The better my blog gets, the lower my rankings!
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My blog was hit by Google Panda on July 21. My rankings dropped dramatically overnight. Nothing I do is helping. In fact, the day my guest post was published on one of the biggest blogs in my niche (DA over 70) my Google impressions dropped to an all time low and then got worse. (250 impressions and 12 clicks) You can see the first drop and the second drop in these screenshots and yes Google Webmasters and Google Analytics match.
http://tinypic.com/r/2dvtvlj/5
I am getting more fans, subscribers, traffic etc but my Google traffic just gets worse. I would really like to get some organic traffic! But I have no idea why this is happening. I checked manual actions and there is nothing. I cleaned up crawl errors and duplicate content. I get several backlinks a week within my niche from high authority sites. I just don't get it and I am very discouraged.
What should I do?
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...the day my guest post was published on one of the biggest blogs in my niche (DA over 70) my Google impressions dropped to an all time low...
Giving your content away is creating new competitors and feeding existing competitors. This is just like giving Goliath a club to beat you with and giving Google a reason to demote the rankings of your site for duplicate content.
Have the courage to not give your content away. Don't give it to anyone. Post in only on your own site. That will bring visitors to you instead of to your competitors. It sounds like you have fans who visit your site and will spread the word about it for you naturally.
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The easiest fastest thing to do may be to noindex those posts on your site that have copies showing on other sites and then just work on creating new content.
If you take a 10-word chunk text from each of your posts (or posts that have stopped receiving traffic) and do a search for each chunk in Gooogle within quotation marks and someone else's site shows up for that search above yours, then you should either ask the other site to remove your content, ask them to link back to your site with a followed link, or noindex that page on your site.
I know it's not fun to have to give up on content you may have worked hard at creating but when you let stronger sites than yours publish the same content that's published on your own site, they're often going to win out and yours will appear as the duplicate content to google. As EGOL said, don't do that.
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Actually this is really terrible advice. I am not giving content away. The guest post was original content and only on that other blog. I got over 100 subscribers and 100 new Facebook likes from that guest post and my traffic is up. The backlinks from that guest post are also great because the DA of that site is 73. And this other blog is not a competitor. It is a supporter of my blog and that support has earned me a pretty penny.
My problem is Google Panda.
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Why are you assuming that my guest post was not original content? It was. There are no duplicate content issues whatsoever. The google traffic going down the day my guest post was published was just a coincidence. My point is Google Panda has hit my site unfairly and nothing is working to get my rankings back up.
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Often, a panda penalty reflects duplicate content issues and as you mentioned, you did have such issues--how bad they were or how well cleaned up they are you hadn't made clear. If content that you've had published on other sites is not also published on your own site, then of course, that won't be an issue for you but such couldn't be ruled out that from your question. You might look through these articles for
- The 10 Days of Google Panda - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
- Are You Making These 7 Panda-Punishing Content Mistakes? | Search Engine Journal
Something to think about--domain authority tells not the whole story of the quality of a link coming from that domain. If you're getting a couple of links a week from one domain over a long period of time, there's a lot more you should know about that site than just the DA (I'm not saying that you don't, but only that you should) and that you may not be able to rule out a penguin issue.
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I cleaned up the dup content which was from archive subpages and a few duplicate title tags.
The site with the DA of 73 gets 4 million unique hits a month and is one of the top personal finance blogs in the US. There are no negatives to backlinks from this amazing site.
Thanks for the two Panda related links.
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And keep an eye out for sweeping generalities--there's not much in SEO that is 100% black or white.
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