What to do next after being hit by Panda update Oct 13?

[DeIntegro]

Hello everyone,

I am asking for advice.

After Panda update Oct 13 it was a drop for most of the keywords in Google's SERP, minus 3-10 positions for three of my sites (guides to different countries). As a result the traffic from Google decreased by 30-50%.

Prior to this update the sites were doing well increasing an audience for over 5 years. The previous Panda updates didn't hit them. The content is unique, new material appears steadily, though not very fast. The structure is user friendly. Using only Google Adsense in correct proportions to the content.

Now for a number of key words like "city name" or "city name" + "country name" the pages fell from 1st-3rd places in SERP (shared the places with articles from Wikipedia) to 5th-12th. Above me are various dating services with such domains as "loveme. / cityname" with a lot of advertising and not a lot of unique content.

I have read different opinions on this topic lately. However, may be you can give me advice what to do next. Just continue to add more good info, improve content hoping that things will change for the better or do anything extra?

Thank you in advance for your advice.

[dunivan]

First, check your code, make sure theres not a errant nofollow or robots.txt directive in there. Also, check your organic search in analytics to figure out when the dip really occured, and try to trace any changes made around that date.

I would then portion your content by topic or author - you can do it into subdomains, folders, whatever, the key is to determine which of the content is low quality and what google still finds to be high quality. Within a bit you should see some keywords return to normal and some will still stink. Take the ones that stink and scrutinize them against google's list of 22 things to think about, work to improve that content. Similarly I would ask an objective third party to read through that content and see what they say about it.

Then I would look into your site architecture, are obvious things you'd want to appear within a click of an article there? If something is referenced somewhere else on your site, link to it there, don't make me find it. Do you display a lot of adwords/ads on the site? Scrutinize the ads, do they add value to your users?

Go through your code, make sure your on-page optimization is all in a row and does not look spammy. Make sure you have your alt tags going on and are unique to images.

Check your link graph, do you have a lot of article syndication/content syndication, is someone stealing your content? Try employing rel=author to help with that and show you are the source of said content. If you stole the content, rewrite it and make it unique.

Thanks for the TOS reminder Leosghost

[edited by: dunivan at 3:26 pm (utc) on Nov 2, 2011]

[Leosghost]

This should get you started, with a url we can learn more.

And giving a URL would be against the TOS [webmasterworld.com]here ..which apparently few read..