Strange recovery from Panda

[diogenes]

I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up?

Thx

Paul

[Sean_Dawes]

One thing I want to comment on with wordpress and google is how wordpress makes blog post urls. They use dates. Google is all about freshness and this is one of the things I would change how the urls are structured in the permalink area of admin. Make sure not to use dates unless you want to for any material you do not wish to get long term traffic for.

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Paul

Have you looked deeper into your analytics - how do your traffic sources for the two sites compare- are they different? Are you getting traffic from keywords on your new site that you aren't on your old site? If so what is the bounce rate on these terms - my thoughts are you might be ranking well for some keywords that don't provide visitors with the information they are looking for. Alternatively your page could be so relevant for that search keyword that visitors don't need to dig any deeper into the new site. In this case time on page should give you a clue as to which of these it may be in this situation - is the time on page too short to read the content for you average person or not - how long does it take you to read? It might not be this but I always find looking deeper into the analytics of a website tends to hold the key, especially when you are comparing it to another site that you own in the same niche as you are in the fortunate position of having access to both sites analytics. Hope this helps.

[diogenes]

Actually my question (should have made it clearer) is why is my site ranking so much better in the past few months even though all the important analytics numbers have simultaneously been changing for the worse? It would appear that the various pundies were wrong about how Panda really works.

Paul