Site Surged with Panda Now Dropped In SERPs

[learnseo81]

I've a website which has been dropped in the SERPs on 12 May. My traffic surged a lot in Panda 1 and Panda 2 both updates.

My whole website is built on only unique content and gradual link building. I've many #1 positions which are now all lost. My daily traffic has dropped from 5000 visitors a day to 200 visitors a day.

Some things :

1. My site is a Wordpress site and had tags and duplicate subpages (like abc.com/page/2). I've gotten rid of them and blocked google from accessing them.

2. I'm checking whole site for duplicate content and replacing any duplicate content with fresh one.

3. I'm adding new content and fresh backlinks to the site like I've always been doing. None of my posts are short than 1000 unique words.

4. I'm doing everything to make sure that there is no duplicate content across my site and even If a scrapper site has copied my content, I'm replacing mine with new one and turning off RSS feed so that scrappers can't crawl me that easily and quickly.

I'm not afraid of Panda in anyway because I'm not doing anything wrong. This is something I believe. If you've more suggestions to improve my approach, I'll be happy to take honest advise from you.

What I'm thinking about the dramatically fallen SERPs ? Here is my take on this :-

1. First of all, I believe my site has not been hit by panda. Its something else.

2. None of my backlinks have gone anywhere and I'm viewing this incident just as google dance and believe things will come back.

3. Google WMT is not showing any backlinks for my website.

4. My site serps are bouncing like crazy. From #70 to #40. Then to #65. Then to #56 and this is making me mad. Feels like Google is updating their index or re-assessing my website and/or its backlinks?

Finally, duplicate content can't hurt us because there are lots of variables involved in high SERPs ranking. This is from Google's website about duplicate content (Google posted this after the Farmer Update)

If you find that another site is duplicating your content by scraping (misappropriating and republishing) it, it's unlikely that this will negatively impact your site's ranking in Google search results pages. If you do spot a case that's particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and request removal of the other site from Google's index.

I would love to hear what you think about my situation. Do you think I've been penalized? Although I've been in the biz for quite some time but learning never ends.

Let me know what you think guys and thanks for reading this long post.

[walkman]

I'm sorry but backlinking doesn't harm as you are telling me. People are still throwing 2000 links everyday to their sites and dominating SERPs. I know quite a few such guys.

I assure you it does harm. Google has an internal mechanism (manual check?) and they are pretty sure it works well but I don't know. Maybe if the site is a 'normal' site and looks like $200 has been spent they might say it's unlikely that someone spend this much to knock them down. Context does matter, I guess.

But don't operate on I can tell google my competitors bought them for me.

[learnseo81]

@centipede

If your theory is right, can I harm your site by sending tons of back links to it? Even Google has said that If 1000 of spam sites link to you, you just work on making your SITE better and don't take offpage into the account since that is out of the control.

IMO, link building and link manipulating are two different things. Go check SERPs for any keyword and tell me who is not doing any link building. I don't want to argue with anyone as when it comes to SEO everybody have different theory.

and Yes, I've sites with links at all and nobody looks at them.

[learnseo81]

@walkman

I'm not saying that what you guys are suggesting is wrong. Check SERPs for any given query and they are on the top because they have some links which are working for them.

I've also ranked lots of sites for other people sole on the backbone of backlinks and they are still on the top. I'm even seeing sites that rely on the same backlink profile as me riding the top of SERPs. There has to be some other reason.

People are going to #400 and then coming back and then dropping again. Everything is looking so strange!

[indyank]

learnseo81, you are free to believe that backlinks won't hurt you but when you get hit, no one can offer any alternate explanation. Google does have a big army of manual testers.

[walkman]

IMO, link building and link manipulating are two different things. Go check SERPs for any keyword and tell me who is not doing any link building. I don't want to argue with anyone as when it comes to SEO everybody have different theory.

and Yes, I've sites with links at all and nobody looks at them.

A few points to keep in mind:
Not all sites get hit or get hit at the same time.
Or have the same effect if they get hit.
Google might ignore the suspicious link or penalize your site.
If your site is 'good' and mainstream, Google might be more forgiving.
If you have 400 regular links and two bought ones, they will most likely let it slide. If you have no real links and 400 bought ones, adios.

So they are so many variables.

[edited by: walkman at 4:56 pm (utc) on May 23, 2011]

[learnseo81]

@indyank

It is likely that what you are saying might be correct but I've yet to see a proof of that.

[learnseo81]

@walkman,

I believe Google don't monitor back links of millions of sites through manual reviewers but they have algo in place for that. Google might "Forgive" a site, seems like a weird statement.

Now If I start targetting competitors websites, I can not take them down. The sites which have taken the #1 place from me have the same backlinks. They must be more lucky than me.