Hello guys I have been following this forum religiously and have learnt so much about the Panda update that I thought I would register and share my story and also ask some specific Qs.
My website was a industry leading website for its niche:
1. Ranked number 1 for 95% of golden keywords in the industry.
2. Original articles written by industry experts
3. A public forum (VBulletin)
4. A Q and A style section published on a blog (Wordpress) where members of the public ask a Q and the appropriate industry expert answers it.
5. A business directory that had lots of pages structured as below:
domain.com/city.html - geo pages for business listings with featured listings and free listings and links to business profile pages
domain.com/profile/businessname.html - individual profile page with only business details and links to individual pages about the business owners on free listings.
domain.com/profile/businessname/businessowner.html - profile page for business owner with nothing more than name and address details. for some businesses there could be up to 12 owners.
Although a UK specific site we had business listings for other countries in the format
domain.com/country/profile/...
The "country" data was only bringing in searches for business names, telephone numbers and nothing more - the content on these sections were very thin.
6. The website had adsence above the fold on "free business directory profile pages" and also on the left hand column sitewide.
The site got hit at the second Panda update on 11th April and dropped about 60% traffic.
We read the forums and though as a plan of action this is what we need to do:
Noindex, follow - all wordpress tags and archive pages - we have 12K posts and 28K pages indexed on /blog - so we did this and now we wait!
Delete all thin blog posts and add this content as "comments" to similar posts and let the deleted posts just 404.
I am wondering if the deleted posts should 404 or 301 to /blog/ (which would be a quicker way to get them removed from the index?
Remove all non-UK business listing data that was essentially thin data pages.
Since the above followed a good directory structure we removed entire sections by requesting a directory removal in WMT.
Do you think it is a wise move to tell google exactly what you are doing in WMT or should have i just placed a noindex on those pages an let G works its way through the site that way?
We also took all the domain.com/city.html that were either thin on content or getting very low traffic and placed a noindex,follow on these pages.
For the higher traffic domain.com/city.html pages we wrote some unique content.
we have placed a noindex,follow on all free data listings with the following structure:
domain.com/profile/businessname.html
domain.com/profile/businessname/businessowner.html
There are approx 80K of pages like the above that have had this applied to them.
We are finding that Googlebot visit these page that have noindex on them and yet they remain indexed and im guessing its going to take a few attempts for this to sort itself out.
In the forum we noticed that all "member" profiles had been indexed and so we performed a WMT directory removal for forum/members/
We have removed all adsence from the site.
We are now waiting and we have noticed recovery of one keyword which was very competitive. After panda it dropped from #1 and #2 (double serp) to #4 (single result).
2 days ago the above result reversed itself and started ranking above a wikipedia entry as before.
This is the only page that has recovered and if this was a sitewide "penalty/algo change" then why would only 1 page recover unless the recovery is unrelated to the actions taken?
I am now just waiting to see what happens as google comes in and reindexed what way probably 80% of the site in terms of number of pages.
any help / discussion / advice would be appreciated.
James
