I'm re-indexing some pages I'd no-indexed

[dickbaker]

I've been reading just about every theory that's been advanced about how to recover from Panda. There's been so many that sometimes it's overwhelming.

A month or so after Panda 1.0 took half my Google traffic, I no-indexed pages that I thought were weak. After reading many posts here about sites that have recovered, and what the content of those sites is like, I've questioned my decision to no-index pages.

My Google traffic is half of what it was last year at this time. But I've also no-indexed just about half my site.

I'm going page by page in GA, looking to see if a particular page got a reasonable number of visits from Google (at least 2-4 visits per day) pre-Panda and post-Panda through March 30th or so, when I'd no-indexed a lot of pages. If the page had gotten visitors during both periods, I'm indexing it again.

At this point Google can't take away much more traffic without just going to zero, so there's not much to lose.

I've tried adding reviews, videos, historical information, performance data and tables, and other useful information to various pages, but with Panda being a sitewide penalty/demotion/whatever, there's no way to tell if those are helping.

If I see visitors coming from Google to these re-indexed pages, that will at least tell me that the pages weren't entirely at fault. If traffic overall declines further, then I'll know that those pages should be no-indexed again.

[tedster]

I'm looking forward to hearing your report. I've been dubious about the "noindex" advice that was being pushed out, even by some Googlers. Somehow it just doesn't make solid sense to me - after all, the pages are still "there", just not being used as search landing pages.

[balibones]

The only advantage I could see is if those pages were causing people to click the back button from SERPs because they were so bad. Our site has a lot of "stub" pages that are poor search results, but due to lots of deep links and good content (despite being "out of stock") the pages still ranked. I checked analytics and found that the bounce-rate was high and pages per visit and time on site were low for those pages. Thus, noindexing them may help with those "quality signals" assuming that they are being used by Google.

I agree with Ted about second-guessing the strategy. It would be logical to just delete a page if the page sucks, rather than noindexing it. But the problem is we need those pages to be up because it is a better user experience for them to see that an item us currently unavailable, and to allow them to subscribe for an email alert when it becomes available, rather than showing them zero results. So noindex, follow it is.

I've stopped trying to "fix" our site for Panda though. Until we really know what "works" we're just chasing our tails. We're still making changes, but they are to improve our site for users, not Google. In the end, I think this is what Google wants, even if we don't know the specifics of what they're looking at to determine this.

[suggy]

It would be logical to just delete a page if the page sucks

And good advice. Just had a major clear out, in our case old discontinued products. It 'sucks' if people land on those and find we don't sell it anymore and hit back. You've only got to look at bounce to see the alternatives we show are often not close enough.

I'm amazed having really dug into our site, how much of it really isn't that great. We tended to just plough forward and not worry too much about tidying up behind ourselves.

[dickbaker]

Suggy, I've looked at bounce, both for the pages I'd no-indexed, and for the site as a whole. The average bounce rate is low (under 45% for all visit lengths, under 18% for visit lengths if only counting a visit as a bounce if the time spent on page is under 10 seconds).

The time on site prior to Panda was two to three minutes. The average number of page views three to four. Both of these metrics varied by season.