How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

I've run The Online Slang Dictionary (<a href="http://onlineslangdictionary.com/" rel="nofollow">http://onlineslangdictionary.com/</a>) since 1996. On April 11, the date of one of the Panda updates, traffic from Google dropped 20%. Between April 11 and a month ago, I made the following changes:<p>* Correct spelling, grammar, and capitalization errors<p>* Where spelling "errors" are legitimate "slang terms", link to the definition pages for those slang terms (gonna, wanna, ain't, dat's, etc.)<p>* Remove unnecessary extra punctuation, e.g. example sentences ending in "???" or "!!!"<p>* Checked keywords on top landing pages for searches like "slang", "slang dictionary", "slang thesaurus"<p>* Remove unnecessary extra spaces in the middle of sentences<p>* Use complete sentences even where completely unnecessary<p>* Restructure entire /definition+of/word+goes+here directory structure to be /meaning-of/word-goes-here, since people search for "meaning of" more frequently than "definition of", and since Google seems to have stopped treating + as a word separator in some cases.<p>* Reworked meta descriptions and page titles<p>* Removed meta keywords. I know Google doesn't use them, but maybe they treat them as a negative indicator of site quality? Who knows?<p>* Completely re-designed site's front page<p>* Switched from Google Custom Search Engine to a custom search implementation, because I think I can provide better results, improve the user experience, and reduce search exit rate<p>* Delay-load Twitter widget to reduce page load time<p>* Use rel="canonical" on every page on the site, since Google is indexing the IP address of the site and showing it separately in SERPs<p>* Removed &#60;priority&#62; nodes from the sitemap, just in case Google knows better<p>* Fixed the "HTML suggestions" on GWT, such as short meta descriptions and duplicate meta descriptions<p>* Excluded directories via robots.txt like /word-of-the-day/, since the words of the day are already spidered elsewhere on the site, in case Google is giving me a duplicate content penalty of some kind<p>I've also made plenty more changes in the past month, but I haven't written up a list yet.<p>Sine the Panda update, I've seen no improvement in traffic from Google to my site.

Because of the lucrative nature of affiliate payments and commissions in the travel industry, one of the biggest sources of what Google considered bad content was sites linking to hotels.<p>Look at this page: [<a href="http://www.travbuddy.com/hotels" rel="nofollow">http://www.travbuddy.com/hotels</a>]. All those links to "Hawaii Hotels" and "New York Hotels" look exactly like an old-school linkfarm.<p>Ask yourself this: if you're Google, and somebody is typing in "Hawaii Hotels" to do a search, is your Hawaii Hotels page really something they want as a top result? I don't think it is. Your content is not really "canonical" for Hawaii Hotels, it's just a page that lists a few reviews you've managed to collect.<p>It's all speculation on my part, since I have no inside information, but essentially, I think you're sort of poisoning your own reputation at Google with all those links.

hi, the funny thing is: all big travel sites lost <a href="http://trends.google.com/websites?q=tripadvisor.com%2C+expedia.com%2C+travbuddy.com%2C+lonelyplanet.com&#38;geo=all&#38;date=all&#38;sort=0" rel="nofollow">http://trends.google.com/websites?q=tripadvisor.com%2C+exped...</a><p>i did not hear from a single big travel site that won in the so called google panda update.<p>and to be honest, i understand it<p>the spammiest verticals are not only PPP (pills, porn, poker), it's PPPIT (pills, porn, poker, insurances, travel). i worked in poker, i worked in travel, i did insurances and yeah from an SEO perspective they are all very disgusting verticals.<p>and from what it looks like: the whole travel segment got a hit. so yeah, you can try to get out of "panda" but then you should realize that "panda" is nothing you can get out of. it's not a "penalty", it's a new set of rules. try what works, try what doesn't and then iterate. so simple.<p>and from what i see: <a href="http://tools.pingdom.com/?url=http://www.travbuddy.com/Hotels-Am-Walde-Hahnenklee-v390237&#38;treeview=0&#38;column=objectID&#38;order=1&#38;type=0&#38;save=true" rel="nofollow">http://tools.pingdom.com/?url=http://www.travbuddy.com/Hotel...</a><p>you root HTML already takes 900ms to get delivered, then you load about 162 additional dependencies. ... i would work on speed.

I run a large site that was unexpectedly affected by Google's "Panda" update. There has been a lot of talk on the subject, but most of it is FUD, and I haven't seen many large sites lay everything out for discussion. This is the first post (of many planned ones) about our experience with Google's "Panda" update.<p>Hopefully it will generate some good discussion from those facing a similar situation, and help some other people out.

The site should 410 removed pages insted of 404ing... 404 just means "not here anymore" and google will wait to remove it from their index until they have revisited the page a few more times over days/weeks.<p>A 410 on the other hand indicates that this page has been intentionally removed, and google tends to act quicker on those.

Google's intention with search, to return exactly the most relevant information for any query, seems a bit like the strive for a grand unified theory of physics. It's a noble ambition, but there are going to be a lot of mistakes and missteps along the way; it's probably going to take an awful long time to arrive there, if it ever happens; and when we do get there a lot of people are going to be upset by it. I really appreciate that you've stepped forward with both information about the effects of the changes and what you've done to remedy the situation. I'm keen to see your followup posts, and I will be keen to see what future changes Google implements and how they improve things for you, me, and everyone.<p>But as time has shown, holding out hope for Google to do anything <i>specifically</i> helpful has been a disappointment in so many instances I've lost count.

An observation based on mentions of "low quality" in Amit Singhal's blog post at <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...</a> -- you mention that you have no-indexed thin content pages, but is it possible that if Google sees that the volume of "noindex" pages is high compared to the overall volume of pages on the site, that Google still views your site as overall of "low-quality" (relative to the other sites it indexes for the same keywords)?<p>Rather than noindex pages, I am thinking using robots.txt to prevent access to these pages might be better -- Google can't perhaps then tell what to make of these pages you've hidden via robots.txt. Just thinking...not really an expert on this.

I think this is all nonsense. Google's work should be to separate good content from bad content. Now, they are inverting the relationship and saying that web masters should be responsible to handle that information to them.<p>This is wrong in several levels. First, Google starts to dictate what is acceptable or not in their index, using tools like webmaster central and all the "semantic web" talk -- Why should I care?<p>Second, it creates the incentives and the opportunity for bad guys to do well. If you need to do all this overhaul of a web site, the only people willing to do the work will be the very same ones that created content farms in the first place. After all, they are the ones that make big buckets from Google, not the after hours hobbyist that maintains a single web site.

What still confuses me is the duplicate content issue. Doesn't it make sense to make some information reachable in different ways?<p>For example in a typical blog, the same text can be found via direkt link, latest articles, categories... How does one make that go away - and should it be done?

This is great. I work for a blog network that got hit similarly hard by both Panda updates, and we've done a lot of the same stuff (removing and/or de-indexing short/no page view content, improving our site map and linking system), but scrapers continue to be our biggest issue, especially the ones we don't syndicate to. These can rank higher than us in Google as well, and we continue to try to find a way to flag them or submit removal requests without having to do each one manually.<p>This is a great write up though, it's good to see that others are trying the same things as we are.

Hi Eric,<p>Have you tried approaching Google to discuss it?

I'd like to talk to you a bit about your site. Please send me an email, I don't see an obvious contact form on your blog.... johng a t forum foundry d o t com