Am I still hit by Panda? Got back 43% traffic.

[irock]

HI, I did a bunch of improvements to my site and then during Panda 2.3 (or whatever took place in late July) my site suddenly recovered. Traffic steadily climbed until mid-September. By that time, my site has recovered 43% of Google referrals. However during second half of October, my site traffic slowly declined and again lost 10% referrals.

I see a lot of my keywords in the top 20 yet my traffic only recovered about 43%. So, in your experience, am I still 'hurt' by Google Panda?

Thanks!

[tedster]

From the experiences people are sharing, it sounds like you are "recovering" but not "fully recovered". Are you clear about what actions brought about the improvement?

[irock]

I asked this because what I know so far is that a site is either affected by Panda or not. This means either all the pages are just "gone" or rank where they are supposed to be. Am I wrong or is ther another story to this?

[tedster]

While it's true that the initial effect can be like falling off a cliff for sites that are hit hard by Panda - there are many reports of gradual, step by step recovery. This is especially so if you're making changes a bit at a time, rather than launching a "whole new game plan" in one fell swoop.

[irock]

To answer your question, "Are you clear about what actions brought about the improvement?", I did the this. .

You see, when I look back, my site is plagued by a bad site structure, thin content (articles with fewer than 150 words), insanely long articles (3000 words with lots of pics all on one page), and bunch of orphan pages, so I fixed all these with the following fixes.

1. Put orphan pages where they belong in new categories.
2. Split up really long articles into 2 pages.
3. Deleted no fewer than 2500 outdated and thin content articles.

[potentialgeek]

I would suggest you compare the date of your possible recovery, or a significant part of it, to the Panda updates. [webmasterworld.com...]

Keep in mind, too, that Google may have done 200 algo tweaks since Panda was released to other parts of the algo besides Panda. (I personally believe they've done at least one update to Vince.) They say they do hundreds per year.

Some sites that recovered from Panda got much higher results in total than before it struck. They are either benefitting from non-Panda updates and/or getting out of Panda before their competitors whose sites were also Pandalized.

[irock]

Thanks for the reply. The actual date of recovery occurred on July 22nd/23rd. But my traffic has been on a decline since mid October. I lost 10% of traffic already from recent high (mid-Sept).