Have any sites recovered from previous Panda updates on Jan 19th?

[acee]

Was the Panda update on January 19th 2012 specifically targetting sites with excessive ATF ads or did any sites previously mauled on October 14th 2011 recover?

I've been waiting 4 months for a Panda update and this one appears to have had no effect on my site, despite my having sorted any potential issues.

I'm now considering moving the site to another old domain or two that I own. Perhaps I should have done this 4 months ago!

[tedster]

From what I know, January 19 was not a Panda update.

There's been no word from Google about Panda in recent times. However, the last confirmed Panda update was only two months ago on Nov 19 [webmasterworld.com].

[acee]

I didn't even notice the Nov 19th update. No change in traffic.

Not sure what to do next.

[Planet13]

Not sure what to do next.

What have you tried so far, and when did you try it?

[webman]

My site that survived for almost ten years was hit by the Oct 13th Panda update. I redesigned the site and saw a slight uptick over the past month, gained back about 20% of lost traffic. However, I just checked traffic since the 19th and the site took another hit so it is back to the Oct 13th levels. Very depressing!

Note that I have also been working on three other sites, all wordpress blogs. All three of them were hit by 10-30% on the 19th, although 2 of them average less than 100 visitors a day so it is hard to tell the full impact given the low weekend traffic.

Overall, it seems like the more content I write and the more I try to optimize design and the more links I work toward getting and the more social interaction I post, the more Google doesn't care. The sites that are killing my categories are all linked to from each other and owned by a company that has bought several high PR financial sites and then linked them together to form a monster network of PR 7 sites. I just can't compete anymore.

It's been a long run for me in this business - over ten years now, but I am about to give up.

[synthese]

No noticeable recovery despite massive changes and improvements in October and Nov.

[Mr Prospector]

Most of my sites got crushed on Oct. 14th. The sites that have maintained their ranking have one common thing going for them. Links from High quality, older, trusted sites and that's it.

I've tried updating content and adding social media to the affected sites with more adverse effects on those sites. So to me it appears as if google has turned up the quality score for incoming links.

[acee]

@Planet13 - I can't remember exactly when I made changes, but I've removed all syndicated hotel pages and any attractions where the description was submitted by the owner. All that remains are pages written by me, mostly my photography and my videos, so it's squeaky clean.

I lost about 80% of referrals on Oct 14th. Prior to this traffic had grown and bounce rate was really low. I suspect the mistake I made was to allow Googlebot to spider the syndicated descriptions, which I had previously blocked.

Has anyone had success by moving their content to a new (old) domain? This is what I'm considering now.

[Planet13]

Wow, acee, I am sorry to hear about the 80% drop in traffic (although I guess that can be typical for some sites hit by Panda).

If the syndicated descriptions are actually HELPFUL to your users, can you just noindex them? I know some people have mentioned that noindex worked for them, others said they had to remove the content entirely...

Others have said moving to a new domain worked well for them. See this thread for example:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I hope this helps. It sounds like what you have is a directory and I think that the standards for directory type sites have been raised significantly.

[Planet13]

@ webman:

My site that survived for almost ten years was hit by the Oct 13th Panda update. I redesigned the site and saw a slight uptick over the past month, gained back about 20% of lost traffic. However, I just checked traffic since the 19th and the site took another hit so it is back to the Oct 13th levels.

Could you give us more detail about your redesign. What exactly did you do? Please be as specific as possible.

Also, are you still seeing to day the same lower traffic since the 19th of January?

@ Mr Prospector

I've tried updating content and adding social media to the affected sites with more adverse effects on those sites.

Could you please be more specific, too? Have you just rewritten the content, or are their new facts and resources you added? And when you say, "adding social media" to the sites, what specifically have you done?

Thanks in advance.

[Jori]

Hello there

My website was hit by Panda last october. It lost 50% traffic.

It recovered totally from it, not on 19th, but on 20th.

It was previously hit on august, when Panda was rolled for the world. I lost then 20% of traffic.

The website : small targeted website, wordpress based. It is small (less than 100 pages), but with 2K targeted visits per day. It has lots of Adsense (and few affiliation), but not above "only" above the fold, users don't need to scroll to start reading content.

the actions, after first panda on august :

- branding. I did create a brand. Logically, I changed domain name, with 301. Old pages redirected to new ones. We were then in october.

- "duplicate themes" . It's not duplicated content, but instead duplicated pages, targeting same keywords. Instead of having URL A and URL B targeting KEYWORD 1, I merged CONTENT URL A with CONTENT URL B (choosing one of those URLs).

- Redesigned completely the website. Less ads above the fold.
- purging wordpress comments > using disqus instead

Panda big hit on november > maybe because of this completely new URL. Less links, more errors (bad 301s...).

What I did after this catastrophy :
- new links
- completely sweap GWT errors.
- removing disqus.
- limiting wordpress comments to the last 20 instead.

All the time : always improving design (trying to have more pageviews, speeding loading time...).

And many more improving things that I don't remember.

It finally worked. What was the main difference?

I think the first panda hit on august was unfair and illogical. I did many irrational things at that time, that could eventually penalise me, but with patience, it would be fine. So that's what I thought.

The second hit on november was legitimate, because of the new brand, new domain and a lot of errors in 301s and 404.

I can not tell you what i think matters the most to recover from panda here. Maybe the rebranding? Maybe the new design? Maybe the comments? Maybe the links? Maybe my duplicated "themes" ? I don't honestly know. Maybe everything :)

[ErnestHemingway]

One of my sites that got hit on Jan 14th recovered back to #1 but another one which got hit on Jan 19th (without ads) is still at #6 and top spots doesn't make sense only my site got pushed down. Top 5 are using Ads above the fold though.