been busy implementing various changes which mostly deal with removing poor content.
It is generally thought that the latest Google search algo update penalizes websites that have some poor quality content. How poor quality content is defined is a mystery, but anything duplicated or abbreviated is likely to be top of the list of poor. So WordPress tag pages, category pages, archives and any other pages that just repeat content from the main page are likely suspects to bring a site down.
Is WordPress The Main Problem Regarding Panda?
Some people have commented how there are many WordPress sites that have suffered from the Panda update and believe that there is something specific about WordPress that has caused this. However, I do not believe that Google will penalize a website just because it is build on WordPress. It is more likely to be that WordPress sites have suffered most because it is such a popular platform. Google loves open source and people love WordPress because it is free.
So, what have I been doing today?
My first task was to delete all WordPress tags that had been used less than 5 times. Some people delete all tags and forget about them, but I do use them for navigation, they are very useful. For example, I have categorized this post as SEO Advice and so far tagged it as Panda. If I was to write more on Panda, I would tag the new articles Panda too. I do not plan on doing so though, as there are many heavyweight SEOs talking Panda to death already.
So, I deleted tags. I also tackled all the errors that I could from the Google Webmaster Tools, such as the soft and hard 404′s, duplicate titles and descriptions etc.
Next task is something that I picked up on Amit Agarwal’s blog about recovering from Panda. In it he explained that as well as trashing loads of tags and working through the error reports he also noindex sub-pages of tags and categories.
Now, this sounds like a good idea. On busy categories I may have 50 pages, and each of these is containing duplicate content. But, how to keep the main category page? I have until today been using the All in One SEO Pack, however, Tam, a regular poster over at Cre8asiteforums.com suggested that I give Platinum SEO Pack. I just tested it, and by jove it works! It does precisely what Amit Agarwal explains on his blog.
Other Good Things About Platinum SEO Pack
I was a little concerned about using it at first, as I was worried about the effect it may have on changing loads of descriptions. But it has a nice little import from All in One SEO Pack function.
The Procedure I Used To Migrate from All In One To Platinum
- Deactivate All in One SEO Pack
- Activate Platinum SEO Pack
- Press “Migrate from All in one SEO”
- Ignore the recommendation to backup the database (best backup just in case)
- Check that “Use noindex for sub pages” is ticked
Job done.
As an example, the source code for www.webologist.co.uk/category/google reads:
<!– platinum seo pack 1.3.7 –> <meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow,noodp,noydir” /> <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.webologist.co.uk/category/google” /> <!– /platinum one seo pack –>
and the source code for www.webologist.co.uk/category/google/page/2 reads:
<!– platinum seo pack 1.3.7 –> <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow,noodp,noydir” /> <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.webologist.co.uk/category/google/page/2″ /> <!– /platinum one seo pack –>
Note that Google’s search bots can still spider their way through the sub-pages, they just will not be indexed. So links back to the main blog, i.e. posts, will be followed and then ranked accordingly.
Where have my descriptions gone?
Noticed 2 things:
- I seem to have lost descriptions. This is a bad thing.
- I have no idea what noodp and noydir are.
So, fix descriptions time.
“By checking this option, your META descriptions will get auto-generated, if there’s no excerpt. i.e. the first 160 characters of your post/page content will be automatically assigned to the meta description tag.”
Ok, it seems that as I was running the All In One SEO Pack I had deleted the WordPress META description code from the templates. Need to pop that back in.
Will test then update…….
Ah, no, descriptions are there on the post pages, just not the cat pages. That is OK, if Google decides to list the first category page then it can make up its own description.
So for this post, the META is:
<!– platinum seo pack 1.3.7 –>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow,noodp,noydir” />
<meta name=”description” content=”OK, so one of the sites that I manage has been badly hit by the Google Panda update (previously known as Farmer Update). I have been busy implementing various” />
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.webologist.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/fighting-pandas-with-platinum-seo-pack-1-3-7″ />
<!– /platinum one seo pack –>
I do seem to have two descriptions though. It was on another blog that I deleted the default WordPress one. Above this description I also have:
<meta name=”description” content=”OK, so one of the sites that I manage has been badly hit by the Google Panda update (previously known as Farmer Update). I have been busy implementing vari…” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Panda,” />
<title>Fighting Pandas With Platinum SEO Pack 1.3.7 | Webologist</title>
Guess I can get shot of the first description that WordPress generates.
Anyway, if you want the Platy All In Oner then you can find it via your Plugin search in WordPress or get it direct from wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack
Will The Save Me From Pandas?
No idea.
What Is Your Google Panda Story?
While we are all working hard to improve our sites, maybe we could share some Panda stories. There has been a lot in the press about how the Google Panda update has affected some major companies, but as we all know, it is the smaller businesses that are really suffering.
OK, nobody wants to lose traffic, but if a company is seeing its search referrals drop from 1,000,000 a day down to 100,000 a day, they are still getting a lot of good business from Google and probably have a high exposure in social media and a loyal readership. Some people have mentioned how they have received thousands of emails from clients and fans since Panda, asking them where the site is – they still manage to find it though!
My Panda experience has been unpleasant to say the least, but I am seeing it as a new learning curve. Although I have lost a lot of good business from Panda, so much that my wife has had to go back to work (and I will look after my kids 1 day a week – that will be fun!) I am still confident that it will work out better in the end. Why?
I think that Google decided that enough was enough with poor quality PAGES, and Panda is there to stamp them out. Note, not websites of poor quality, but pages.
Many websites that have suffered talk about huge communities, forums that are 10 years old, millions of comments, videos, images, hundred of thousands of pages. This is all very well – but how many of those pages are actually read by customers and web surfers today? Maybe 10% at most. The rest sit dormant.
But think about poor old Googlebot, it still has to go and check those pages. Thousands of pages across millions of websites. Maybe the Panda update is a message to webmaster from Google, that is really just saying:
“Tidy up your mess, I am fed up with having to walk around the rubbish to get what I want!”
Other ideas is that it is designed to stamp out the scrapers and content thieves. Yes, many well established sites have suffered because of Panda. But think about it. If a professional scraper has a network of say, 1000 websites, that scrape 10,000 different domains, that is going to cost them a lot of money to run. If they too have lost a lot of traffic, they may be forced to close down their operations.
Yes, you may be suffering now, but maybe this will recover in time. The scrapers may still appear top of search for some terms, but not all.
Anyway, I digress. What is your Panda story? Share away.
Hey, I have been working around the clock to reverse engineer the Panda update and have made dozens (ok more like hundreds) of changes to 4 different sites that were hit.
I have also spent days comparing sites that were hit vs sites that were unaffected and have come to similar conclusions as you.
I have learned many facts about the update and have come up with many theories as well. As I wait for Google to re-crawl my site(s), I’d love to talk to you about our efforts.
I have spent over 80 hours working on it so far and I’m sure some of my data might be useful to you.
Sincerely,
Email me,
- Eric
ps. I found your site by searching for recovery stories within the last 24 hour period.
I too have a ton of data from the top sites that got whacked in the UK. Email me and we’ll share data, one of my clients is also a travel site that lost 60% of it’s traffic. Very substantial as the site had tens of thousands of uniques a day.
I’ve been comparing notes with dozens of SEO’s and webmasters. One aspect stands out far more than any other.
Get in touch.
Very nice of both of you to offer to share your information. I will be writing a much more detailed report on how I fixed my site after Google Panda shortly, you are welcome to provide an opinion on that once it is available.
Hilarious sales pitch!
I admit, I am certainly no salesman! Maybe I need to hire one? Hmmm. Nah.
I’m sorry but this is a total scam…
How can you write an ebook on Panda when it only hit the UK 9 days ago. Nobody knows how this is going to pan out yet.
“People that say that you can never recover from Panda are often missing the main point about the Panda update.” – who exactly is saying that? I don’t see anyone notable saying it, please give me a link.
Subscribed? Very curious about this. I’m finding it hard to imagine how you’ve been able to do this recovery with such a quick turn around and be sure that it’s the panda update you’ve fixed because perhaps it was a different penalty that happened to come down around the same time.
Not accusing or anything, just very curious as it seems nobody else on the web has managed to get out of the panda-box..at least publicly.
Starstruck, I started following events when it was released in America on February 25th, almost 2 months ago (although I only had a slight interest then, I thought that I would survive it!). There are plenty of people that have said publicly that in their opinion recovery was not possible, in both Google’s own webmaster forums and private SEO forums.
To be honest, at the moment I cannot remember who said it, but I think it was on the main Google Webmaster thread that now has 1829 replies. I am not going to read it AGAIN. That thread was started on 3/3/11 and I have been following it pretty much since then. This is the thread: Think you’re affected by the recent algorithm change? Post here (Google.com).
That all sounds very wishy washy, I know, but if at the time of reading those comments I thought that they would come in handy later, I would have bookmarked them. Maybe I will edit the article a little to ensure it does not seem misleading.
You are right, Google may tweak the algo again, in fact they are very likely to be making daily modifications to it (they always do). After the US roll out there were noticeable changes in the weeks following.
Michael’s blog is a very good one too read on the subject, although again at the time of writing the reports of sites that had recovered were few and far between.
But I think that to call it a scam is unfair at best. The book has not been written yet, how can something be scam before it exists? I will be providing proof of recovery as well as the details of the processes that lead to that recovery. Every step I took over the last 8 days was logged. There are actually over 600 entries in the log.
The story may not be over either – I am sure I mentioned that. Recovery commenced today, if it does not continue the book obviously will not go to press, I shall work on the SEO further. At the moment I am monitoring progress. But even though the recovery only started to kick in at around 11am this morning, traffic by the end of the day was up by 48% and pageviews up 78%, according to Google Analytics data.
Hi Starstruck, this is one of the things that I read. It is on SEO Round Table, written by Barry Schwartz on March 18th. He talked about the 2 possible cases of recovery from Google Panda, and then mentioned that Matt Cutts informed them that Cult of Mac was not a Panda victim, so did not actually recover from that, we can only assume that there was another issue which Google would not disclose.
This was written around 3 weeks after Panda was released in the USA. There was still a lot of speculation about what caused the possible bounce backs, and many people adamant that recovery was not possible.
One online friend of mine made many changes to their site and it still did not recover. I will see if they wish to speak about it, but cannot disclose their information. They are a very well respected SEO but run a site with a different makeup to the one I manage. That is the reason for the disclaimer.
Matt, on the day Panda UK was rolled out traffic slumped by 55.34%. I used the information I had gathered since the US update plus a lot of extra reading and was working on changes daily (about 12 hours a day) since then. Maybe only the changes I made yesterday alone are the ones that led to a recovery. All I am offering is to share what I did. Remember that Labnol / Digital Inspiration recovered 2 weeks after the first rollout in America, and they did not have the headstart that I had. I also had made various changes after “Panda USA” (but nowhere near so many as in the last week) in the hope of avoiding the penalty. That did not work (or it may have reduced the severity of the penalty).
Maybe instead of an ebook I will just help individuals? Is it really so shocking that someone that has worked with SEO / web publishing for 5 years can piece together hundreds of conversations between SEOs over a period of 7/8 weeks and use that to fix a site? Maybe!
“..at least publicly.” That is of course another factor Matt. From the comments so far, I am actually surprised that nobody asked “what website recovered?”. I will not disclose this at the moment simply because I do not want my competitors picking up on it. And I decided to put this information in an ebook for that same reason. I am starting to think that nobody will want to buy they book anyway!
Labnol and Cult of Mac had a big following… I would say they’ve had a manual intervention to get out of the hole they were in rather than actually done anything themselves to cure Panda (apart from campaigning on Twitter and in the media).
How many hits did you have before panda and after? I would guess this site gets 100 uniques or less a day… not enough sample size (either in number of visitors, or number of sites) to say you’ve cured Panda and will sell an ebook.
If you’ve truely god a cure for Panda then go hawk your services to the companies who are down massively in sales since then, instead of selling some ropey ebook…
That is your opinion Starstruck. Google / Matt Cutts have specifically said that Cult of Mac was never affected by Panda in the first place and that there is certainly no manual intervention.
As for site traffic, at no point did I say that it is Webologist that was affected or recovered. It was another site that I manage, not this blog. Your guesstimate for the traffic on this blog is not far off (a little bit low) which of course explains why there are so few people actually involved in this conversation.
As for the number of hits, I will not be disclosing the specific data, only percentages and screenshots from Google Analytics the reflect patterns, but rest assured it is enough to provide a useful sample size.
I really do not have time to become a full time SEO for another company, I already have one company to run, that takes up more than enough time already. The reason for the ebook is that I want to be able to provide some small businesses with a guide that they can follow that may help their sites recover. For companies that can afford a full time SEO they will already know this stuff, and are all no doubt beavering away as we chat fixing other sites.
Your first mistake is taking what Matt Cutts says as gospel. I don’t have time to go over the rest of them, and if you’ve made the first one its probably pointless anyway
Well, given the choice of Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesman on web quality, or Starstruck, the mystery man, I go with Cutts, and I recommend that other webmasters do the same. What exactly is your interest in this subject? So far you have only offered criticism, none of which is backed by any facts.
Hi
I read your comments with great interest.
It simply cannot just be about the best content.
The content on our site is 100% original, rated amongst the very best online, written by some of the top physicians in the world…..and we were decimated by Panda. We have over 1 million emails from readers telling us our health content was the very best they came across. And there’s no one at Google to talk to! They have too much power. Shame on google.
Hi Guy. You are suffering a similar problem to many people. I am sorry to break the news to you, but your content may be original but it is not unique.
I just went to your site and picked one article, I chose the first article in the cancer section which is “What Is Lung Cancer?”. I then pasted the first paragraph into Google search – there are “About 269 results” for the first paragraph and then 6 for the sentence in quotation marks.
You are first on the list which is a good sign that Google recognizes you as having authority on that article, but there are 268 sites behind you, many of which may now be ranking above you on a wide range of search terms. Similarly the a direct quote for the first sentence in “What Is Diabetes?” brings back 7 copies.
Finally I took a look at an article of yours which is a serious condition but received a lot of spammy attention – “What Is Erectile Dysfunction?”. About 3,190 results in total for the first paragraph and 45 websites with direct quotes.
Being original is not everything unfortunately as people copy. Google can only try to determine which sites should have authority based on its algorithm, which includes all the sites listed in Google’s index. There are steps that you can take though to attempt to win back your positions.
Update – First draft of the document is almost complete. 33 pages so far and counting. Should be on target for distribution next week.
I could do with some hints on what to look for on my sites so a book like this may just help me after having been hit by the panda update.
If you’re still going ahead with the book, i’m in..!
Yeah, it is still going ahead. 33 pages written currently with my editor, who is AWOL – but then it is a glorious sunny day today!
Im in also
Finally a recovery story! i have been spending countless hours reading posts and looking for people to share knowledge with regarding “best practice” and what changes they are making. Today i had my head in my hands thinking …. maybe we need to bin this site but your story at least brings some hope to the table. My site which i haven’t listed here is the industry leading site for its niche and has been for years it has been slapped hard lost approx 70% traffic and i am seeing many scraped versions of my content appearing in search above me! I don’t want to publicly mention my site but would happily share data and would love to discuss further.
I’m still struggling with this update. Unfortunately, I still did not recover. I actually deleted more than 100 articles. I removed all the tags in the website. I also removed some keywords for certain articles. I also altered the layout a little bit by removing some extra columns and related posts listing inside the article. But, so far after the situation still persists after the 11th panda update.
The 404 errors in google webmasters increased after I removed tags in the website. Also, the removed pages are showing 404s. I don’t really get this because the links that are coming to these articles are from the website itself. Maybe it showed the previous posts listed in related articles. And, the thing that annoys me is that the list the posts which were crawled like 2 years ago. I want to get rid of this. Can you help me out?
Glad you are recovering from this. Congratulations! Looking forward to see how you fixed things. And, I must applaud if this is true and then you’ll be the only man to come forward and say that you did something and it worked and also shared it!
Joel, sounds like you are making the right sort of changes. I hope I made it clear that my recovery is not over, I am still down overall, but have clawed back a fair amount of traffic since the update. Still got a lot of changes that I need to make though.
Is this for real or a Pr stunt? Are u prepared to share the domain and keywords that have stopes and recovered including placement changes?
We will when we are ready. It is not intended to be a PR stunt, apart from this blog we have not doing any PR. As mentioned in the post, it is not a full recovery after Panda and traffic is fluctuating, but we are certainly hopefully, and still working around the clock to make more changes.
Ok what I ment was linkbait stunt I have done the everything to clean up the site to benefit the end user and not a hint of movement like one of the above comments mentioned scrapers are ranking above my original content. I’m very curious to see some real evidence as I’m skeptical that anyone has really recovered or even on the road to recovery
Well, the graph above is from Google analytics, the only modifications I made to it were drawing the arrows and annotations on.
Just added a traffic comparison at the end of the blog showing the improvement seen yesterday compared to last Wednesday, which was 2 days after Panda. Note a drop in bounce rate that is directly related to some of the changes that I made.
Hmmm still skeptical (easy to photoshop) can I ask have the main keywords started to move up in rankings and by how much? When will yoube providing domain info if this is for real I would take screenshots of current rankings and any movements to make this more believable.
I’m french SEO. I subscribe for the reduction
Our website is coming up for 4 years old. We do not post much content, so are certainly not a content farm. In fact there are only 74 posts that are on women’s exercise. We have seen our traffic drop after the UK Google update on the 12th April. Our traffic has dropped by almost exactly 50% (50.82% according today google analytics) – more importantly (no, not more importantly) also, pageviews has fallen too. This implies that people are less interested in what they find. Maybe a sign people are coming to the site after looking at the first Google results and still not finding what they want (because now less relevant searches?).
Eeeek i hope this isnt a PR scam I was thinking there was no way to recover until I read this!
hmmmm if your site has a US and a UK audience you would have felt this hit when panda rolled out in the US! but have failed to mention this. my site also had a US and UK audience and it was hit twice once when the US panda rolled out and again on 11th of April, based on your story it seems your site was only hit by the UK panda update despite having a national audience…
That is correct James, and after the US roll-out I thought that I was in the clear. I think that Google must have used location of the servers, or read the address of the office, rather than based it on where the readers are. The site actually gained traffic after the US update, I assume because a lot of sites I was competing with were suddenly dropped.
please notify me of the ebook release.
Hi Webo, hit me when the books live, like you…I mash up all of the theories, test them and see what works. Some of my sites were US traffic dependent and took a huge dive as early as Jan (end), these were on UK servers so I think a geo server filter hit me, then the UK dropped off slightly and I’m slowly recovering on them all. Looking forward to your side of the story…
Webologist, To see what Panda is about from a reverse engineering or case study perspective, it worth it from theoretical understanding of search engines.
If it has practical applications for webmasters (now almost synonmous with ‘the users’ in a Post Panda world) even better.
I am not skeptical at all about your research. I think with a lot of hard work and brains you can reverse engineer Panda. I guess the question is, would that have a different effect than focusing on the user on your site.
This is my personal focus now: to get users to stay longer and come back because they like might site, rather than SEO. If you book included a part on this, then I think it would even be more interesting and of value to the reader.
Yes a case study analysis of Panda but also new ideas on how to decrease bounce rate and increase return visitors so in the long run you do not have to worry about Google. That would be an interesting book.
That is good news that you have recovered from the update. Looks like the only criterial for good seo is quality content.
Nishi, not fully recovered. In fact, lost some of the recovery I made. Reviewing changes since recovery day, seeing what needs to be reversed. Book on hold for now!
Mark, I had started writing my “best practice” guide, I am tempted to develop this further. I also have an document I wrote a while back on utilising DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers). It was actually written for a client that in the end decided that they could not use it, so if I get permission to use this, then this could form a part of a much larger book on running websites in general.
So many ideas, so little time. More testing to do.
I am keeping an eye in all this. My site ranked pretty well but looks like I have been hit hard by the panda. Perhaps time to make changes or do nothing at all; just wait and watch. There is no doubt that these are good updates and will eliminate those who are into low quality link building trying to promote their low quality content/sites. 3 cheers for the panda. Hip Hurray.
Really interesting article. I have been struggling with many of the same issues. The site I work for does make part of its money from display advertising. So, I wondered if you have a hunch for the ideal (and maximum) number of adverts per page, before you get penalized?
So, how do I sign up?
Did you select the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” button? If so, you’re signed up.
Still working on that CWhyatt. Probably the million dollar question!
I have heard people talking about the ads to content ratio. So I presume you can get away with more ads on a page, if you have a decent amount of content.
We are also experiencing the issue found by many, where content syndicated from our site to others, is ranking higher than our original article… Previously we were always led to believe that as it was published on our site first, we were seen as the originator…
Content syndication has never guaranteed that you will rank first. When I set up a local business portal people re-published the RSS feed in the early days (probably still do come to think of it) and as the business portal was new and had next to no Pagerank it lost all authority for the content. This is essentially what has happened with Panda, many sites have lost authority for their own content, while those site that use the content may have more links (albeit manufactured, not natural) and a greater social buzz.
I’m interested in reading your book, if it goes ahead!
Sign me up.
I have worked it out before you got your stupid book published! Google has simply decided to save precious server power and rolled back the algo clock to 2001. Their results are bloody awful now. First page full of keyword-hyphenate-5-page-sites that peddle crap and offer nothing.
If you want to “recover” from Panda and compete, simple split your large site into 100 smaller ones of 3-10 pages and run them all on 100 different servers. Google loves diversity and does not give a hoot about quality. Quality was a red herring! And you have been fooled!
Heh. You could be right you know. eBook on hold while I continue to sort this mess out. Had some success but that was followed by some failure. I think now that things are steadyish, but need to check that increased marketing and promoting will bump it up a bit, to prove (hopefully) that its current rankings is the result of collateral damage and not any penalty. Sorry about the delay to those that wanted to read the book, but I cannot produce a book without solid evidence that following new best practices will dig you out of the doldrums.
I just posted this comment over on the Google blog where they are talking about quality and Panda. It got deleted, so I may as well post it here.
This comment was in reply to the issue of copyright and how Google seems to be struggling to workout who owns the copyright of web pages.
Regarding proving who owns content, I made a suggestion here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=56296fdbf843940a&hl=en
Basically, publishers should be able to present their new work to Google (maybe via webmaster tools) before publishing it publicly. This should solve most cases of content theft.
I also think that Webmaster Tools should provide some more clues to the poor quality content on the site. It shows duplicate descriptions and titles, it would be useful if it would flag poor quality content or even just cases were pages are too similar. I have been writing on the same topic for 4-5 years and no doubt there are times when I say similar things or write similar comments in reply to questions in the comments.
Webmaster Tools really could help people that are striving to make their sites better quality.
In the last month I have made over a 1000 changes to my site, but still seeing lower quality sites appear above me (some are so obviously re-written in poor English it is silly).
I have removed around 400 articles now, following my own criteria for quality. Most were from my hobby days when I was just using free content to create a website, long before I thought I would be making a business of it. Many were short news blogs which at the time were interesting but now pretty irrelevant (unless you like old news). Now my issue is with other people that have copied my content (although I am still finding some articles that have been partially duplicated).
Still much to do, many articles to re-write simply because they have been copied so much in the last 4 years I cannot DMCA everything, so may as well write a new version! Oh well.
That is another question though. If a page once ranked well, but now post-Panda does not, will making it unique and of high quality help, or is the content itself somehow considered lost and therefore the URL abandoned? I have a few articles I plan to re-write completely just because it would be easier than trying to re-write parts and still make it all tie together just as well. Still lots to do. Here’s hoping my site recovers. I have been given an ultimatum today by my wife to recover our business or look for alternative employment! Got 4 months.
Interesting thread, let me know when/if your eBook hits the shelves…
Please keep us updated on your progress and the ebook.
Wow, 9 days since the last update. Been making many more major changes to the site. Things again seem to indicate an improvement, main page getting more hits today, but, too soon to say. Latest changes have concern web design, content management, copy quality and a few slightly random changes to site architecture, which some SEOs think is simply barking up the wrong tree.
I obviously really do hope that I have some better news to report soon, not only for the sake of this ebook, but for the sake of the main part of my business!
I’m in, please let me know when the ebook is ready.
I’m looking forward to the ebook!
If you’re changing everything then a bullet list of what worked for you might be easier, but then a book saying how you changed everything pays better, if it happens before next update renders it useless.
Seen some more minor improvements, but still not enough to shout too much!
Total traffic is still down 41.51%, but that is an improvement all the same. Almost all losses now on a few pages, other pages up by over 100% (but started with much less traffic).
Basically a deeper and more thorough marketing strategy for the site….. still working, cannot believe it has now been almost 3 months!
Glad to hear you can recovering from Panda update! My site is a huge huge forums but got hit pretty hard, drop 90% and still dropping… I still debating if i want to try something else altogether. Thanks
Sorry to hear of your huge loss. Maybe time to diversify. I am working on several projects at the moment and hoping to spread my risk evening amongst a small group of high quality and focused domains. The hardest thing is building something professional and high quality quickly enough!
I dont understand what kind of game Google play in our days, why they dont make rules and say to the webmasters to follow. They are not clear for what they want. We must guess like magician or something! Everyone speak about quality and unique content and at the same time all spam and copy articles sites are number 1 on search results! This is quality? The only think that I see is a dictator! Is Google ever think about the small web business and how much they lose? No because she have enough to buy the hole planet….
OK, an update: I will not be publishing an ebook as I really feel now that:
a) it is still too soon to put anything in writing as the goal posts are constantly moving.
b) it probably will never be the right time to do so
c) I just wrote up my thoughts on Panda here which some will like, most will ignore, a few will mock: http://www.webologist.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/google-panda-site-quality-guidelines-what-do-they-mean
So, now 6 months down the line anyone got happy news?
Are there any happy panda recovery stories?
Don’t seem to be hearing much.
Guy S
There are certainly success stories, however, people tend to keep quiet. For every webmaster that is ranting about losing traffic there are many that do not (and cannot) publicise such things. I know of a few recoveries and I have made a partial recovery.