Panda recovery... fix most popular pages or bad posts first?

[raymondcc]

My tech blog site has been hit by the first Panda and thankfully is still able to get about 10,000 hits daily. In attempt to recover from Panda, we are in a journey to improve all our contents by rewriting them or simply deleting the ones that are no longer useful today.

I've read many times that a site will mostly recover from Panda after removing some pages and often rewriting the rest.

Which action would "probably" make more sense for a faster partial Panda recovery since even tedster confirms that sites gradually recovers and not through one panda refresh.

A) Improving the top 100-200 articles that gets the most hits.
- Doing this should improve the overall metrics for the whole site. I thought about this possibility because it makes sense to make sure that the top articles are really good when Google is sending a lot of visitors to those pages. If they are not updated/improved to satisfy the visotors, Google may just somehow know about it and stop sending people to those popular pages.

B) Improving the oldest ones first.
- Most of the old posts are either short, not well researched, outdated, or even doesn't work at all. Google has often said to fix the "bad" pages to recover from Panda. I think that there are a couple of old posts that is in the top 100-200.

Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[indyank]

raymondcc, I am not discouraging you by saying this but personally I feel it is not easy for a "tech blog site" to recover. Those claiming recoveries were probably receiving much lesser traffic than what you seem to have received.

There are three kinds of tech blogs.
1) How Tos
2) Reviews
3) Downloads

Which one does yours fall in or is yours a mix of all? There are more chances of recovery with the steps that you plan to implement, if your traffic drawing pages fall in the first two.

But it is also important to understand how your link profile looks like.

1) What is the ratio of your total links to homepage vs individual pages?
2) How does your anchor text profile look like? Is it predominantly keyword based or domain citations or something else?
3) Study the link profiles of pages that got pushed down hard. Do you notice anything wrong there?

I am sure that your blog content would have been copied by many others and a relatively bad or weak link profile along with such duplicate content can easily kill a site.

[raymondcc]

My "tech blog site" falls under how tos and reviews.

Is Panda related to link profile? I thought that was Penguin?

[indyank]

Panda is about low quality while penguin is about spam. But both are about everything - content and links.

If you really believe that your content is bad, then work on it. But I think I know your site and I believe that you have some excellent content and a reasonably good user engagement going on your site, though work need to be done on grammar and typos.

Do you really believe that you are doing fine with your link profile?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If your tech blog site falls under how tos and reviews its very possible, even likely, that Google stopped sending you traffic that has a remote chance of buying something.

[indyank]

Yes that is a very good point and I agree with Sgt_Kickaxe.

Though I am not sure how well they do it or how capable they are in reading the user intent i.e. commerce or information need in their users' minds.

And to play the devil's advocate here, how about they sending traffic to reviews and how to sites while showing relevant commercial ads alongside them? While it is true that every person intending to buy would like to be taken to a good review or how to site, the converse is not always true. There are still a lot of people who want to read the information on the web and buy in offline stores i.e. they don't have the commercial intent while surfing the web looking for products.

[LostOne]

"when Panda is mostly related to content."

You have to be kidding...unless you can add more.

[raymondcc]

Why is it not possible for me to "add more" content?

[LostOne]

ray:

That was a reference to a comment which I don't see anymore. Panda has to be about brands in my opinion. There's no other glaring reason I can see. I've spent months trying to fix on three separate occasions...small site under 300 pages now, information only. You almost have to be a household name or have some kind of prominent web or brick and mortar presence to get free of the critter. Or a site that's just weak enough to sneak by the filters. I see those on occasion at least in my industry.

Indy's comment sounds right

"Panda is about low quality..."

Low quality in the Gorg's eyes but it doesn't mean the public perception of a site. I've given up. Time to move on to bigger and better things out there. Otherwise it will eat you alive out of frustration. Life is short, opportunities are elsewhere.

Btw, I'm still hanging in there. I can live on the current crumbs, but what's next from the Gorg? My eggs are being dispersed.

Btw, my pages don't need much updating. The information is constant, may change very five years or so with an occasional product innovation but the principles will always remain.

Good Luck!