Recovered From Panda: Well I Guess So!

[zehrila]

Today, either they reverted their panda update or i am just being lucky to see old rankings, some of which are even stronger. What i did so far.

1: Changed hosting
2: Changed nameservers (just for the heck of it)
3: Used WP recommended robots.txt file for blog
4: Blocked some internal dupes and weird urls through robots.txt
5: Fixed some 500+ broken links/images.
6: Noindex Nofollowed thousands of pages.
7: Removed adsense altogether from main pages. Atleast 1 unit still exists on some very deeper pages, which i have noindex, nofollowed.

Further things i have lined up to do.

1: Thousands of canonical tags (they seem tricky to implement)
2: Thousands of 301 redirects.
3: When i create a Widgets page, it creates 6 other pages e.g green widgets, blue widgets etc. It at times get very hard to fill those pages, so iam in a process of enabling only those pages, for which i have actually added content. It shall significantly remove thin pages.

I just hope its not a temporary thing and ranks stay. There is still a lot more to fix in my site, the errors, which i was not bothered about and took rankings for granted.

Hope it helps someone.

[dazzlindonna]

Congrats on overcoming Panda, and good luck. Hope they stay.

Out of curiosity, were you hit by Panda1 (initial US round) or Panda2 (international rollout)?

[crobb305]

old rankings, some of which are even stronger

How is traffic? Is it back to 100%, more, less? A lot of folks are reporting improvement this week, so definitely a good sign.

[zehrila]

dazzlindonna: Thanks, i hope ranks stay and improve. It was second round, the global update which was rolled out on 11th April.

crobb305: Apparently, traffic is exactly same as before the panda update.

[indyank]

6: Noindex Nofollowed thousands of pages

This looks to be most crucial step than all others. But how did you determine the pages to be noindexed?

Are you fine with traffic even after loosing so many pages?

[crobb305]

crobb305: Apparently, traffic is exactly same as before the panda update.

Good work :) Glad to hear of your full recovery.

[dibbern2]

I had one very hard hit important page move from 65th to 4th place this am. I cleaned an error in content yesterday that repeated content found on another page; it could or could-not be a Panda issue. I'm not sure with everything quite uncertain.

[crobb305]

I cleaned an error in content yesterday that repeated content found on another page; it could or could-not be a Panda issue.

I reported a month or so ago that one of my hardest hit pages (I believe it was -400 positions) had a spelling error in the header tag (not an alternate spelling, but a real spelling error for a significant key word). I corrected it, and the page was restored to an average position of 4 according to WMT within a couple of days.

[indyank]

dibbern2, How much of it was repeated? Was it a single line or a paragraph?

[indyank]

crobb305, Where do you see that page when you search for it in google after clearing off all personalization?

[indyank]

I too saw an important page jump to page 1 from page 3.But it is still at the bottom of page 1 and has not reached its previous position.

But it was just one page.I saw a similar one page improvement in another site. There it was restored to its previous position.

It looks interesting as google seem to be restoring the ranks for just one important page and testing something.

[crobb305]

crobb305, Where do you see that page when you search for it in google after clearing off all personalization?

For that page, I have been seeing it at #1 for most of the phrases I have checked, since the spelling correction a month ago. Google Webmaster Tools has been reporting an position of 4. I have also had a large recovery this week for overall traffic, up 70%. Still not 100%, but BIG improvement in traffic over the past 4 days.

[Pjman]

It looks interesting as google seem to be restoring the ranks for just one important page and testing something.

That is exactly what I have seen over the last 3-4 days too.

[indyank]

crobb305, did you address any duplicate content issue? I remember you saying that you have content which can be seen on several other sites too.

I am having a similar problem.Most pages seem to have been copied and i have been filing DMCAs left and right. Pages on Blogspot blogs are removed the next day but forums and sites hosted elsewhere are a real problem as they don't respond and it will be a prolonged battle.

Blogger team delete the pages in question the next day.But I am not sure why they aren't deleting the entire blog.They should delete the blog if they find someone posting useless copied content on blogger platforms.

[crobb305]

crobb305, did you address any duplicate content issue? i remember you saying that you have content which can be seen on several other sites too.

I gave up on fighting scrapers and duplicate content. I did rewrite one or two paragraphs on the homepage (to improve relevance and optimize for natural language/document scoring), but 75% of the content that is on there now was there before Panda. I sent one or two DMCA notices out, but I really don't think it mattered. We've even been talking about the number of scrapers ranking for Matt Cutts' content (about 15,000 copies of his February 10th post, for example -- and some scrapers out rank him for snippets).

[indyank]

and some scrapers out rank him for snippets

Exactly.I am having the same issue with several of my pages that got scraped.And would you believe that the sites ranking ahead of us are total crap and some just spit out content scraped from google using bots.

I saw another thing with this duplicate stuff. some forums and sites copy your entire post and paste it in a thread or page which has other copied content too.and these forums/sites rank higher than us for the snippets.
In this case, it does look like the number of words in the page is all what made them rank higher than us for the snippet.

Google appears broken when it comes to ranking snippets and duplicate content.They have totally given it to the scrapers and this seems to be an issue for panda affected sites.

Is Cutts site affected by panda? any ideas?

[indyank]

crobb305, what exactly did you do to see this improvement then?

[crobb305]

what exactly did you do to see this improvement then?

Just for brevity (since there was so much), it's fairly well documented in this thread [webmasterworld.com...] Everything that I theorized about, I did. The only thing I did not do was move to an designed template -- I kept my tables and I cleaned up the html as best I could (to improve rendering).

[zehrila]

This looks to be most crucial step than all others. But how did you determine the pages to be noindexed?

Are you fine with traffic even after loosing so many pages?

I noindexed page with least possible content, and pages,which do not bring any traffic. Yes, those pages did not bring any traffic to begin with.

crobb305: Thanks, i have still 5 other sites to get out of the junk. I have been using different strategies on each of them.

[walkman]

My traffic stiiiiill sucks, but I see changes in Google referrals. I don't think this is over though, as I'm seeing major crawling and very deep one. And changes in SERPS and site:domain.com.

Every day at least 50% of pages are taken by Googlebot. I have a decent PR and good linkage so that probably helps.

dibbern2, I doubt a change you made a day before influenced Google Serps, it takes a few days at least for things to be updated. Google is changing and a lot of things they might do we attribute to what we do.

[walkman]

It looks interesting as google seem to be restoring the ranks for just one important page and testing something.

That is exactly what I have seen over the last 3-4 days too.

Google would need to send a lot more than a few visitors to gauge any changes, margin of error and everything.

[kd454]

I am starting to see what looks like the beginning of recovery on a site that was hit by Panda 1, don't want to get to excited.

Congrats on your recovery!

[dibbern2]

Checking 49 other important pages (other than the one I wrote about above) is showing a solid no-change for four days now.

This one page is a big exception.

[danijelzi]

Around 10-15 of ~2000 posts on one of my sites are positioned well, pre-panda-like. It's like I get 1 page unpandalized daily and that trend started a couple of days ago. Also, scrapers were ranked better for every article they scraped from me, and now it's around 50% - 50%. However, it's only slight improvement in Google organic traffic (USA), so I can't call this a recovery.

[walkman]

That's what I am seeing too: great referrals for certain pages (nothing special about those pages AFAIK.) But it's obvious that something is going on, since they are just a few referrals and I know thousands and thousands of those searches occur. So maybe just a new dataset is mixed for a while with the rest?

[danijelzi]

Exactly the same, Walkman. Also my highly-ranked pages are nothing special, no great number of ext. backlinks, content quality is as same as on other pages, etc, but somehow they appear high in SERPs, but probably only on select datasets (or datacenters) and produce a very limited number of referrals.

[Shatner]

I'm seeing a lot of fluctuation and my google traffic over the past couple of days has been higher than it's been at an time since Panda 1.0 (though still not at pre-Panda levels)... but I'm not ready to call it a recovery yet.

I haven't really been able to identify any specific keywords which have actually made it back to page one. And I'm starting to think most of the increased Google traffic is actually just from the Google News links at the top of search results and has nothing to do with Google Search.

So... not ready to call it a recovery yet. Something is definitely going on though. I think we all need to give this a week and then report in.

[Shatner]

For anyone who said they were starting to see some recovery... still seeing it?

Saturday all my gains were completely erased, any keywords which had started to rank weren't just de-ranked a few places but removed from rankings entirely. Google traffic overall was completely reset to the lowest possible point since Panda.

[danijelzi]

Saturday all my gains were completely erased, any keywords which had started to rank weren't just de-ranked a few places but removed from rankings entirely.

Exactly the same here.

[zehrila]

Shatner, i don't want to jinx it for my self, but its 3rd day and my traffic is continuously improving. However, there is one weird thing i have noted, my home page, which used to be cached everyday, has not been crawled for past 8 days. Deeper pages are being crawled. When did you see the recovery? was it partial or full and how long it stood for?

danijelzi: was your recovery partial or full and how long it lasted?