All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?

[apogeecorp]

Good morning,

Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk.

Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS.

Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly?

Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500).

Look forward to your responses!

[MattJanaway]

Removing duplicate content won't necessarily increase your search positioning. It will however, give your site the foundations needed to start a (relevant, natural and organic) link building campaign - which if done correctly should increase your SERP's.

You should see content as part of the foundations. Good quality and unique content is usually needed in order to be rankable but it doesn't make you rank necessarily.

Having good quality unique content will also minimise the chances of being hit by an algo update.

[Chris.Menke]

Hi Apogee

It can  certainly take several months for your pages to drop from the index so if you've removed the pages in GWT and removed the URLs they'll eventually fall out of the index.

Was the site penalized and that's why you removed/replaced the dupe content--meaning were you ranking well and then, all of a sudden your rankings tumbled or are you just now working to build up your rankings?  This is an important distinction because there are few examples of sites that received a panda penalty (thin/duplicate content) coming back to life.

If you don't think you've been penalized and you're just working to optimize your site and pull it up in the rankings for the first time, consider how unique your content is and how you're communicating your unique value proposition to the visitor.  Keep focusing on those things.

Also, your back link profile looks a bit seedy--in fact, your problem could well be penguin-related.  If you were penalized and it was a penguin penalty, you should be looking to clean up some of those links and working to build new ones from more thematically relevant sites.

[apogeecorp]

The site has not received a manual penalty from Google.

However traffic and generic keywords fell when the previous developer decided to copy all of the products directly from our other site top4office.com.

The site was ranking pretty well in the past. Do you have any kind of ETA of when the updates will take effect

[Chris.Menke]

That's hard to say. A recent history and link profile like yours won't give your site the authority it needs for index updates at the frequency you would like. It's also possible that a hole has been dug that you cannot pop out of simply by reversing the actions of your past SEO.

You really need a thorough survey of your site, it's history, and it's analytics to determine the extent of the current problem and the best path to take to get out of it.  Absent that, shed what bad back links that you can and develop a strategy to build visitor engagement with your brand.

[EGOL]

I've had two sites with Panda problems.  One had two copies of hundreds of pages in both .html and .pdf format (to control printing format).   The other had a few hundred pages of .edu press releases republished verbatim at their request or with their permission.

Both of these sites had site-wide drops on Panda dates.

We used rel=canonical on the .pdf documents on one site using .htaccess.  On the site with the .edu press releases we used noindex/follow.

Both sites recovered to former rankings a few weeks after the changes were made.

If you had a genuine Panda problem and only a Panda problem then a couple months might be about the amount of time needed to see a recovery.

[apogeecorp]

Thanks for your responses. We are talking over 3000 pages of duplicate content which we have no removed and replaced with actual relevant unique and engaging content.

We completed all the content changes on the 6/06/2013. Im thinking to leave it for a while and see whether our rank improves within the next month or so. We may consider moving the site to another domain since its features lots of high quality content.

Thoughts?