Hit by Panda 4.1 and it couldn't be more wrong!

[followuk]

Hi,

I'm scratching my head with this one, I have a website with around 40 pages of unique content produced by a professional copywriter who works magazines and PR agencies - each page has around 750/1000 words - according to Google the reading age is intermediate as you would expect from a good copywriter, I have anchor points jumping around the page to information the user shows an interest in - this happens I have video recording and heat maps.

I also receive 100s and on some pages 1000s of social shares from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and G+. I wanted to build a site the way Google wants you to so I have done no link build at all, everything focused onsite so I just spent the last 2 months making the whole site responsive for mobile and tablet devices - I also spent time getting the load time down and 'was' in the process of hooking into a CDN for extra performance.

Ive done everything I can to make the site just good and its reflected in the social sharing and natural links from sites such as huffington post.

On the 23rd my sites rankings which were solid for over 2 years have crashed, but what's worse is ive been dropped and replaced with sites using the same tactics as the Payday Loan industry, and it seems great favouritism has been given to sites containing Adsense - I can see ranking one page sites with less than 300 words content and 3/4 ad units above the fold and sites which have taken chunks of content off Wikipedia and rank.

Thumbs up Google, great job.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Do you fancy PM'ing me details of your site & search terms for me to take a look? I would be interested to see cases like this.

-Andy

[JVRudnick]

LIke iQ above, yes, I'd like to see the URL too...if you'd PM me too I'll take a look/see and get back to you as well...

Jim

[followuk]

No worries,

I can share here for you to look at and to help others who may also be interested (or disagree).

So the domain is Followuk.co.uk and seems the whole site has taken a hit but to make this more targeted im looking at the page Followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays - and the target term for this page is -> Bank Holidays 2015 in Google UK and although this may seem a small term this term and its variations receive millions of queries a month.

I could except the drop if it was related to the link profile as currently a little weak but according to my analytic's traffic dropped on the 23rd (inline with the panda rollout) which targets thin/low quality sites if im correct.

Now where it becomes interesting is im not complaining about not being higher up, but the fact I WAS on page 1 and had been for over 2 years, on the 23rd the page was demoted to page 6/7 while thin/low quality sites have been given higher positions or stayed neutral.

In this case the Panda update looks to be doing more damage then good for example take the second result - http://www.year-planner-calendar.wanadoo.co.uk/2015-public-holidays-bank-holidays-bank-holiday-dates.htm

Surely this comes under the types of sites Panda is looking to target -> thin, low quality, advertising heavy, spammy etc - BUT Google's algo thinks this is the second most relevant 'quality' site it should show to it's millions of users querying those terms and its not the only site like that in the top 10.

And I just want to say I dont think I should be number 1 or 2, 3 because there are better sites which deserve those positions but do I think I should be in the top 10... Yes.

I would love to know if Google thought the above was the right thing for the algo to do because to me looking at it as if I was an outsider (which I try) this is a straight out.

Fail.

[followuk]

Hi JVRudnick,

No worries, see the above post and thanks for showing an interest in my problem/discussion.

[TheVibe]

Hi there, I know that I can't help but just wanted to let you know that we are in a similar situation. We have an e-commerce site (so slightly different) but we have no dodgy back links, have been as clean as possible and each and every description we write is original. We have a lot of content and none of it is duplicated anywhere on web.

On Sep 23 we dropped from #1 or #2 down to page 2. Yet in our place are some sites with copied content. The top 2 spots seem to have gone to newer sites which do have original descriptions which has me wondering if we should be changing our product descriptions on a regular basis (any ideas?)

One last note if this is also about customer behaviour we have pretty good interaction, a lowish bounce rate and good engagement for a retail site.

So like you I am at a loss to see why we have been penalised by an change which is supposed to help small sites with original content and good engagement!

[followuk]

Thanks for letting me know others are experiencing the same. If I find anything interesting I will be sure to let you know on this thread - Likewise if you notice anything interesting would be appreciated if you could come back and share also.