Moving Part of a Website to a Subdomain to Remove Panda Penalty?

[sbrault74]

I have lots of news on my website and unlike other types of content, news posts quickly become obsolete and get a high bounce rate.

I have reasons to think that the news on my website might be partly responsible for a Panda penalty so I'm not sure. There are over 400 news posts on the blog from the last 4 years so that's still a lot of content.

I was thinking of isolating the news articles on a subdomain (news.mywebsite.com)

If the news play a part in the Panda penalty, would that remove it from the main domain?

[julianhearn]

My understanding is that panda is about low quality and thin content. Are your news posts either thin or low quality content? If not why worry?

I can understand the problem with bounce rate, but two points: 1) your article might still be interesting for the person who searched for it. 2) you can promote your latest news stories at the bottom of the post and in the right nav, e.g. look at how the dailymail.co.uk right nav is filled with juicy news stories which I'm sure increase the pages read on their site and decreases the bounce rate, e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2326088/Prince-Harry-delights-staff-surprise-visit-Chelsea-Flower-Show.html

[sbrault74]

It's not low or thin content but I thought Google was using the bounce rate as an indicator of low quality content.

[sbrault74]

http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/category/news

[generalzod]

Not necessarily. I run a news website that covers current affairs. And as my site is in a small niche but has good domain authority, it ranks well for many random search terms. My bounce rate is about 83% but still ranks #1 for all my main keywords.

Naturally, I'd prefer if it were lower, but it does show that it's not a critical factor. I'm pretty sure it counts a lot more when Google calculates your quality score in AdWords however.