How to deal with 3 years of Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird change?

[itsjustme2]

No need for another long sob story...got hit by Panda almost three years ago, followed every rule in the book, rewrote 2200 pages to 750 pages, added 200 original video, no link buying, 12 year old domain...tried the link disavow tool, lost 98% of traffic

The only thing I can think of is the backlink profile got polluted by scrappers (it was a popular authority site) and there's no way to fix it...or else I was deliberately targeted....either way, there's no way to find out the actual cause...

so I thought that the only remedy would be to take down the site, ban the googlebot, delete the youtube account, delete the ads etc, and never have my name associated with either a site or advertising account, and then replace the content under a false name, on another site with a partner.

After three years of rewriting what amounts to three books, I'm wondering if this might be worth it?

I understand that others have just moved to a new domain and started over.

What if you and your site were deliberately targeted?

and no, this is not one of those "just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they are not out to get you posts":)

Any thoughts. I dread the thought of rewriting the equivalent of three books and then needing to reedit some 200 videos once again...

[goodroi]

Change for the sake of change tends not to have the best results.

I see you shrunk your website pages and you mention many numbers and alot of work. You do not mention what you did to improve the value proposition. What are you offering that is not offered on 100 other websites?

Rewriting content is not a smart idea if you do not have a strong plan to make it better than all other information and provide real value. It does not matter if you improve a 100 word article about how to boil a cup of water into a 500 word article with online video. It is still just an article about boiling a cup of water.

3 years of making changes will not help if you are not making the right changes.

By really boosting the value of your website you can eventually gain big non-Google traffic, so much that you no longer care if Google ranks you or not. That is when you will likely start performing better in Google's ranking algorithm. Because your new & improved site is now naturally generating the signals Google is looking for.

If you don't know what changes to make, you can run a scientifically valid usability test to identify the weak parts of your website.

[itsjustme2]

"You do not mention what you did to improve the value proposition. What are you offering that is not offered on 100 other websites?"

Underntand what you're saying. The changes amount to a site somewhere between the "Great American Novel" and a "how to boil water" Ehow site.

For example. the pages are often parts of 20 page sets of articles, that also include original research (firing up the spreadsheet and producing statistics and graphs).

specific content hard to explain without revealing the site

so, content's not the problem...checking out the serps for comparison and competitors reveals that page one results often taken by sites with one picture and thirty words, or a page of 120 words no pictures, or a site that has backinks from only 3 different domains, or an ehow type site that writes the proverbial "how to boil water", "how to boil cold water with pictures and info", "how to boil water in the microwave" set of keyword laden articles etc.

I've been around for 15 years, and do the requisite homework, just like all the long time members of Webmaster World.

Had I known I'd never recover, of course I would not have invested the time or money fixing things.

since you can't change the past, I'm trying to figure out how to make the future a bit less grim.

[RedBar]

page one results often taken by sites with one picture and thirty words

Unfortuately that IS Google these days in many sectors and no amount of work may rectify the situation, in fact even a new site most probably will not do any better.

I assume your Bing rankings are ok? If so then your current site is fine. It's pointless getting into yet a.n.other Google-bashing thread since many of us can see and have experienced what they have done and they have absolutely no intention of reverse-engineering their mistakes ... Just think how that would look to shareholders! What, Google admits making mistakes?!?!

It's not going to happen, period.

[RedBar]

Oh, and welcome to WebmasterWorld itsjustme2:-)

[itsjustme2]

"Unfortuately that IS Google these days in many sectors and no amount of work may rectify the situation, in fact even a new site most probably will not do any better."

Thanks RedBar...it's just that I've read experiments by some old time Webmaster world members that moving the content might work, it's the domain, not the content.

That's the reason for publishing with a partner on a different domain, not under my name or with any association of my name to either Youtube, adsense or any other way google can associate the content with the former domain or name.

Number one in Bing for many queries and of course no traffic from them.

BTW...I do have a Great American Novel in mind, titled

"Living in a Type II Error World"

What happens when you take a scientific approach to life, live the experiment, understand the results, and then ask, "What if I'm Wrong".

Type I errors "what if you assume a relationship among the variables in the experiment exist when in fact they do not"

Type II errors "what if you assume a relationship among the variables in the experiment don't exist when in fact they do"

It's kind of an edgy theme. But back to the question du jour...everyone perfectly understands Google is in it for Google not for me or you or anyone else....so enough said...

[RedBar]

it's just that I've read experiments by some old time Webmaster world members that moving the content might work, it's the domain, not the content.

I've read the same but have not seen any definite proof of this. 2014 will be my 20th year of SEO yet Google seems to be more unstable then ever at a time when it should be maturing into a reliable friend, not an uruly, street-fighting kid.

For instance my flagship site, well-recognised throughout my international trade as the #1 resource, gets very little Google traffic, in fact yesterday, according to AdSense, it had 10% of what it actually did. These weren't rogue robot visitors, these were real-world commercial trade customers ... How can Google get this so wrong? I can see who was on this site and from where, this was genuine traffic..

Over the Xmas period I completely removed three sites that were launched three months ago, why? They did not gain any traction whatsoever. When they were launched Google spidered and indexed them within one week, soon they were ranking on page one but then slowly week by week pages and images started disappearing. All these pages and images were unique yet they disappeared to the extent that of the original 550 images only 15-20 existed last week.

Searching for these images revealed NO image results whatsoever, that's how unique the images were, but the occasional SERPs result page did have the Keyword1/2/3 combination but hardly ever the actual page.

Just how can this be? They were in their index and then slowly disappeared, has Google an even bigger problem than we have even considered? Can it not digest and collate all the information it now has?

Certainly on even well-established sites of mine I see Google struggling to display new information, a few pages they seem to be able to cope with, a few hundred and it seems to pollaxe them completely. I do know others have experienced this since they have stickied me precisely the same problem.

"Living in a Type II Error World"

Did you ever see "Max Headroom"?

[EditorialGuy]

Your story inspires a more general observation:

Google has been preaching "quality content" for several years now, but--in the words of an old Burger King commercial (later borrowed by Walter Mondale in a political debate), "Where's the beef?"

Panda supposedly targeted "content farms" like eHow, but are WikiHow and Wiki.Answers.com any better?

Matt Cutts & Co. may have good intentions, but they've been crying "Wolf!" for quite a while now, and very little has changed.

Back to your question:

If you were to republish your pages under a false name (for example, on a partner's site), wouldn't that make the pages look like scraped content? Or, at the very least, like duplicate syndicated content? Even if the ploy worked, for how long would it work?

[itsjustme2]

Over the Xmas period I completely removed three sites that were launched three months ago, why? They did not gain any traction whatsoever. When they were launched Google spidered and indexed them within one week, soon they were ranking on page one but then slowly week by week pages and images started disappearing. All these pages and images were unique yet they disappeared to the extent that of the original 550 images only 15-20 existed last week.

kind of the same here....another site I built started to take off, then got throttled, no matter what time of day, when counting backwards for 24 hours, Google sent exactly 12 visitors. I figured it was because of the association of the domain with my flagship domain and/or my name. so I banned the google bots, removed the site from webmaster tool, adsense etc. and basically kicked it into oblivion, with out wasting another three years of my life.

That's the reason I'm pondering the issue of going anonymous and putting up the content under an assumed name, with someone else's name at the headmast of WMT, Youtube, adsense, etc. al.

Missed MaxHeadroom, but understand the concept and how it relates to today's headlines.

[itsjustme2]

If you were to republish your pages under a false name (for example, on a partner's site), wouldn't that make the pages look like scraped content? Or, at the very least, like duplicate syndicated content? Even if the ploy worked, for how long would it work?

thought about that...wondered how long between taking down the flagship domain, banning the google bots, 410 everything taking down the youtube and adsense accounts would take prior to being able to put up the content as new, rather than duplicate content.