claaarky - 9:24 pm on Jun 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

getcooking, glad you're seeing some sort of correlation. Like you say, there are some pages you expect a high proportion of your visitors to leave your site on......the trick is finding the ones you don't want people leaving from in their droves. That's where your problem is.

On the basis that Google is collecting Panda data via the browser for pages people actually visit on your site, noindexing won't make any difference (unless you've also made it impossible for people to navigate to those pages from within your site). I think any improvement in traffic you might see around a Panda update will only be attributable to removing bad content and/or improving the quality of some of your low quality pages.

I'm intrigued by the idea you think visitors 'should' be exiting from a content page. Don't you want visitors to look around your site more? Does your revenue depend on visitors clicking off the site? But even then couldn't you open the page in another window so your visitor has the opportunity to look around your site a bit more later?

What I'm finding about myself with this is that I had a complacent approach to my visitors and Google - I just thought my site couldn't perform any better and Google would continue to keep pumping people in and some of them would inevitably buy. What I'm realising now is that we had many low quality pages that weren't producing any revenue and were gradually grinding people down to the point where they left. I always had the mindset that it was better to keep ranking pages on my site to keep the traffic coming in. Now I see those pages are why Panda hit me. People were saying they don't like them and I wasn't listening (well, I didn't know where to look to discover that, now I do).

I think your category pages hit by Panda could be impacted by low quality articles that they link to and/or they are low quality pages in their own right. I'm finding that once the exit rate gets below 30% on a page you wouldn't expect people to leave from, the quality issues are quite subtle (could just be the article or category page is slightly too long, badly worded page title, etc.). At higher exit rates the cause is obvious. Last night I rewrote my Privacy Policy page - I'd just slapped it together years ago (see Amit Singhals guideline about slapped together content) and never updated it because it wasn't important to me. 75% of visitors looking at my privacy policy left the site at that point. The page looked awful, so I improved the presentation and broke it up a bit. Looks better now. I'll keep improving it until I see my customers are no longer leaving from that page. That will also help the pages linking to it (i.e. all of them!).