Google Panda & Commercial Keyword Density

[gyppo]

Hey guys, been a while since I last posted. I have 5+ sites in total, 2 of them are impacted by Panda (badly).

The sites that aren't impacted have large numbers of pages, a much larger range of keywords. Some even have extremely thin content (i.e. images).

The sites that Panda has crucified have a tight focus on particular groups of keywords.

From my observations it seems like Google looks at the number of pages you have & perhaps the volume of of the keywords that you're targeting. Then they might flag you for being above a certain threshold - since you're more likely to just be trying to get traffic than providing "value."

Anyone else experienced a recovery by tuning down the commercial intent of their titles & h1's? Or by adding more content that has less of a commercial nature?

[tedster]

Npo takers on this one so far. Since Panda was targeting "content farming" it certainly is possible that high commercial keyword density could be one metric, I guess, but if so then probably just one of many.

[Robert Charlton]

gyppo, to take a stab at what you might be seeing, possibly it's not a question (from Google's perspective) of commercial intent vs non-commercial intent, but just the way you built and optimized your pages.

It sounds to me like you might have stuffed keywords in an unnatural fashion onto pages you wanted to rank, perhaps without much regard to the quality of the content. Commercial intent was probably why you did it, but, as tedster suggests, excessive keyword density is what Google sees.

I don't think it's simply the percentage of commercial pages that would trigger Panda. I've worked on sites where essentially all the pages had commercial intent, including small focused sites as well as large ones, and they've done just fine. It's more a question about whether the content is helpful and the quality of inbound links to the site is good.

I should add that it's also likely that your commercial phrases are more competitive than your non-commercial phrases, so pages targeting commercial phrases would be more volatile under any circumstances.

[Whitey]

I've worked on sites where essentially all the pages had commercial intent, including small focused sites as well as large ones

How would you rate the competition level in those verticals?

I do have a hunch that certain commercial verticals are treated differently.

[Leosghost]

The Op's original premise would not fit at all with my experience as posted in this previous thread [webmasterworld.com...] msg:4513075