Whether our shared articles caused Panda hit to our high quality site

[BobGW]

Hello,

We are a quality site hit by Panda

Our article collection:

http://www.nlpca(dot)com/DCweb/NLP_Articles.html

is partially articles written by the site owners and partially articles that are elsewhere on them web.

We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.

Could this be why we were hit by Panda? And if so, what do we do? We've dropped way down in rank but have worked our way half-way back up.

Two of our main keywords are:

NLP

NLP Training

Thanks!

[EGOL]

We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that.

Google probably does not know and certainly does not care.  If you have duplicate content on your site you are a potential target.

What type of link-building have you been doing?  You might have been hit by the overoptimization penalty.

I was republishing some third-party content on a couple of my sites.  I deleted most of it and no indexed the rest.  Cut off your foot to save your arse.

[BobGW]

Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Is that enough to save our arse? Or is some deletion necessary?

I assume if we are not first in google for the content and title of an article, it is a potential duplicate content problem, correct? For example, if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?

Any advice is appreciated. You're one of the best EGOL.

[stubby]

Perhaps you could add a link to the original source on some of these where you have the permission.  This should send a signal to google that you are showing it on your site for the convenience of users, but it is from a different source.

[EGOL]

Can we no-index all the duplicate stuff? Or is some deletion necessary?

On one of my sites I deleted a lot and noindexed followed everything else that was a duplicate.  We saw rankings recover in about a month.

On another site i had a lot of .pdf documents that were used to control printing of graphics.  We used rel=canonical on them.  That works very very slowly to remove them from the index.  We are seeing slow recovery on that site.

if I take the first 2 sentences of an article, and type it into google, if someone is showing up above us, we need to no-index that article?

If the article belongs to someone else then I would noindex or delete.  (Just saying what I would do it if was on my site).  If it was my content I would set up a google + profile and use rel=author and rel=me to attribute them to a verified author.

[BobGW]

Hi EGOL,

When is no-indexing enough and when would you suggest deletion?

[EGOL]

I don't know.  Everything that I have done is an experiment.

If you are really scared, delete... if you have some tolerance for uncertainty then play around with noindex or canonical.     I deleted from a really important site.... used canonical where I the ranking loss was small and the risk was not jugular.

[BobGW]

Hi EGOL,

We are getting a lot of traffic off of some of these articles, so the site owners are not sure they want to no-index them just in case that's not causing the problem. Our rankings have come up from 40 to 26 on our main term, and similar for other terms, even though we still have duplicate content.  We were originally at 19 before a big drop in November/December

How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.

What would you suggest I let the owner's know? Do you see further risk in future panda updates?

My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles, no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles. I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.

However, it's not my decision, your thoughts?

[EGOL]

You have some valid points to consider... things seem to be improving and the articles that you might cut do pull in some traffic.

I can't tell you how to make your decision but here is how I made mine..

I had hundreds of republished articles but a lot more that I had written myself.  Deleting lots of republished articles would cut my traffic and cut my income.  Noindexing them would cut my traffic and cut my income.  However, although those were serious losses they were small in comparison to other content on my site.  So, knowing that google does not like duplicate content I got rid of them.  There is still lots of great content on my site, visitors still find stuff to read, I know which of the things that I cut I should author a customized version for my own site.

The upside....  My site is more compact but still has thousands of content pages and the content that remains should be a lot stronger.  After making the cuts my rankings, income and traffic increased.  Not quite to previous levels but back to nice numbers.

I have reduced risk and am pleased with that.  Everything that I cut was redirected to similar content.  The most valuable of what was cut will be replaced with custom content with 301 redirects from the old content.

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How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes.

What from this is unique?  Definitely keep that.  Keep what is not struggling in Google. Keep what is essential to your site but replace with better that you create yourself.

Do you see further risk in future panda updates?

Yep... that's why I cut off my foot.

My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles,

YES... In the past I wanted all of my content to be anonymously written.  I have changed my mind on that and used rel=author on the best stuff.

no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles.

heh....   Here I would be chopping off two of those sites and merging them into one.  I would have done that years ago before panda was ever heard of.

I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops.

I agree.