Losses starting April 2011 - any benefit from resideration requests?

[wtbradley33]

My site was hit by Google beginning in April 2011. Not sure why really. I have made a lot of changes per "SEO Experts" but only gradually coming back. I post a lot of fresh, relevant quality content but am still not gaining the ground I lost.

Has anyone asked Google to reconsider the penalty? I heard nightmares about this. Should I go down that path?

[goodroi]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld! Did you see any messages in your Google webmaster account?

[wtbradley33]

No, none at all. No warnings or anything of the kind.

[kenroar]

I was hit with Panda hard in January, 2011 and again in June of 2011. It recovered a little later that summer. I also saw a boost on March 6 last week. Overall, I'm down almost 50% from 2010. I have followed all the advice Google has to give with limited results. As goodroi says, welcome to our world.

[wtbradley33]

I am definitely in your world. Post Panda/Penguin I've spent a ton of money on SEO experts making sure all my H1 tags are perfect, my meta titles and descriptions. Every page on a 1000 page site has an H2 tag and making sure my site audits are virtually perfect. My team is active social media wise with real content....still not much improvement. Sadly, it's possible Google is doing this to force us all into paying for clicks. My Adwords expense is way up and Display Network is non performing because those sites got hit as well.

[Robert Charlton]

I've spent a ton of money on SEO experts making sure all my H1 tags are perfect, my meta titles and descriptions

wtbradley33 - Panda involved a combination of quality-related factors... things like fluff or derivative content, bad site structure and navigation, extremely slow-loading pages, bad design, pages that resulted in a lack of engagement, and sites that caused visitors to return to Google and repeat their searches.

There were other factors too, content duplication issues, etc... but H1 tags and meta descriptions are perhaps the last thing I'd look at to fix Panda problems. Page title elements are extremely important onpage factors, but I've seen sites buried by overoptimized titles that were chasing keywords rather than describing concepts covered by the site.

I'm going to guess that you've got algorithmic problems, and I'll take a further stab and say probably "shallow" content (ie, content that really doesn't say much). That's been at the core of most Panda problems I've seen. Weak inbound linking goes with this. It's hard to get freely given, high quality, relevant inbound links if your content isn't really good. In some competitive areas, I'd say that the content needs to be compelling.

There's no "reconsideration" fix for algorithmic problems. The site needs simply to be better (and more popular) in Google's eyes than its competitors.

I can only guess what's being done from the way you describe it, but if what you're saying reflects where your SEO experts have put their emphasis, then they may be 10 to 12 years behind, maybe more... and they may not have done much to help you.

[goodroi]

How many links did your site naturally gain? Yes it actually happens that other websites will give you an editorially reviewed backlink because they think your site is good enough. If you haven't naturally gained links from relevant websites then it does not matter how many meta tags or reconsideration requests you fill out, your website will perform poorly.

Take a step back and ask yourself:
Why would someone want to link to my website?
What am I offering that is not available on 100 other sites?
What makes my content special enough that people will seek it out?
What am I providing to my community that they want bad enough to manually type in my web address?
Now go back and re-answer the questions honestly without your ego clouding your judgement.

Once you honestly answer those questions, your website will be able to better deal with automated and manual penalties. Until you fix the fundamental issues, the minor improvements are like putting lipstick on a pig. Sure the pig might look nicer with lipstick but it is still just a pig.

[wtbradley33]

One of the issues is that my site is seen as an affiliate site in the eyes of Google. We do have about 300 advertiser profiles on the site that because of FTC regulations require approved content. Advertisers pay lawyers to approve forward looking statements and promotional content to comply and that is what my site and my competitors are allowed to post. So, yes, because of that we all face duplicate content issues.

Post Panda/Penguin we have worked hard to reduce the percentage of duplicate content from our advertiser profiles with blog posts from industry experts and owners relating personal experiences. We are now offering resourceful blog posts from highly credible experts in my niche. I have been doing this for about 6 months now. I am seeing improvement but it is slow.

The SEO audits, proper canonicals, no follow, H1's and H2 tags, being proactive with posts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest have all been part of the whole approach.

So, it is very slow and the amount of money we have spent to offset the loss in natural traffic to generate as many leads as previous is taxing the budget.

So, we answered the questions you stated and have answered the call and will continue to answer the call. Some of my competitors and new sites with no site authority, in some cases, after a single industry article can rank higher than mine for a particular keyword. Where is there content? Please tell me how a site with one high school level article from an unknown author qualifies to be ranked higher than a 7 year old site with hundreds of articles from experts in the industry.

That is why I asked the question. Should I ask for reconsideration?