Recovered from Panda - and how I did it

[brinked]

Alright so one of my sites just recovered from panda. Its a site I bought a few months ago and have mostly neglected but it earned a decent income (all adsense). Site had 3 adsense ads on every page, I removed them all, since the panda update it was only making about $5 a day anyway.

Site has about 80 pages, all with unique content, its an old site, really should have never been hit IMO. Here is what I did:

- removed all adsense ads from every page

- Updated the homepage text a little bit, added some and tweaked some old text.

- removed duplicate meta descriptions (there were 6 pages that had identical meta descriptions)

That is all. I am encouraged that it only took about a week for the panda to gets its paws off. I wish my other site was recovered but its much bigger and many more pages. I am not sure if it was one thing or a series of things...to be more clear, there was one adsense ad at the top posing as a top navigation and then two of the smaller banners 1 above content and one below it.

[walkman]

I removed Adsense all together on one of my sites and in 4 days it jumped from 3rd to 1st page #10, had 2 nasty Adsense blocks between title and content removed = improve user experience.

KD..,
When did this happen? Seems to me like it's too fast for Goog to re-index, measure user reaction and redo SERPS in 4 days. It's possible of course, this is a different animal

[Shatner]

>>>Seems to me like it's too fast for Goog to re-index, measure user reaction and redo SERPS in 4 days. It's possible of course, this is a different animal

It does, but I think there was a big algo chang in the past 3 days. Maybe even a Panda 3.0. Well maybe more like a Panda 2.2. A lot of stuff has shifted. Most people haven't seen any real recovery, but a few have seen slight recoveries like this, limited to individual pages while leaving the site as a whole Pandalized.

I suspect it had a lot to do with scrapers, it has had SOME effect on that for me in the scraper sense. But again, the scraper thing was more the symptom than the problem so it doesn't really affect my Pandalization overall or do anything for my Google traffic.

[brinked]

Just to provide an update on the site that recovered. It now ranks higher for many searches than it did pre panda.

There was a term that it has always ranked #2 for as long as I can remember, and it now has the #1 and #2 positions.

I think it may have the deceiving adsense ads, as they were very well disguised as a menu and had a very high CTR. Either way, the site just received about 30% more traffic than it ever did pre panda. Pretty satisfied so far, I just wish my 1 other site will follow suite already but to be fair, the other site is over 20k pages.

[Pjman]

I have seen some recovery in the last 3-4 days, but it all seems directory specific. Maybe got 20% of my keywords back to Prepanda.

I removed about 20,000 User generated pages. Really thin or crap content. The site had 50,000 pages, it now has 30,000. It took me 2 months to do that. I noindexed that whole directory 2 days after Panda. 3 Days ago I removed the noindex, now that it is all clean useful content.

Panda knocked me down 65%. Now I'm at about 50% down Post Panda.

I have noticed that all the words that returned point to related parts of my site. As if certain directories were re-evaluated and others are still waiting.

[RichTC]

Brinked,

Thank you for sharing your experience, i have been following this thread and appreciate your post. I would like to also bring some value to this thread in the quest to recover from Panda.

One of my UK sites was hit by Panda and this is the position regarding unique visitor traffic (based on a weeks performance) from Google for this site:-

Pre Panda / After Panda
Mon 20,387 / 7,727
Tue 19,409 / 7,992
Wed 20,084 / 7,865
Thu 19,272 / 7,363
Fri 14,461 / 5,644
Sat 09,420 / 3,936
Sun 12,432 / 4,413

115,465 / 44,940 - this is circa a 61% decline

I believe that (in my case) the dominant issues facing this site and why its been hit are that:-

1. The site contains some specific originally written content by us, (many weeks of research and editing) that is so dam good and so valued by users that every muppet and and his uncle has coppied it - i believe that this new G algorythm doesnt know who the originator of content is in many cases i have seen.

2. This content is linked from the home page and i believe any page that links to "suspect" pages also gets devalued

3. The adsence rep has over time encouraged us to increase the adsence units on some of our pages and we currently have 3 text blocks and 1 image block on some of these pages. Whilst they are in keep with the page design i believe this could have been the tipping point. Some of these ad units have a similar background to our page design (as advised by the G rep for best results)and again this could be a factor.

4. The home page text has remained similar for a long period other than todays date changing on it and i wonder if this is a factor

As at today i have taken the following action.

1.We are re writting the articles - major ball ache to be honest but it has to be done. We have also fired off some DMCA reports to some of the major coppying culprits who have stolen our content without permission but its kind of fighting against the tide, a total rewrite is probably our best option.

2. We are leaving the links to that content for now, afterall it is OUR content, its good for users, but will remove if we dont see any improvement

3. We are removing all adsence units except one, (the adsence rep is best pleased!)so we will now have just 1 adsence text block which will be towards the bottom of the page. That Ad block has a totally different background and sticks out like a sore thumb. If no recovery, Im tempted to drop it all together. Frankly the adsence revenues were declining anyway and by taking off 75% of the adsence on the page its possibly not worth keeping it, especially as Google it appears is so intent on killing its own product, so will review this as we go.

4. We will change / adjust the text on our home page.

The above will be completed by midnight tonight UK time 28th April. I will update here of my findings in due course and let you know if i see any recovery of any level

Rich

[walkman]

Well, I am getting very specific and good referrals. As many I deleted many pages so can't give exact numbers and earnings will take a day or two really see but I like this--considering how bad it was. Was it something I did? Probably not since others have seen some recovery. Nevertheless it should be better for those pages left, simply because I have less pages.

My gut tells me that not all pages have recovered, since I get referrals for just a small percentage of them but it's getting better. Nice to see Google (indirectly) admit that they screwed up. With that much power, they should be very careful.

[zoltan]

I am just wondering how will next quarter's financials look for google when so many of us are removing ads / changing ad positions. I am sure their overall revenues will also be affected, not only ours.

[Pjman]

I am just wondering how will next quarter's financials look for google when so many of us are removing ads / changing ad positions.

If their is no change to their revenue (specifically on adsense), they are way too big and it basically is call to arms for an anti-trust suit. Because they can truly dictate many markets on a whim.

[rooo]

I saw a 55% drop in traffic in the first full comparable week - this has 'improved' to 48% this week, progress at least.

I have tinkered - nothing major though - and have seen some rankings crawl up a few notches. I have removed a small 200x200 adsense block too - this was one of the first things I did.

If, and it's a big if, this is was caused the rise, could be down to site performance rather than the adsense?

[dataguy]

About a year ago my Google AdSense Rep convinced me to go from 2 ads per page to as many as 6 ads on pages with a lot of comments. I eventually settled on 5 ads for these pages, which roughly make up about 10% of my site.

A week ago I removed 2 of those ads and recorded SERP positions for common search phrases for 25 of these pages. Within a few days a few started move upward in the SERPs, and today, 7 days later, all 25 pages have had significant improvement in the SERPs.

For the first time since Panda 1 I've tried something that appears to have had a positive effect, and though it's a small change, maybe I might have more control over this thing than first thought. Maybe I won't have to get a real job after all. Wish me luck!

[johnhh]

walkman:

You see a higher percentage of referrals from google.it/de/jp/de etc ?

[RichTC]

Very interesting

I think we all conclude that a number of factors are involved here. Its to early yet for me to know if changes i have made will work or not but im certainly encouraged

DirigoDev on another thread belived that a big factor was link ratios:-

The ratio is "Internal Links - External Links / Total Links" I'm NOT subtracting nofollows. In my data, high numbers, both negative and positive, got hit hard.

Im now wondering if by having lots of adsence units on a page, in effect you increase your outbound link ratio to inbound and cross the percentage line hence another signal to get hit - this is a computer algo we are talking about.

This would also explain why some sites are not hit that you would expect to be hit that have Adsense units on them. I.e they have lots of inbounds which improves the ration in their favour hence they can get away with more?

No company wants to do something that in any way hurts its own revenue but adsense partners being hit is probably an unwanted side effect of what they have done.

I do believe that google PERHAPS want to improve their serps by removing MFA, thin content and directory sites with no value and try and clean up its results. Also its very difficult to get good links to junk sites but the unavoidable concequence of this Panda update is that good sites are being thrown out with the bad as a result of this clean up.

I will report back in a week if the changes im making improve anything but i do belive this is one of the factors

Rich

[indyank]

Adsense team sent another reminder mail to add more ad units today!