Corrective Measures After Panda: What are you doing to recover?

[zehrila]

Apparently the panda has caused enough damage and i am one of the victims. From past few days, i have been working on fixing what i believe have been reason for the the massacre. I have two hostings, and about 8 sites spreaded on them. I believe, this penalty has a lot to do with excessive ads and thin content.

One of my main site has the qualitative links and to Camouflage my back link profile, i linked it from some of my own sites (related in some way). Now after the panda, all sites having same adsense account, got demoted, including my main site. My mistake that i was lazy about a lot of thin pages, which i now have put no index attribute in.

I want to know, what corrective measures you guys have taken and taking and whether it has changed your serps. This is what i believe has done wrong.

1: Thin pages
2: Excessive ads, specially on Thin Pages!
3: Cross linking with in your own sites

Corrective measures iam taking.

1: Adding Noindex and Nofollow tag in thin pages untill i fill the up.
2: Taking off ads altogether for a while.
3: Changed hosting of main site, different IP and nameserver
4: Slowly removing links from my own sites and getting fresh links to accomodate to loss of links.
5: Once iam done with al above, i will get my self a listing in botw and yahoo.
6: Post fresh indepth articles on Blogs, which i have been finding for a while.
7: If nothing above works, i will move my content to a backup dormant site, which actually picked up in serps and 301 my old site.

I think if you mention your corrective measures, it shall help us all see what actually works.

Note: Some of my sites, which do not publish any ad and are relatively thin page, did not get hurt.

[miozio]

Panda is not a penalty, its a quarantine for at least one month. Many sites have been infected by different diseases and were public for years. Its a good idea to Put Infected sites into a locked area and wait until they recover..

Unlock them later and all the problems, even those not included in the low quality filter will be fixed.. Main purpose - quality to its utmost! Webmasters across the globe are now fixing all possible issues as we speak! Smart Google! I just don't understand why they put Rotated article posts allover 2o positions from free bloghosts?

[dibbern2]

IF (a really big IF) it acts like a penalty, and has a lengthy duration of six months or so, should we be considering moving to a new domain AFTER cleaning any issues rather than waiting for a half year or so?

Don't know the answer, but thinking about it.

[SouthAmericaLiving]

@indyrank - are you sure "it is obviously no. of ads in the case of suite101..."?

On the homepage they have no ads (except advertising for the site...to contribute to the site) then on article pages see no more than the allowed 3 per page adsense ads plus a AOL or other ad.

You may be right, just not sure that would be a viable analysis of the Panda changes and how those hit Suite 101.

[wyweb]

What am I doing to recover?

Polishing up my resume.

[wyweb]

I weathered googles algo tweaks in fine fashion for almost 10 years. Fingers crossed every time. None of them touched me. None of them even came close.

MayDay nailed me. It started before that though. What was before MayDay?

Panda seems to be putting the final nails in the coffin.

Google seems to be telling me to do something else. They just now started it though. I was under their radar for years.

[crobb305]

I know Matt Cutts specifically mentioned Suite101. Unless they have redesigned their site, I don't see the problem. It looks well-designed and runs Adsense. I am not familiar with their content, but without fact checking, I can't assess the quality just from a quick glance. Maybe they have a history that I don't know about.

I do see an open letter to MC on the Suite101 site. This is the first I have seen it.

[bramley]

The two sites that come to mind for intrusibe advertising, in your face / top of the page are Google search results, and YouTube, where you are forced to dismiss ads that pop up over most videos. Kettle pot black ...

[wanderingmind]

@ Indyank - That's strange isn't it - that only 2 sites have recovered (that we know of?) In the case of a normal penalty or update, there would be many by now.

Remember that DI knows Google very well, and has worked with them on seminars etc, while MC specifically talked about CoM.

[brinked]

crobb, I see the problem with suite101 very clearly. They fall in line with the other sites that were hit. There content pages have 9 ad units. There are 6 adsense units alone. There are ads above, below, on the side and even in the article. There is also adsense ads on search result pages, thinning them out and deceiving searchers. suite101 is your typical MFA website.

[crobb305]

crobb, I see the problem with suite101 very clearly. They fall in line with the other sites that were hit. There content pages have 9 ad units. There are 6 adsense units alone.

Granted, I only looked at a handful of pages the first glance through, but those only had one Adsense unit in the left margin or in the upper right hand corner. Now that you mention it, I did go back and found some pages with multiple units. Not all of their pages are that way.

[brinked]

suite101 is what I like to call a high quality MFA site. They have good content, a good design, good layout but at the end of the day, they are more worried about there ad revenue then they are about readership.

Heck, I am all for sites like suite101. We are all here to make money. Its really a shame that these high quality sites are being hit, sure they are over loaded with ads, but they bring something to the table and are not useless. But they do fit the mold for a MFA site none the less.

[ascensions]

Suite101 appear to have moved their ads to the right in their latest articles compared with their older articles on the left.

I get a strong suspicion that ads before content or in-between title and content is one of the "signals".

[Dan01]

Because Google isn't being at all honest about what's going on here.

I don't know if they are not be honest, but it would be great to get more information. Maybe they don't want to do it because they feel that Bing might do the same. A trade secret? I don't know.

[Dan01]

Tedster:

In other words, Panda isn't exactly "a penalty" even though the ranking drops often look like a penalty. It really is an attempt at a new way of ranking that hit some sites particularly hard.

The goal was to cull the shallow low quality sites from the top of their SERPS, right? They felt that would provide better results.

It sounds like you are saying that Panda actually elevated the "good" sites and didn't penalize the bad ones. Is that right?

Thanks for throwing a monkey wrench in my ideas. LOL

[crobb305]

I get a strong suspicion that ads before content or in-between title and content is one of the "signals"

I think you're right. And consistent with your speculation, I also get the feeling that a top navigation could be deemed one large ad if each link in the nav goes to thin/monetized pages. In general, I think navigational areas are ok and are good for the user, but we may have a tendency to link excessively to our monetized pages. So if every page of your site provides navigational links to your hardest-hit pages, the entire navigational area may appear to be one giant ad to the algorithm. There could be a big feedback loop that bleeds backwards to the homepage rankings.

For now, I have removed ads on 3 out of 5 of those pages, and added content to all 5. I have also removed the top nav from the homepage, to experiment with bounce rate (to see if the navigation area even matters).

[tedster]

at the end of the day, they [Suite101] are more worried about there ad revenue then they are about readership.\

Even granting that this is true, how would a machine intelligence measure that?

It sounds like you are saying that Panda actually elevated the "good" sites and didn't penalize the bad ones. Is that right?

It did both. It elevated rankings for some "good" sites and lowered rankings for some "bad" ones. both the improved rankings and the lowered rankings are all over the place, from just a smidgen to something very hearty.

So I don't think Panda takes those lowering actions as a penalty step - as something that is layered over the basic ranking calculated by relevance and citations. Instead, I think it is a full partner component in the algorithm, one that operates in parallel with the relevance and citation components.

In other words, I think it is still possible for a site to get a penalty ON TOP of a poor Panda value.

[johnhh]

"good" sites and lowered rankings for some "bad" ones.

I'm not sure its "good" sites and "bad" sites - I think, judging on a limited sample of data I have so far, it is more "good" pages and "bad" pages

If the whole site is 100% "bad" pages then obviously the whole site is affected.

What is "good" and what is "bad" at the current time I have no idea but I feel I am at the point of dismissing certain factors as being "bad".

[wanderingmind]

@ Tedster

Can't a machine intelligence decide that if ads appear in areas where your eye travels most (according to regular heatmaps), its low quality / priority for ads over readers?

[tedster]

I think so, but I can't say for sure. Heat maps can vary a lot from layout to layout.

[ascensions]

I think in a lot of cases, you simply need to determine if the "text" (and header tag) appears before the ad, or after it. Simply looking at the bot cache of HTML will show that.

[kd454]

I am finding Panda loves fresh new links and responds pretty quickly to them of you have enough of them with some push behind them :)

I think they must have devalued certain link/anchors more than others, go to try this on my hard hit kw's and see what happens.

So far got kw's pushed to second page back on first on my test runs, going to try to get the harder hit back to first.

[danijelzi]

Guys, before removing posts and ads from your sites, you should maybe check if your pages were scraped. If the scrapers appear to Google as the original source of the news because of whatever reason, they'll probably rank better than you in SERPs and your original posts will apparently look like a copy of the same posts on scraper sites and rank accordingly.

I did some tests regarding this and posted here: [webmasterworld.com...]

Other facts in behalf on what I said above:
- category pages on my site are not scrapped and rank well
- older posts on my site that were not scrapped rank much better than those that were scrapped. However, even the old posts got devalued, maybe because of my original posts on the same site that appear to Google as copies.