Panda Recovery Question

[SharewarePros]

Dear Friends,

One of my customers was hit by the Panda, we were working on improve the tiny content on several pages and the remaining pages were:

1 NOINDEX/FOLLOW

2. Removed from sitemap.xml

3. Un-linked from the site (no one page on the site link to the pour content)

As conclusion we can't see any improvement, my question is should I remove the pour content pages (404)?

What is your recommendation?

Thank you for your time

Claudio

[mediawyse]

Absolutely! Think of your site as a book. It used to be (pre-Panda) that adding new pages to your site was the right result. More pages, even low-quality pages, allowed for your site to better trigger long tail keywords which generated more traffic. This traffic may not have been super-targeted though and tended to generate very high bounce rates.

Now, post-Panda, it's clear that even a SMALL amount of low-quality, thin, or poor user experience content will drag down your entire domain. That's how Panda works -- it's a page-level quality algorithm. So pruning or removing that content is definitely a consideration to which you must give serious thought. Ask yourself: does your client's content answer a question, fulfill a need, or provides a unique viewpoint all of which work together to provide a full quality user experience? If not, then either re-write (usually a complete waste of time) or remove it completely from your site.

When Google pushed out Panda waaaaay back in 2011 they published a list of 23 questions that site owners should be asking themselves when auditing their site for content and user experience. Read this list and take a hard look at your site and content practices with an eye to understanding how Google may see your site.

Then, I'd suggest you go into Google Analytics under Behavior, choose Site Content, then All Pages, and then sort that content by Bounce Rate. Any page that has a bounce rate of 100% OR an average visit of less than 30 seconds should be reviewed closely for complete removal from your site. Even a small amount of these type of pages can drag down an entire site algorithmically.

Finally, if you do remove the pages from your site, I'd suggest a 410 GONE status code. These seem to be processed much faster than regular 404s and it's a clear sign to Google that these pages are NEVER coming back!

I hope this was helpful Claudio. Good luck with your client's site!

[SharewarePros]

Dear Casey,

Thank you for your prompt response, I want to share with you he url http://goo.gl/4QBVjR please take a look an will be welcome all your feedback

Thank you

Claudio

[Ivek99]

Hi,is this really true about this: bounce rate of 100% OR an average visit of less than 30 seconds should be reviewed closely for complete removal from your site. Even a small amount of these type of pages can drag down an entire site algorithmically.

thank you

[mediawyse]

Ivan, Panda is a page-level user experience algorithm. Ask yourself: do content pages that result in high bounce rates, low average site visits OR result in "pogosticking" (users click on the pages then immediately use the back button and return back to search results) REALLY qualify as quality pages? The answer is no, they don't.

I would urge you to visit the list of 23 questions I initially linked to above and ASK these of your current content options. Further, if you do visit this link, take a look at this quote from Amit Singhal on the same page:

"low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content."

Directly from the horse's mouth. Can't get any clearer than that.

[Ivek99]

Thank you