Panda, rankings and other non-sense issues
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You're right. Your site and 8notes seem to be guilty of the same practices, assuming there's anything wrong with them, and yet it is ranking well. Although according to MajesticSEO, it has half the pages you have indexed (520,439 vs 944,432).
Your link profiles are significantly different. Again according to Majestic, you have way more backlinks (649,076 vs 234,122) but from half as many referring domains, IPs and subnets. You have 1/10th of the educational backlinks of 8notes. And the majority of your backlinks, roughly 55%, are nofollow whereas 90% of 8notes are the opposite (follow). 8notes seems to have more deep links as well.
Maybe it's worth looking a little more closely at your link profile?
8notes is also https. That might also have a bearing given you're both ecommerce.
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Thank you Donna! Yes, I am aware of our different back link profile. We are a commercial website, therefore we have many backlinks from hundreds of affiliates... and that could cause issues, I am aware of that. I have worked a lot with my affiliate to put nofollow links where necessary, and to not pass page rank as much as possible... But again, we are talking about issues NOT Panda related... right?
So... again, this can't explain why the first Panda in 2011 as well as the last quality update released in June (was that really Panda?) has hit us hard. I am getting convinced that it is not Panda the beast hitting us once in a while, but something else... my point is: I could be under "several" penalties, ok, I get that... I could be under some Panda penalization, or other quality penalization, and maybe Penguin to some extent (I could never find a clear relation between my traffic loss and the release of Penguin updates though)... but if I am really in the eye of Panda when that happen, back to my original question, why my competitor has never been touched by the white & black bear when its content should be much more prone to Panda than mine? That's the whole point of my conversation here and the answer I am trying to find. I am trying to find a logical explanation of why my traffic dropped with the release of Panda updates, whereas my competitor wasn't touched at all.
Thank you again for your help, appreciated!
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Thank you Kristen,
I have just put down a plan to re-architect our website that way and create "sub-categories" in the same way our competitor has done to push-up the main category pages as well (according to the "soloing" technique).
As I wrote yesterday below, this is also something clearly NOT related to Panda... just another needed tweak to the site.
Thank you again, appreciated your help!
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I think it's like the Highway Patrol.
Everyone speeds, but everyone doesn't get caught. You point to a similar web page that hasn't been penalized, but there are many who have.
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Thank you Julie for your posting and for participating in this discussion.
Well, what you say might be true, but being an algorithmic penalization that shouldn't really happen... unless the system is flawed in some way to catch the wrong guys (every time?)
Also, thin and duplicate content is so much more obvious and noticeable on our competitors that makes me completely mad trying to find a logical explanation of why me and not them!
Unless, Panda or other similar "quality" updates are looking now for something else nobody has clearly understood yet...
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Donna, as a side note, I have no idea where Majestic pulled out over 944,000 indexed pages for our website. By spidering it with Screaming Frog we couldn't crawl more than 387,726 pages... unless they crawled all links dynamically generated by our internal search engine, which by the way, is blocked by the robots.txt file, therefore all those dynamic pages should be not counted.
Also, on the actual Google index, if you use the site: command, you'll see that Google has indexed just 123,000 pages from our site (because most of them are canonicalized), whereas you'll see over 545,000 for 8notes.com.
Actual data seems to be a little different...
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I wonder if "indexed URLs" is an accurate label. I looked at the URLs Majestic found, and a significant number are redirected files, images, and mp3s.
You have a perplexing problem Fabrizo...
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Yes, I agree with you, I don't see much logic beyond that. Of course, if they also count images, we have hundreds of thousands... we are a pretty big website, what do you expect, right?
My website situation makes people "scratch their heads", all the time...
I'd really like to know from you if you see anything on my website that could trigger a "Panda" kind of of penalization, compared to my mentioned competitor above (8nots.com). So far, no one on this thread has given me any hints on that.
Thank you again for your insights, I appreciated it very much.
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"I'd really like to know from you if you see anything on my website that could trigger a "Panda" kind of penalization, compared to my mentioned competitor above (8nots.com)."
_Key phrase being "compared to my mentioned competitor". Cause yes, I can see things that might trigger a Panda penalization. You have a lot of overlapping / duplicate content but so do your competitors. _
The only thing that comes to mind is if there's a threshold you're exceeding that your competitors aren't by virtue of the fact that you many (and more) ways to tag/filter your content, for example, genres, specials, and ensembles.
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Thank you Donna for your reply.
Well, I see what you mean, but if you look how those drill-downs are handled on our site, all pages generated dynamically that way are excluded by robots.txt. That's why I am puzzled to see the competitor's website having a similar kind of browsing without worrying about duplicate issues. Also, I apply any possible rule to reduce duplicate content as much as I can even for those few indexed pages such as the use of canonicals (when parameters are present in the URLs) or the use of rel="prev" or rel="next" for paginated content.
Please, let me know if that's what you meant or I am missing anything here.
Thank you again very much!
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Yes, I see what you've done with genres, specials, etc. That looks good.
If I compare you to 8notes, you've got a lot more segmentation when it comes to instruments and those pages are NOT noindexed.
For example, you have 29 different versions of the "Dust in the Wind" sheet music page, all very similar. Here are a few:
- http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-328374.html (Dust in the Wind sheet music for violin)
- http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-328387.html (Dust in the Wind sheet music for trumpet solo)
- http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-301822.html (Dust in the Wind sheet music for choir and piano)
- http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-170563.html (Dust in the Wind sheet music for guitar (chords))
- http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-26501.html (Dust in the Wind sheet music for piano solo)
- http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-119157.html (Dust in the Wind sheet music for piano solo V2)
NOT noindexed doesn't mean they're getting indexed by Google. When I did a site command for http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-328387.html (Dust in the Wind sheet music for trumpet solo), it wasn't returned as a search result. When I searched for ""dust in the wind" trumpet solo virtualsheetmusic" it was not returned as a search result.
So maybe you need to consider noindexing all the instrument variations as well, but still offer them up on the site for visitors. I'd check analytics to see if anyone's landing on those pages from search. As I said earlier, I can understand why you'd want them indexed but if they're causing you more harm than good, you might have to balance that out.
I love a challenge but that's the best I can come up with Fabrizo.
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Thank you Donna!
Yes, I am aware we have much more segmentation, but why in the heck that should be bad? And, more importantly, why that should be worse than having much more actual duplicate content than they have if you consider they never use canonicals nor noindex to avoid duplicate issues.
Take for example one of their instrumental pages like this one:
https://www.8notes.com/violin/sheet_music/?orderby=5d
You can order the results by title, artist, level, etc... they don't even care to have duplicate issues by canonicalizing the URL when parameters are added to it. What do you think may be worse for Panda? I am just asking, I'd really like to understand what can be worse.
They have similar issues with their product pages, if you click on their tabs at the top, parameters get added to the URLs but no canonical is present there. We do have canonicals instead, as by Google's manual.
As for having duplicate titles (because of different instrumental versions), yes, that's something we have tackled in the past several times, tried to remove the duplicates (noindexed) but didn't help. I mean, we didn't notice any change by doing that waiting several months after the change. We just got much lower traffic because of that, but nothing positive.
Also, have a look at our competitor how many different version they have for some of the most popular titles:
Bach's Air on G: https://www.8notes.com/scores/air_on_the_g_string_bach_johann_sebastian.asp
Bach's Minuet: https://www.8notes.com/scores/minuet_bach_johann_sebastian.asp
Beethoven's Fur Elise: https://www.8notes.com/scores/fur_elise_beethoven_ludwig_van.asp
Beethoven's Ode to Joy: https://www.8notes.com/scores/ode_to_joy_(9th_symphony)_beethoven_ludwig_van.asp
Now, I understand we may have many more titles than them, our catalog is much bigger than theirs, but still they have similar issues, right? If so, why they have a very privileged spot in SERPs compared to us? I am sorry to sound like a broken record, but I am still not convinced the problem here is all this...
If you have the chance, I am eager to know your after thoughts... thank you again very much for your help and time Donna. Appreciated very much.
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Oh, I also forgot to make you note that when we have more than one version for the same title and same instrument, we add a canonical to the first version.
For example, both items below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-170563.html
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-119157.html
Are canonicalized to this item:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-180308.html
Thanks
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I agree with your observations. I don't see why you'd suffer a Panda penalty and your competition wouldn't.
My only other observation (again, not Panda related) is 8notes have made much more extensive use of link title and alt tags to reinforce their keywords and subject matter.
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Thank you Donna, glad to know that I am not completely mad!!
As for the fact they have done a great job with title and alt tags, anchor texts, I agree, but you know what? That's another realm where I became paranoid for, the so called "over-optimization"... We used to have perfectly optimized titles, descriptions, H1,s ALTs, anchor text, etc... the whole enchilada perfectly optimized, then we began to lose rankings for an unknown reason (Panda? Over-optimization? Too many pages? What else?), and I began becoming paranoid about everything, so we started "de-optimizing" here and there, etc... Here is additional proof that when things are NOT clear, we all become paranoid and lose control on everything.
I may also add that some of the blame should be probably given to the SEO industry that has spread a lot of fear about all this stuff, without giving an absolute "quantification" of what means "too much optimization", or... too much duplicate content, or too much thing content, or too much bad links, etc... how much is "too much"? That's the question for which I am afraid there's not easy answer, but maybe they scared us too much about all this.
Thank you again, and please, let me know if you have any more ideas.
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Thank you very much Julie, I really appreciated your words. I have wondered so many times what Google think of "quality", and why before us there are always very low quality websites distributing the exact same music for free (often copyrighted music, which is illegal) and most of those sites are full of ads. Is that quality?
We could open a new discussion thread on the "What is quality to Google?" topic, I think it'd be very popular!
Thank you again.
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