Martin_Ice_Web - 9:24 pm on Oct 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

This is not a discussion of my page but a way that we have in common with many site owners.

Jet I think it is time for us to summarize what we have done to escape from this angry panda.

Let me have a look at prepanda days.
Like the very most of us, I was running a good going website, in my case it is an ecom site located in germany. Prepanda we got a lot of visitors. Many liked the site, some not. We are not to heavy linked but got some deeplinks from topic related forums. We also got some links from very big magazines.

Prepanda features:
-about 10.000 products/pages
-2300 links
-steady traffic/conversions
-although we could get manufacture descriptions we have selfmade handwritten descriptions
-we have renamed pictures from manufacture and added our own pictures

Now panda comes along and with every panda we lost a bit of traffic but the traffic that sticked was more targeted. Our conversions were going up.
The whole thing went wrong with panda in april 12. This panda took away 50% of the traffic. Now the traffic has been realy untargeted since. With every new appearance of the angry panda we lost more traffic and the targeted traffic is way down. No to say that conversion went down too and bounce rate went up.

After 3 month of waiting i decided to do something.
So i began to look what panda could cause to be so angry about us. I have to admit that we did have another site with same products runing on the same server.So i thought DC would be the problem. The site has been moved and all relations to the old site have been vanished.


I think the above fits to many other site that have been hit by panda!

So what we did is:

-reworked every single product titles, descriptions and metas
-we "siloed" our products because the site structure was a bit confusing
-we added a lot of new fresh and related content with pictures
-like from google suggested we set the canonical tag for similar widgets to a summary page
-we did kill many links
-end of juli we completly redesigned our site
-we validated our html and php source code
-we began to ask every user what he thinks about the site ( and let the suggestions flow into design)

-in addition to claaakys opinion we looked at the bounce rate, time on site and the other user metrics.
After the redesign the user metrics showed a significant positiv growing.

The latest panda now was very strange because we got old very strong ranking back for 4! days and the site was runing very well. Then suddenly all this has been cut of since today.

As of today i am depressed to the that we are outranked by very low content pages that have only 5-6 words on it or pages with heavy repeated keywords or 20 times the same description. It is not that we donīt get traffic but the traffic is misguided. So bounce rate has went up.

My conclusion about the panda animal is that it has pushed down many affiliated sites but killed more legal sites.
My own searches show me that 8 out of 10 results are not fitting to my query. So it is not my site that has the problem but the panda that gets things wrong. My big question is now why does kongoo panda hurt my site?

Why does panda send me the wrong traffic? And my conclusion is by all the answers in this forum, we are to targeted for the querys. The most pages in serps are not deep ecom sites but have a very shallow array of products. This does not cause to haevy duplicate content.
The last EMD update opened my eyes. This was a next step towards overtargeted ( not over optimized ) pages. Since this is the idea of search engines to find most targeted sites this leads me to
either
1. googles algorithm is not good enough to to deliberate between good content/quality signals and low content, untrusted sites what in my eyes is not given because prepanda they did a very good job
I took a look at many pandalized site from poeple on this forum and have to say 95% do not fit into shallow/low content sites.

or

2. by looking at all the quality updates that either did the complete opposite of what they should have done or this updates did more colateral damage as that they were improving the serps.
If I now take all the little pieces of the puzzle
-introduce knowledge base
-moving from free to payed adds listings
-kill legal business sites
-promote shallow content sites
-force poeple to sign up into google+
-promote own services
it makes a lot of sense that google is on the way to kill al free traffic and become a giant pay for information mega complex.

The more i think of it and donīt see any business/sites recover but get tanked and googandas earnings go up the more i think its point 2.



I realy would like to see one from google who has the threnght to tell us what this is all about. So we can deal with it and say if the work we are doing is worth it.