Entertainment news site got hit by Panda. Now what?

[Oxydada]

Hi!

Today, two of my biggest entertainment news blogs got it by Panda. Both sites are in Spanish, so this is the "new Panda" released today.

I noted traffic went down around 27% and 30%. I got traffic from lots of Spanish speaking countries, and traffic from all of them was low today for about 30%.

I've been reading a lot about Panda, but I really don't know how to face this particular penalization with these kind of sites.

None ot them has content stolen - all written by my. Not much ads, just the right amount. Updated daily, original content. Good backlinks (PR5), articles are long and there is no keyword stuffing whatsoever.

What can I do to... revert this? Is it possible? Any advice?

These are sites about news, nothing to sell, and LOTS of pages :(

Where to start? Any feedback will be MUCH appreciated.

Sorry about my English.

[tedster]

This forum is full of reports, ideas, conjectures and reports on Google's advice for reversing Panda downgrades. I'd suggest using our Site Search [webmasterworld.com] to locate these threads - and there are a lot of them.

Some of the most detailed advice from Google can be found in this blog post from Amit Singhal [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com] - who along with Matt Cutts is spearheading the Panda "site quality" algorithm.

A Panda devaluation is not an easy situation to move away from. First, it doesn't seem to happen dynamically - but rather only at intervals when Panda is "re-run". Second, there are apparently many factors taken in combination, so what works for some sites might not have any effect at all for other sites.

Good luck to you. This kind of situation can take everything you've got and a looking at your websites in a way that may be quite new to you and your team.

[Oxydada]

Thanks. I already read that post from Amit, and couldn't find any red flag with my site. Already checked site search.

I understand there's lots of reports and ideas, I was just trying to figure out if there was something specific to "News" sites vs. more specific niche sites.
Hoping that maybe there are some fellow site owners in the same category that could add some points.

[ascensions]

Start deleting... Build a script to delete all content under 1000 words. That's the only thing I've seen that works.

[Oxydada]

Thanks! Usually news aren't even close to 1000 words (or you mean characters?), I'll see what I can do.

[Rasputin]

1000 words sounds a lot, but I think the principle is correct and that articles need to be generally longer and more informative than other results for the same search, and have something unique to offer.

The presence of a significant number of short articles appears to drag down the whole site, including the articles that are of good quality. A site with 25% short poor quality articles appears to be enough to attract panda - less than that I couldn't say, but I don't think that just a few pages would do it, as sometimes suggested.

This is an observation reached by comparing my 2 panda sites with my other non-panda sites, which tend to have much fewer articles, but longer and of better quality.

Bounce rate / time on site etc taken overall for a site don't seem to a reliable indicator of whether a site is penalised - in part perhaps because these statistics only apply to articles that are shown in the results i.e. they exclude articles that google don't show because they are of too poor quality, and in part because these statistics vary a great deal between search terms.

You can start identifying low quality pages by running an 'advanced filter' in google analytics to find pages with both a high bounce rate AND a low time on site.

Improved content also seems to be the most consistently way of improving results reported by other 'panda escapees' (and should of course improve user statistics at the same time). Bit of a job if you have 1000's of pages though.

[superclown2]

Start deleting... Build a script to delete all content under 1000 words. That's the only thing I've seen that works.

Be careful. This is a completely unproven idea and there is evidence to the contrary too.

[londrum]

..especially if those pages are attracting some decent backlinks. you might be doing yourself some damage by deleting them. i would at least check what the traffic is like on those pages before deleting them. if their traffic hasnt gone down then you should leave them alone

[HuskyPup]

Start deleting... Build a script to delete all content under 1000 words. That's the only thing I've seen that works.

Be careful. This is a completely unproven idea and there is evidence to the contrary too.

I agree, I have unique content-rich pages pandalised, I have image only pages with brief description both pandalised AND unaffected and some of those have RISEN to the top!

Have your pages been replaced by anything specific? FWIW I've seen the lowest traffic weekend volume since Xmas 2010.

[chalkywhite]

I run an IT solutions site, im seeing traffic down almost 50% so far since sunday. We basically post solution to IT problems, more business level than end user level...damn you google...the site just has two ads and that is it nothing has change in about 8 months bar hand written original content.

[netmeg]

These are sites about news, nothing to sell, and LOTS of pages :(

I would start not by looking at only the sites, but by looking at the business model.

How unique is your site? Are there lots of others (in Spanish) ? Are other sites doing entertainment news in Spanish still seem to be holding up well in Google, or did they see drops too? Are your news items pretty much the same ones that other sites have, or do you have some stories/posts/content that are rich (not shallow) and exclusive to you? Has traffic to all parts of your site dropped equally, or did some sections suffer worse than others? Do you post the full content on your site, or are you an aggregator (a la the Huffington Post, for example) where you post excerpts and then links to the complete story?

This is where I would *start* looking, if I thought I had been pandalized.

[skweb]

Oxydada, our experience is similar to yours. My wife runs a website in Spanish and English. The English part of the website was smacked slightly in the Panda updates but last week the Spanish pages have been hit around 30%. Now this is a very large and popular website in business for about 12 years pulling in more than a million visitors a month for hundreds of keywords. Like what has happened in English, Panda is head-scratching. How is it possible that pages that were considered so high quality for 12 years -- and they are -- are now demoted? I would have told myself that G did a good job if the results were better than before but I am seeing blogspot spam blogs and amateur answers at Yahoo appearing much higher than decent websites.

I have something else that is interesting to share. Many years ago I had created a blogspot blog to test if machine translated content can rank. I would take my English article, translate it with software and then publish it. Guess what; that blog is untouched.

As a Google shareholder, I am now worried that the arrogance and self patting at the company is about to bring its downfall. Yahoo and Bing are already producing better results, and Google that completely screwed up on Panda, not only chose not to fix the English searches but has also let loose the devil in other languages.

It is time to sell my Google stocks.

[ascensions]

especially if those pages are attracting some decent backlinks. you might be doing yourself some damage by deleting them. i would at least check what the traffic is like on those pages before deleting them. if their traffic hasnt gone down then you should leave them alone

I redirect all my deletes via 301, but I also steer clear of the major traffic generating pages too. (those should be edited to conform to standards anyways.)

Panda seems to like, similar content on a single domain, from what I'm seeing, so deleting those sections that don't coincide with the theme of the site may be the answer.

In the above case, since it's entertainment, and you don't have the ability to "pull rank" as a news organization, it may be impossible to ever escape Panda without a major demolition. It may be worth considering while also deleting anything under 1000 words, also diversifying by creating multiple websites based on your successful content. For instance, instead of one giant entertainment website, arrange the content into angelinajolie.com, bradpitt.com, johnbarrowman.com, etc. Or do the subdomain fix. (based on the same principle.)

The answer to Panda, though I didn't like it either, is niche specific, quality sites that cater to readers who love similar content as what they're searching for.

Personally I understand Google's move here, but I don't agree with it. They're expecting that webmasters help facilitate the user's search experience, rather than they (Google) build a SE that is capable of doing it. That said, I've capitulated and I'm moving on.

[Dave_Hybrid]

FYI - Don't delete content, noindex tag it. That way things can be reverted if need be!

[ascensions]

Dave, the truth is, noindexing suggest that Google is going to revert Panda, but they're not. Once I began to look at that content, I realized it wasn't worth saving IMHO any ways... took up database space, and slowed the server response of other pages.... another factor in Panda... which means not deleting it can still affect you. Download the stuff and place it on a thumb-drive in case you ever want to refer to it.... but it's time to let go of the past and move on. If you're not publishing, collegiate essay quality material, Google isn't all that interested from what I've seen.

[HuskyPup]

The answer to Panda, though I didn't like it either, is niche specific, quality sites that cater to readers who love similar content as what they're searching for.

I am VERY niche specific and I have seen pandalisations and promotions but the overall Google winners have been a couple of spammy Chinese directory sites plus one large Chinese real world manufacturer who has about 700+ different domains spamming trade crappy pages all over the SERPs, nothing of any value whatsoever to anyone...NOTE, that's in my niche.

I have not seen a generalisation which applies for all.

[chalkywhite]

Im prepared to suffer short term losses make really small changes here and there hopefully for a long term gain to see what beats panda. I feel sorry for people who rely on there sites for their main income. Google could not be more vague if they tried on what triggers panda.

My personal opinion is that google want the first page like a high st with all brand names with a sprinkinling of there own little chains here and there.Smaller websites do not stand a chance. C`mon bing a fight back may work right now.

[ascensions]

Husky Pup... in that case I have no clue. I'm sticking with the plan though...

[sid786]

It has been made clear that ads don't affect the site in the Google Webmasters Forum. So, webmasters, don't worry about the number of ads on your site. Two or three is just time. Also, I have read that duplicate content hasn't been a issue.

Some of the biggest e-commerce sites have seen tremendous growth after the Panda update. They have snippets available elsewhere on the Internet.

The thing is, Google needs brand. Google ranks you when you are worth ranking, and it takes hell lot of time for us small-timers to create a brand around our site.

Good content is a must, yes. But how does Google's little bots identity and define "good" remains a mystery. Forever.

My biggest site has been hit by Panda, and I panicked, eventually messing up what took me three years to build -- from changing the URLs to re-evaluating the inbound links. It took me hundreds of hours to realize what I did was a waste of time.

I've learned that Google likes to keep things simple. Believe it or not, Google has all the rules outlined, and if we followed them patiently, Panda could be our best friend.

[tangor]

I've learned that Google likes to keep things simple. Believe it or not, Google has all the rules outlined, and if we followed them patiently, Panda could be our best friend.

Odd thing is, we don't know the Google rules... used to, but not anymore. Bing is using upwards of 1,000 markers on their site for search results... who knows how many G is using these days?

Bing answers: [webmasterworld.com...]

[HuskyPup]

in that case I have no clue. I'm sticking with the plan though

My advice would be to back-up everything and then target one section of your site(s), change it to the way you feel is required and test it for a month. Changing an entire site could lead to confusion if there is a change with Panda since you may not know precisely what change made the effect...you or Panda.

I've launched a new site throughout all of this malarky using my own 11 year old standard template design, I have kept precisely the same AdSense units and positions, this site is doing extremely well across all search engines.

The difference between this site and all the others is that the main widget image is 600 x 800 rather than 500 x 500 and I have included more pertinent, but generalised, on-page information in addition to the specific and relevant widget information.

I have a lot of well-established trade competition spamming all the engines however this approach seems to be working well and they are without doubt the most informative widget pages available on The Net.

It is pure coincidence that I have built these pages like this, it was a natural progression being for my new flagship site under a .eu rather than .com, I was going to do it anyway and it had nothing to do with Panda.