How Do We Recover from Panda Update?

[office7]

I need your help on working out how to recover from the Google Panda update started in April 2011. Our site is www businessperform com and we started in August 2003. Our site has grown over the years to some 660 pages.

We get many thousands of visits each month. However, just after the first Panda update, we lost 62% of our organic Google referrals. In February 2012, we recovered a bit with losing just 42%. This month, we have now sunk to an all time low, being down 70% on our pre-Panda Google referrals.

On March 11 this year, we released a major upgrade to our site. We were anticipating that this would boost our referral numbers. However, next month's referral figures showed we went down even more.

Our upgrade introduced many significant enhancements, including:

• improved visual layout and images
• fixed file directory structure
• replaced table based layout with css
• strict adherence to XHTML standard
• added many, many new pages with original content
• added high-quality blog with regular contributions
• implemented rel="author" for many content contributors

We have an Articles section with 230 articles, many from authors who have syndicated the article on other sites. Some articles are from original authors on our site who have also syndicated to other sites. All articles are highly relevant to our readers and of very high quality. This is in addition to the other over 400 pages that are unique to our site.

From listening to Matt Cutts and analyzing our stats, the syndicated articles should not be a problem. For some of the syndicated articles, the article on our site is at the top or near the top of the Google search results when searching on the article title.

We also have 20 pages of external links. All links are categorized into relevant subject areas and each is described by one paragraph of text.

All pages have been white-hat optimized for many years with unique and descriptive title and meta-tags. We also have been using Google Webmaster Tools for a long time to monitor and fix site issues as they arise.

Over the years, we have also got inbound links from web directories, articles directories, press wire sites, our blogs, thousands of quality forum posts and other sources.

I am at a loss to know what to do to recover the 70% loss in our Google referrals. I would appreciate any help that you can offer.

Kind Regards, Les

[alanf]

Leslie,

It would appear your top performing keywords dropped dramatically around Jan this year, does your internal analytics agree? That would coincide with Panda data refresh 3.2 I think. So it it was a data refresh, then it most likely that some backlinks that were supporting some 'money' keyword got devalued, it is clear from your post that you had been building for a long time, and that building just got knocked down. As you shoudl have plenty of Analytics history, it should be fairly easy identifying the volume/money keywords that got lost, and then start the far more difficult task of re-supporting those keywords.

Alan

[morestar]

Interestingly enough, the following, which is what you did

• improved visual layout and images
• fixed file directory structure
• replaced table based layout with css
• strict adherence to XHTML standard
• added many, many new pages with original content
• added high-quality blog with regular contributions
• implemented rel="author" for many content contributors

are some and if not all facets of SEO - so in essence you did some good old wholesome SEO on your site and your rankings dropped? Now I'm not saying those are specifically related to the increase or decrease of rankings but they're practices that most SEOs would say they do.

What have you done about checking your back links? Maybe there are some indications in Webmaster Tools that you can look at, maybe remove and possibly make a change to what you're seeing.

[C0ldf1re]

If it were anybody other than Google, we might suspect a bug in their algorithms. The only way around that would be to keep fiddling with things until you got past the bug. -- But I'd probably be burned at the stake if I suggested that Google might do anything less than perfectly!

[Mike-H]

As Morestar suggested this sounds like it may be a backlinking issue. Who links to you and why? My initial checks show some reasonable link diversity but many links are the keywords 'Business Management Tools And Resources'. Have you diversified links to internal pages? Have you acquired links from sites that have been dropped by G? There are some sites linking to you that some people may argue are unrelated and may be devalued.

I am not an SEO expert this is just my 2c.

[office7]

Thanks for your responses. I do appreciate your attention.

@Alan The big drop-off you seen in the stats was the huge seasonal falloff between Christmas and the New Year. Referrals did rise in January and February this year. The biggest fall by far was with the first release of Panda where we saw a loss of 62% of our Google referrals. When I analyse the stats, there are no specific keyword types or page types that got hit harder than the others. My analyses show that the impact was very much across the whole site -which is what is characteristic of Panda; a site-wide penalty.

@morestar @ Mike-H, I've only had a cursory look at our backlinks. They number in the thousands and my eyes start to glaze over. Most of our backlinks are from our syndicated articles and our blog accounts on other sites and from many forum posts (none of which are spam). We have never paid anyone to get 50,000 inbound links for $50 in five days. Our link distribution is not ideal, but I don't think it's spammy. I guess I'm just not sure how to do a proper analysis, and one that is fact-based.

Yes, many of the inbound anchor texts are the keywords 'Business Management Tools And Resources'. That's because in the early days of link building, that was our standard link text. We are now much better at varying the anchor text. And we are also now much better at linking to many more pages within the site. We have many links from articles directories, which have been devalued by Panda. What proportion of our links is from article directories? I don't know. I need to have a look. That's a very good observation.

We are adding new, high-quality unique content on a regular basis. We have also now put noindex,nofollow on the 20 links pages. We are now waiting for the next Panda and Penguin updates to assess the impact. The next stage is to put noindex,nofollow on a section of the syndicated articles on our site. After that, if that has no effect, we will look at the placement of our adverts on our site.

We are treading cautiously as the main cause of the problem may be the devaluing of our inbound links from syndication sites, as you suggest. Thanks for all of your great suggestions. I welcome any more thoughts from people in the same situation or from anyone who has ideas on how to find out the causes of the loss of referrals.

Regards, Les

[leonstreete]

I agree about checking backllinks, we've had a similar occurance with one of our clients, we managed to remove 1500 links from what appeared to be dead / bad neighbourhood links, checking via WMT (Also do a back link check on any RSS aggregators using your feed as they may be from bad neighbourhoods also.). We looked at updated content as you've done and focused my clients content to add more value, this has stopped the drop in traffic which was about 50% and is now slowly moving back up. Make sure any key pages you had traffic coming into before your update - haven't changed to much in terms or url / on page elements. Also run some analysis and spot the main keywords that brought in traffic using the search filter in Google Analytics organic traffic. This may give you some clues as to whether you've been affected in one area or many niche of what your site offers.

Check out MajesticSEO and SEOMOZ they have some great tools you can use to get some reports to help you pin point the areas to analyse.
Good luck.

[office7]

@leonstreete Did you contact hundreds of webmasters to remove 1500 links? Wow. That's a massive amount of work. I just had a quick look at our inbound links profile and it looks fine to me. Predominantly, where most of our links are coming from, they are from reputable and very relevant sites. Does MajesticSEO and SEOMOZ have specific link analysis tools that could help me analyze further? What do you think?

Regards, Les

[leonstreete]

@leonstreete Did you contact hundreds of webmasters to remove 1500 links? Wow. That's a massive amount of work. I just had a quick look at our inbound links profile and it looks fine to me. Predominantly, where most of our links are coming from, they are from reputable and very relevant sites. Does MajesticSEO and SEOMOZ have specific link analysis tools that could help me analyze further? What do you think?

Regards, Les

Fortunately most of those links were easily removable and some had already died but Google had not refreshed yet. I hired someone off odesk who took 7 hours with my instructions and a copy of the links from WMT.
Majestic has something called flow metrics ( http://blog.majesticseo.com/development/flow-metrics/ ) which can help you to find out more in depth info about link quality. SEOmoz was good at identifying onsite error 301's and some other stuff whilst giving you comparison reports against your competitors, using their moz rank and other data.

[office7]

Thanks leonstreete. I registered at Majestic SEO and had a quick look at the reports on our web site. There was nothing there to cause me panic. I think our link profile looks fine. I know we need to devote some resources to getting some more high quality links. However, with thousands of inbound links from hundreds of domains built up over nearly ten years, I'm not inclined to make it a high priority. My feeling is that something else has triggered the Panda downgrade. What do you and the other esteemed forum contributors think?

Regards, Les