Does this make sense to recover from panda?

[DaveMri]

Hello guys, our website was pandalized on 9/27/2012 and we haven't been able to recover since then.

I've fixed as much as possible when it comes to poor content, and we have been getting high quality links consistently for the past 3-4 months.

Our blog had some duplicate content issues due to categories, tags, feeds, etc. I solved those problems before the past 2 refreshes without success.

I'm considering moving the blog to a subdomain, more than PR, I'm interested in recovering from panda, and let the blog grow on its own. What do you think about that?

[jhinchcliffe]

I agree with it, I think a fresh new blog with a new subdomain will help fix the issue. Aside from loosing PR on the blog, I don't see any real issues with it. My advice is go for it!

Hope that helps!

[loopyal]

Dave, are you sure that was panda?

What does your webmaster tools account tell you?

Have you fixed all duplicate titles, descriptions and pages?

What traffic have you lost?

Was it only google or yahoo and bing as well?

Here are some observations:

First, look at your link profile - it doesn't look good to me

I didn't see a link from your blog to your home page

You have no terms of use link on the blog pages

There are 2 privacy policies. One for the blog, and one for the main site, but that policy is on the truste site

The privacy policy on the blog says nothing about cookies, or collected email addresses.

The Business Resources page has no content the search engines can see.

The "Our Programs" menu item does nothing

Some pages don't have much content.

[DaveMri]

Yes, for sure panda, that's what webmaster tools and analytics say. The blog does link to our main site, but only from the /blog home page. I did this on purpose, I didn't want hundreds of internal links with the same anchor text.

I'll have a look at our privacy policy on the blog and might replace it with the one from truste.

Regarding the business resources page, I agree that the content doesn't offer much for Google to see, so I might consider "noindex" for it.

Traffic loss, most of our organic traffic from Google. We are doing well on Yahoo and Bing (improving every week actually).

The poor links you see come from negative SEO done against us in may '12. Thankfully most of those comments are nofollow.

Thank you. Please keep the ideas coming!

[DaveMri]

Thank you for your comment, I'm highly considering this move.

[loopyal]

Subdomaining will take time.

I subdomained a lot of content, and almost 2 months later, google is still looking for the content on the main domain, still reporting it as missing, still marking site health poorly because of those pages, and still showing them all in both places in the search index.

One possibility after seeing the new pages indexed, is to use the webmaster tools delete URL feature. You only have a few hundred blog pages, so that won't take long.

After two months, I wish I could tell you that it fixed my problem, but it hasn't.

Subdomaining the blog is not likely to hurt you. Remember you will need to set it up so you can have a separate robots file and a separate sitemap.

Also,

1. be sure that you've covered all the bases, that mainsite links that point to the blog now have the fully qualified URL.

2. be sure that any links on the blog that point to the main site are also fully qualified URLs, and not relative, therefore making a broken link.

[DaveMri]

I have in mind doing 301 redirects.