I think this website has been hit by Panda, but I would appreciate your opinion

[teconsite]

I've been asked to check a possible SEO problem with a website, that has been loosing organic traffic during more than 2 years. I have attached a screen capture from analytics, showing how the organic traffic impact.

This website publishes over 15 articles per week, and 12 of them are news with less than 150 words. I think that maybe Panda is hitting the website because of these practice. You can check the website: crazyminds.es

I would like to know your opinion about the cause of this lost of organic traffic.

On  January, 21st  2013 they changed the website design, but the lost of traffic seems to have started before that date.

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If panda is hitting the website, what should be the best way to correct this situation? They have began now to write news with more than 200 words, but what happens with the old news? Maybe a no-index tag? blocked by robots? how should they manage those?

Thank you!

organictraffic.jpg

[MarieHaynes]

This is a question that would take a few hours to answer properly. Here are my brief thoughts.

What you've described with the short news articles sounds like Panda fodder for sure to me. If they're republishing news stories without adding value of their own then this is not a good idea. Too many of these can cause Panda to demote the entire site (not just the news articles.) In most cases I'd noindex content like this. Sometimes you can consolidate content into a thorough piece of content, but usually either noindexing or removing the content is best.

Also, it's not the number of words that matters. If they decided to write 1000 word articles that were essentially repeating what could be found on other news sites this would also be thin content. If they produce content that they want to have in the Google index, then Google has to have a reason to send readers to their content rather than to the hundreds of other people who wrote about the same news story.

[richdan]

I took a quick look at this domain.

While there does seem to be a few duplicate content issues my hunch is that it is more likely to be due to some technical issues.

I would first go take a look in Google Search Console and check whether Google is reporting any crawl, sitemap or robots.txt  issues.

If that doesn't show any issues then you may need to get a full technical audit by a reputable SEO

[MarieHaynes]

I just noticed one other thing that could potentially be an issue. You've got wp/includes blocked by robots.txt. If this is where your javascript lies, then it's a good idea to actually allow Google to crawl this directory.

[teconsite]

Hi Marie,

Thanks for your anwser.
The news they are publising are being created by them. Not just a copy and paste from other sites, created 100% by them, but those news are just 3 or 4 parragraphs long.

I have checked that there are 19 resources blocked in 3185 pages (js files as you said). I can tell them to let googlebot explore the wp-includes directory, to avoid this issue. Do you really think this can cause such a big effect?

And finally, robots.txt file has also a Crawl-delay:30. Search console show that as a warning. What do you think, should we remove that? It shouldn't be an issue... but never knows...

Thank you so much!

[teconsite]

Hi Danny,

google search console shows this:

• 14527 indexed pages
• 19 resources blocked (js files, wp-includes is being blocked by robots.txt)

Errors, desktop:

• 3 server errors
• 1 soft 404 error
• 51 404 errors

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Errors, news:
4 errors: article fragmented and article too short.

sitemap.xml (146 warnings)
14439 urls, sent
13886 urls, indexed

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No security problems.

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No more issues, I would like to know whay you say it comes from a technical problem... I think there must be something that is making you think that way. I would appreciate your opinion on this issue. Thank you so much!

[MarieHaynes]

Here's more info on blocking javascript and the effects it can have on ranking:

https://yoast.com/google-panda-robots-css-js/

It's certainly possible that it's affecting the site, but there could be other issues as well.

Regarding the news articles, the number of words is not what matters most but whether these are useful to people. If most of these have very low user engagement, then they could possibly cause Panda to affect the whole site.