Panda View On Open Directory Listing On Your Site?

[Pjman]

I'm still cracking away at one of my big sites trying to get any SERP back to normal after 11 years of being seen as the authority. Can you just take a second to give me some advice?

One thing I noticed on my site were a bunch of old helpful outbound links care of the Open Directory Project (ODP). When I use to write articles (a few years back) I would peruse the ODP and find well reviewed links that went well with topic of the article. I post them at the bottom of a 500-900 words of content.

95% of the links are just hyperlinked text that mimic or are Verbatum the ODPs. These pages account for 2% of my total site.

1. Think 2% is enough to set off the Panda filter.

2. The links really are decent sites that help the user.

Should I:

A) Complete scrap the links complete. or

B) Just re-write the text?


Thanks for your help.

[aristotle]

Do you mean that you think your site was hurt because you copied some links from DMOz? This seems unlikely to me, since you only did it on a small scale. But I suppose there's no way to know for sure.

If you do decide to scrap or modify these links, I suggest that you do it slowly and gradually, especially if you haven't made any changes to the pages for a long time.

[Pjman]

@ aristotle

In some cases, I not only took the links from the ODP, but the descriptions and link text that went with them. Even though it is a small percentage (<2%) it is 3-400 pages with that kind of stuff on it.

Thanks for the idea of removing/rewriting them slowly. You're right and I have any excuse for my boss for not spending day and night on it.

[Hoople]

One or two to a few links that are highly relevant to the article's topic could stay. Put a critical eye on the copied descriptions to refocus them to better match the article's primary topic.

Remove the links that are only there for what was at the time SEO purposes. Said differently - swallow your pride for a moment and remove the ones that were clearly added to 'game the Search Engines'.

While doing these changes I would critically evaluate each article. Juice up some, combine like thin-ish ones and NOINDEX/NOCACHE the ones not in the previous categories (likely on the low end of the word-count).

I also agree that slow change is the best. It will also match your rewriting pace.

[Pjman]

@Hoople

Great interpretation. It makes me see things much more clearly.

When I look at it more objectively, I can see how it can be interpreted that I was trying to game the engines with the duplicate ODP descriptions.

The fun thing is that a number of the pages with these copied descriptions still hold a high ranking #1-5. While other pages that were 100% unique, content full, and no duplication got smashed by Panda. The high ranking are because those pages have tons of natural links.

This is the only thing left on my 25,000+ page (12 year old, 4.5 million natural links in) site that can explain my Pandalization. Still down 60% since Feb. 23.

Thanks Guys. Any more input is much appreciated.