Panda Update: Need your expertise...

[gbssinc]

Hi all, After Panda update our website lost about 45% of it's traffic from Google. It wasn't an instant drop mostly it happened gradually over the last 5 months. Our keywords (all of them except the domain name) started to lose positions from top #10 to now 40+ and all recovery attempts we have done so far didn't really help. At this moment it would be great to get some advice from the top experts like you here.

What we have done so far is that We have gone through the all pages and removed the duplicate / redundant ones. We have refresh the content on the main pages and also all pages now have an canonical tags. Our website is www.PrintCountry.com.

Thank you very much in advance for your time.

[john4math]

Usually, what's good for the user is good for Google.  I'm a little confused by how I'm supposed to navigate your site.  There are 3 ways on the page to navigate your site, on the left, top, and right?  There seems to be a lot of redundancy between these.  You could probably consolidate these into one form of navigation?

Also, the links to categories within the expanded top navigation are wrapped in

s.  For example, if you expand Ink & Toner, Brother, Canon, Dell, etc are all in

s.   This is resulting in a lot of

tags on your page.  I'd remove those tags since those elements aren't headers.  It looks spammy to me.

[gbssinc]

Thank you John for the reply.

Like you said what is good for user should be good for Google too right? The reason there are three ways to navigate on the website is mostly because of our visitor behaviors. Some visitors like to use the selector on the right side versus some of them like to use the top navigation links.

For h2 tags I see your point. It's something relatively easy to fix. But do you think it could be the major reason for our penalty?

[john4math]

I looked a bit more.  If I had to guess why you're being penalized it's because your site doesn't have much in the way of original content.  For example, go to a product page, like this one for a Brother ribbon cartridge.  The description reads "Brother Black Ribbon Cartridge. This brand new Brother 1230 black ribbon cartridge is manufactured by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). 100% Manufacturer Guaranteed."  If you stick that in Google, you'll see that you, along with every other printer site uses basically the same description, like printert.com, 123cheapink.com, inkcircus.com, etc.

You need to provide original content on your site that doesn't appear as duplicate content to Google.  The blog is a good start.  Having customer reviews, testimonials, and articles custom to your site are also good.

You might try taking a look at your competitors that are doing well in searches, and see what they're doing in terms of original content on their sites.

[gbssinc]

Thanks again John. There are really good points here.

What would you suggest for the duplicate content? I mean we originally created those pages and mostly our affiliates took those descriptions and even titles. It's little bit out of control who can use our content but don't you think Google should know who the owner of the content is? or any advice to cope with this?

Another point is that it's very hard to create different content for the all products we have. For example some of them are the same cartridges with different colors so the descriptions and titles most of the time are very similar.When we look at the competitors they also have same content issue for the products but their ranking are still good.

In terms of content we actually have a blog (http://goo.gl/i0uXS), article site (http://goo.gl/lGtNl), testimonials and review etc...There are some great sources here and interestingly none of them got affected by the panda update. It was just the main domain.

Thanks

[john4math]

Yeah... beyond what I've already said, I don't really know what to do.  A sort of similar question is here, and Thomas makes some good points.  Adding some of the new schema.org markup could help (they have it for products, reviews, blogs, and more).

[gbssinc]

Any other advice from the experts?