Need some urgent Panda advice. Open discussion about recovering from the Panda algorithm.

[VisualSense]

I have a site that has been affected by Panda, and I think I have finally found the problem.

When I created this site in the year 2006, I bought content without checking it. Recently, when I went through the site I found out that this content had many duplicates around the web. Not 100% exact, but close to.

The first thing I did is ask my best writer to rewrite these topics, as they are a must on my site. This is a very experienced writer, and she will make the categories and subpages outstanding.

Second thing I did was putting a NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta in place for the pages I determined being bad. They haven't been de-indexed yet.

Another thing I recently did is separate other languages and move these over to other domains (with 301's redirecting the old locations to the new.) This means that the site now has a /en/ directory in the URL which is no longer used.

With this in mind I was thinking to relocate the NEW content, and 301 the old (to preserve the juice for a while.) For example:

http://www.mysite.com/en/this-is-a-pandalized-page/

301 to

http://www.mysite.com/this-is-the-rewritten-page/

The benefits of doing this are:

• decreasing the amounts of directories in the URL

• getting rid of pages that are possibly causing trouble

• getting fresh pages added to the site

Now, the advice I am looking for is basically this: Do you agree with the above? Or don't you agree? If you don't, please be so kind to include a reason with your answer. If you do, and have any additional information, or would like to discuss, please go ahead

Thanks,

Giorgio

PS: Is it proven that Panda is now a running update? Or is it still periodically executed?

[Dan-Petrovic]

Panda still runs in installments, not continually. Rewriting content sounds like a massive task, hope it's worth it (e.g. is it better to write new stuff instead?). Have you got any pagination present on the site or indexable search results? We are under assumption here that you are certain that the problem is caused by Panda filter and not other factor and that your page layout and ads are not the cause of the drop or that the problem is not link related. I see no problem with 301 of pages with duplicate content to a new better content page. Sounds like something users might appreciate as well.

[VisualSense]

The reason I know for a fact its Panda, is that the site lost its rankings (and thus about 60% of its traffic) end of February 2011.

Since then I managed to get slightly better rankings by adding loads of content and rewriting some categories (with thin pages, and not too many sub pages) from the bottom up, however, I never realized I had the content I currently located, which is terrible in terms of quality, and has duplicates all over the web. Like I said, this content dates back to 2006 when I didn't have a clue about SEO.

It's not that the content will be rewritten, based on what's there. I just told my writer to write about topic X and topic Y and make it very informative, so I will go from bad to really good pages.

Moving the new pages to new locations and getting rid of the others "infected" pages seems the best in my opinion, despite the age of these pages and the occasional link to them.

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