Question about google panda recovery solution.

[borishar]

Hey guys,

I have been hit by panda. I have a plan to make a major change on my website, and would like to ask for opinion.

Here is the current scenario:

I have a website where people submit recipes. Most of the recipes are less than 50 words, but I have individual pages for them, which is probably being considered as thin content.

Recipes come from different members, but some recipes are about a same product.

I was thinking to create a product page and have all the recipes for the particular product be on that page, instead of individual pages.

So instead of having 4 or 5 individual 50 word recipe page, I would have 1 with 250 words, and 301 the 5 old pages to the new link.

Would this be a point in the right direction?

Thank you in advance.

[bhartzer]

Sounds like a decent solution, since people looking for recipes for that product would like to see a few variations or different recipes.

I wouldn't 301 redirect the old pages to the new link, though.

[borishar]

Why not 301? The old links are indexed, have ranks and traffic from search engines. Why not tell the search engine to transfer ranks and visitors. If not doing 301 all the people would come to a 404 page? Because I have to remove those pages to avoid duplicate content.

Can you explain why not do a 301?

[Clay_More]

Just an opinion from a user who frequents cooking/baking recipe sites.

Without actually going through a word count, I think it might be difficult to provide a recipe in less than 50 words. Maybe a beverage site? If that's the case, just do what the market leaders are doing, but add that little bit more.

[petehall]

I wouldn't 301 redirect the old pages to the new link, though.

I would as it's the correct thing to do for any users finding or bookmarking the original page. Not to mention any natural links they may have picked up.

When correcting Panda issues I pay very close attention to 301's.

[sett]

I was thinking to create a product page and have all the recipes for the particular product be on that page, instead of individual pages.

So instead of having 4 or 5 individual 50 word recipe page, I would have 1 with 250 words, and 301 the 5 old pages to the new link.

Go ahead with this but be careful about the quality of content like grammatical errors, spell checks etc.

Your visitors will spend more time on a particular page for a particular recipe and thus overall average time on your site, per page will increase.

[netmeg]

I wouldn't 301 it either. I'd want to stay as far away from the old bad (thin) content page as I could.

[borishar]

Thanks guys. I will be launching this at the end of december. Fingers grossed.

[Saffron]

Can you expand on the content a bit? There's a very popular recipe site here in Australia that has several versions of the same recipe and they're on different pages.

They now (this is new) have a video, the recipe, instructions and then on another tab they have nutritional information.

[goodroi]

Nice to see you are trying to improve the value of the page but I don't think you are doing enough and doubt you will recover. Consolidating 5 weak pages into 1 page doesn't always make it more valuable. If you combined 5 bags of dirt into 1 big bag of dirt, it still isn't as valuable as gold.

Don't try to achieve the minimum. Try to develop a superior website that is better than the competition.

Why not add a user comment section so your visitors can discuss the recipe and offer suggestions and improvements to it? A single good comment would double the length & value of your weak pages. I've already written more than 100 words in this single response and that is longer than 2 of your current pages :(.

[EditorialGuy]

Without actually going through a word count, I think it might be difficult to provide a recipe in less than 50 words.

TO BAKE BREAD:

1. Mix lukewarm water, flour, salt, and yeast.

2. Knead.

4. Leave ro rise.

5. Bake until done.

(Mind you, if I were Google, I probably wouldn't rank that at the top of the SERPs for "bread recipes.")

[Clay_More]

I'd consider that a reasonable description, but not quite a recipe. Each one of the numbered sections could easily be 100 words, with the addition of some history behind the recipe it could total 700-1000 words and be totally unique.

I just counted a really, really simple flatbread recipe that came out just over 200 words.

Some sites that have short recipes for different consumables have user reviews which "pad" the page content.

[EditorialGuy]

I'd consider that a reasonable description, but not quite a recipe.

I wouldn't, either--and I'd certainly be skeptical if I were Google.

Even the infamous eHow "How to Boil Water" instructions are a lot longer than 50 words.

[Masaai]

Echo'ing much of what has been said already:

Regarding your content, I'm skeptical whether your strategy will work. Thin content is not only based on word count but on substance as well. Google is checking for content associated with the subject matter of the page, including related topics on your page, and their sub-topics. I would think it would be impossible to accomplish this with just 50 words. By way of example, 10 poorly written recipes consolidated onto 1 page does not make it a good page. You have to ask yourself if you find the content useful, and whether you would use it yourself, and be proud to recommend it to somebody. Do you provide tips, and unique insight? Do you have images? how-to videos? Google is not only looking for word count, but content quality, as well as other media such as photos/video. All your content or most of it at least should be unique. In addiiton, if a user comes to your pages and pogo-sticks away, you wont get much love from Google, so not only does Google need to find what it wants, but so do users.

....And absolutely 301 pages, especially those that have inbound links to them. You can do one of two things, 301 all pages whose content has moved OR 301 only pages with inbound links. Not 301'ing is not a good solution at all. IF content is being removed altogether 410 the pages.

Potential solutions MAY BE a) you paying good writers who are also cooks to writeup your content or b)getting your users to submit quality posts/photos by giving them an incentive (if this is even possible?). IF you don't plan on doing anything, your proposed solution is probably better than leaving it at 50 words/page.

hope it works out for you.

[Martin Ice Web]

I am colpletely with goodroi.I would pimp up the weak pages and as long as they are weak i would noindex them.
I would go after EAT. That def. something i see is rising and google goes after this ( nevertheless they are far away from beeing good at it).

To have 5 or 10 different cooking recipes on a site is annoying. What if i want to cook one of it? Can i print the page. How about linking to this one i like? How about to add it to my favorites in browser? Not a good idea though.

Forget about time on site. Go make your site popular. And if you have allready more than one version of a recipe tells you that users interact with our site.

Add factors like calorie calculator, size up calculator. If you want to be the best site for cooking you donīt have to look like a content farm. I think you have to put some deeper work into it and give poeple your know how as chef cook.

I could imagine many sections you could add. Sections about got wrong on cooking the recipe. Sections about what kind of ale, vine and so on are best for this recipe....

I easyly could outrank at site with deep content by making a shallow site very popular. google doesnīt know a thing about cooking, neither will it ever understand what the recipe is about.

[nettulf]

i have a one-page website with one single receipe that gets up close to a thousands uniques some days.

What I did was to really make the receipe in the kitchen and take my own pictures of it at different stages.

I think if you did something like that on some of the pages it would help a lot.

[borishar]

Thank you guys! So much help from all of you! Much obliged