Need help identifying why my content rich site was hurt by the Panda Update.

[MikeATL]

Hi -

I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4) which has been heavily impacted by the Panda update. Honestly I have no idea why my Google rankings dropped off. I've hired 2 different SEO experts to look into it and no one has been able to figure it out.  My link profile is totally white hat and stronger then the majority of my competitors, I have 4000+ or so pages of unique, high quality content, am a Google News source, and publish about 5 new unique articles every day.

I ended up deleting a 100 or so thin video pages on my site, did some url reorganization (using 301s), and fixed all the broken links.  That appeared to be helping as my traffic was returning to normal. Then the bottom dropped out again.  Since Saturday my daily traffic has dropped by 50%.  I am really baffled at this point as to what to do so any help would be sincerely appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

jamescrayton2003@yahoo.com

[scanlin]

I don't have a specific answer, but some thoughts on how to look at the problem:

1. Either your site went down, or others went up. Maybe your competitors benefited some how from the recent changes in Google. So it has nothing to do with your site, but more to do with something about the other sites that now rank above you. Do you know if the set of sites above you has changed? ie are they the same ones that ranked above you before, or are there some new entrants to the top of the SERPs for your keyphrases?

2. On-page vs Off-page. I don't think that content on your site is an issue. I think the recent changes have mostly to do with off-page factors (unless you have a duplicate content issue, which I'm assuming you don't). The anchor text distribution for your home page looks a little skewed towards over-SEOd. you have 10K total links, but 3300 of them are exactly "the cardboard connection". I haven't studied where those come from (OSE says 136 linking domains) but it seems unlikely that a 'natural' link profile would include so many exact 3-word anchor texts. Maybe someone had you in a site-wide footer for a couple thousand pages and they all just got devalued?

[CPU]

Have you looked at which pages the falls in visitors are on or is it spread across the whole site? Can you see if certain keyphrases are particularly affected. You are obviously monitoring traffic but are you monitoring rankings? Did Google News previously send a lot of traffic? Are you still a Google News source?

Without more information and access to the analytics it is difficult to give a definitive answer. If it happened at the time of the panda/farmer update then I would suggest that perhaps the sites you have links from have been devalued.