How do I recover from Panda penalties?

[WebSupportGuy42]

This post is deleted!

[earlyadopter]

If you think your site may have been hit by a Panda penalty, the first step is to verify that it’s a Panda-related penalty, and not another ranking drop. First check your Google Webmaster Tools for warnings from Google that might indicate another kind of penalty, including Panguin or manual action. Then verify that the date of rankings or traffic drops lines up with a date that Panda ran.

If you’ve verified Panda, then you or your SEO team needs to do a complete site audit against the list of Panda triggers above and determine which aspects of your site may be causing the penalty. By far and away the most common cause of a Panda penalty is duplicate content. Spot check your content and run Google exact match searches to see if that content is duplicated across the internet. This will also reveal internal duplicate content issues.

Make sure that almost every page of your site has unique content, a substantial amount (at least 100 words on the low end) and that your site uses canonical tags to avoid internal duplicate issues. Ensure that the site has no more than 3 ads on a page, and that those ads don’t push the unique page content below the scroll (a substantial amount of content should be visible, not just a line or two). This also means looking for site template content blocks that could appear to be ads to Googlebot, such as subscribe forms and internal banners.

[WebSupportGuy42]

Sorry to sound harsh, but (a) did you read my question in full, and (b) is this a cut and paste answer? Because it's not really very helpful.

I said that my site lost 80% of its traffic over the weekend of 27-29 September 2012. This means it's either Panda or EMD. It's not EMD (or if it is, it's a pretty unfair EMD penalty on a site with around 100 quality posts.

I said that I received no warnings or notices from Google and that I have checked every single post and page on the site for duplicate content using Copyscape. I also said Google has confirmed no manual penalty.

There is no list of Panda triggers "above", unless you are referring to my own checklist of the things I've already looked at.

Almost all my posts are long and detailed (many over 1000 words). The shortest post on my site would be 150 words. I run minimal advertising, and no more than one ad on any page or post. I don't have subscribe forms or internal banners.

I get that you appear to be from an SEO company and I appreciate you are trying to help me, really I do. And I thank you for taking the time. But I have heard all this before, over and over, on other forums. I am posting here because I desperately need expert help. I have been working on recovery for two months now and have done everything anyone has ever suggested to try to recover my site. I'm near the end of the process (I hope), not at the beginning.

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[mediawyse]

To be blunt, it's unrealistic for you to expect to receive the one thing you need to recover from Panda in this forum: a detailed site audit to identify all PANDA triggers.

If you are serious about getting to the bottom of the issue, I'd recommend scheduling a penalty consultation with a professional.

What is clear from your graphic is that you did appear to be hit by EITHER or BOTH Panda 21 or the EMD update which was pushed through in September. You also have made what appears to be substantial changes to your on-site content and your backlink profile.

However, that doesn't tell I or any SEO professional for that matter ANYTHING about these metrics (all of which are incredibly popular on Panda-afflicted sites):

• bounce rates greater than 60%

• average site visIts of less than 90 seconds

• slow page speed times (or pedestrian scores on the Google Insight speed tool)

• a very weak backlink profile (with a PR 1 and a DA of 23, I'm sure this is an issue)

• a lack of social signals (check out http://howmanyshares.com/, your totals are pretty low)

• your current attention to on-page content and user experience

Further, we also don't know if you used the Disavow Link Tool correctly, Disavowed the RIGHT links, or fully identified the internal linking issue you "think" caused the problems.

Only a full site audit by an independent is going to find full answers to the above.

Finally, I can't find you ranking ANYWHERE for the phrase "travel tips Thailand" which is your EMD domain. So explain to me again why you don't believe you were affected by this update as well? Or have you always not ranked for your own domain?

That's my two-cents. Definitely consider going the professional route. Google has already pushed through TWO Panda updates/refreshes since September. So if you haven't noticed an improvement since then, you clearly still have issues to work on.

Good luck and Happy Holidays just the same!