Hit by Panda but NOT by Penguin - conclusions?

[Dantes100]

Hi,

I was hit by Panda last April (international roll-out) but haven't been hit by the recent Penguin update.

What do you think can I conclude from this fact in my efforts to recover from Panda?

Penguin was about backlinks and over-optimization. One big bullet on my to-do list was to re-write articles that mainly use the same keywords and reduce their keyword density. Can I neglect that now?

What other conclusions would you draw?

Thank you for your thoughts,
Eddie

[tedster]

Did you recover at least most of your traffic after the Panda hit? If so, I'd forget the traditional "technical" SEO approach for now and focus on improving your visitor data - all manner of site stickiness and general presence of your business online.

[indyank]

If you had been hit by panda then you couldn't have been hit by penguin as the former is to deal with low quality sites while the latter is to deal with spam sites.You cannot fall in both categories.

[gouri]

If you had been hit by panda then you couldn't have been hit by penguin as the former is to deal with low quality sites while the latter is to deal with spam sites.You cannot fall in both categories.

With spam being overuse of keywords and not a lot of variation in anchor text?

[indyank]

With spam being overuse of keywords...

If you meant "overuse of keywords" as keyword density or keyword frequency, No. But spam has to do more with unnatural use of keywords.

[brinked]

I am still getting used to penguin. But it feels like Panda is more of an overall site assessment that disregards the backlinks its has. Where penguin looks at factors SEO webmasters may have been abusing to gain high rankings and has now tightened up the belt on those factors so you can not simply get a high ranking simply by keyword stuffing/excessive link building etc.

[indyank]

But it feels like Panda is more of an overall site assessment that disregards the backlinks its has.

Very true. It has got to do a lot with it.

[Dantes100]

Did you recover at least most of your traffic after the Panda hit? If so, I'd forget the traditional "technical" SEO approach for now and focus on improving your visitor data - all manner of site stickiness and general presence of your business online.

No, I didn't recover, the traffic has been declining gradually since April, but I gained about 40% since April 28-29th last month (still 60% less than pre-panda).

I don't think that recent gain was due to Panda, more due to other sites ranking loss because of Penguin.

But improving visitor data is good advice and makes much sense...