Panda'd - and I think I know how to fix it...

[reallygoodstuff]

Hi,

I have a non-core site that seems to have been affected by a Panda refresh in late December  http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012

Anyway, I couldn't figure out for the longest time why this site, which is full of high-quality, expert-level content would get dinged -- i made several moves to try and eliminate duplicate content -- even though I couldn't find evidence of the duplicate content, but it's a wordpress site so there's lots of opportunities to accidentally introduce it through archives, tags and whatnot.

The classic SEO mistake I was making was I was forgetting about a type of post we were doing to facilitate one of our email campaigns.  On most, sites there's always something you aren't optimizing, and that's the stuff that can really create unintended issues in google, because the decisions made on those pieces, is often more operational toward the other campaigns, than strategic to search.

these posts, are thin little articles, written by humans, but the text is actually submitted to another external site, published there and then recreated as content that the email campaign links to. These posts are segregated from the normal feed on the wordpress site, and the last time I had reviewed this content, we were not using a method for creating that involved publishing it to facebook first.

But, OK, so I'm going to stop indexing this content, that's a given. I believe that is the Panda issue -- I could be wrong, but it makes sense, since otherwise the site is maybe the least likely site to be affected by Panda that I've ever been involved with.

Do I do anything else, after fixing a Panda issue? Is there a reconsideration request for this or something. Should I send a singing telegram to Cutts?

I researched a few articles, and there wasn't much on what to do after you fixed it, but to wait. Just wondering if anyone else who fixed a Panda thang, utilized any communication channel to let google know. thanks!

[jesse-landry]

Well, skipping ahead to the "what to do now?" question, I'd say you are correct in that there is nothing to do but wait. If it was a manual penalty, you would have a notice in your Webmaster Tools indicating it as such.

If it is algorithmic (and it sure sounds like it is from what you've described) then all you can do is wait. This process can take anywhere from a week to 2 months and seems to be a bit of a crap shoot. I will say, from my experience I've seen these types of fixes get resolved in more the 2-3 week range but have heard of it taking longer. A singing telegram might be nice but I think Matt would most likely just cross his arms and give off a simple fake smile, thank them and close the door.

This is oddly symbolic to the way the Google Webspam Team punks us SEO guys on the reg.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Previously you would wait until the next Panda refresh to see if your website was unflagged from the algo penalty. A few months ago, they made Panda a rolling algorithm so you should see whether your site is fixed after its next crawl/reindex.

No need for a reconsideration request but a singing telegram would probably get Cutt's attention if your site doesn't rebound in a week or so

Cheers, Oleg

[julianhearn]

I would be interested to hear of the sites that have resolved the problem with Panda. I can hardly find any examples of Panda recovery examples.