Which is one worst panda or penguin?

[Taiger]

Which penalty is easier to fix, and how to go about it fixing the issues.

[strilliams]

"Google Penguin is the latest update to Google's algorithm. This update is aimed at websites that are using tactics that are considered a way to game Google's searches."

"Google Panda is the change to the algorithm we see that effects a lot of people who have old sites. To understand Google Panda, it helps to understand Google's core mission. Google wants to deliver the best results for what you are searching. They do NOT want to deliver websites they consider to be low quality and this means when people go to a site from Google's search, if you go back from that search, Google notices it and pushes you down in the search rankings. Some of the factors we have seen effect sites, are poor site design, sites that don't reference their articles through links, sites that are slow to load, sites that use duplicate content over and over again. The bottom line is you need to have a well designed site and creates original content."

Above content sourced from: https://digitalfireflymarketing.com/what-difference-between-panda-and-penguin

Personally, I'd recommend hitting 2 birds with one stone and:

1. Removing any trace of suspicious techniques: cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc
2. Check your backlink profile on www.opensiteexplorer.org and for each listed link, ask yourself, "would I willingly show this to the Google webspam team".
3. Improve your site design and information architecture so that you fulfil users' desires elegantly. I've personally found that a decreasing 'bounce rate' is one of the best indications that your site experience is improving.

Hope this helps and good luck!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Both come with their own unique problems, and each target different areas. Neither is particularly easy to fix, but because Panda covers so much more than just backlinks, that it can take a long time to track down what has caused a hit.

I have worked with companies that have been in Panda and then back out within a few weeks - others, many months.

There are some great articles that can help you track down Panda and Penguin issues, so have listed them below.

Panda

• https://econsultancy.com/blog/8583-how-to-identify-and-fix-google-panda
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2069358/Google-Ask-Yourself-These-23-Questions-if-Panda-Impacted-Your-Website

Penguin

• http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-on-googles-penguin-update
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/an-seos-ultimate-post-penguin-checklist-infographic/48228/
• http://moz.com/ugc/a-theory-for-preventing-recovering-from-a-google-penguin-penalty

All of these are excellent guides that will give you information on how you can best approach these subjects. It is too large an issue to generally tackle here. I have written audits that run into dozens of pages!

Hopefully these will give you a wide range of points to look at

-Andy

[Taiger]

Thanks for your responses Matt and Andy, very useful information and I will go into them deeper to workout what is going on with my site. 

It's interesting what Andy says about older sites getting hit the mosts as we are seeing new sites with high rankings, when in the "old days" it would take ages for these sites to rank for very competitive keywords.

We have not received a Google webmaster penalty, but have been hit by one of the black and white animals. We have disavowed many links and have seen some recovery, but need to see more progress.

I'll check out the links above and see if it will help in understand what to do.

Thanks again,

ps, if anyone has any more info, do let me know.

Tai