Is it Panda?, how to deal with AP etc newswire articles

[adamzski]

A site I have lost 30% of its traffic in June then another 10% in July, is it Panda?

The site has 10's of thousands of AP or other syndicated articles on it, they are not there for SE benefits, they are categorized and relevant to the people who read them, the site gets half of its traffic from type ins/bookmarks.

Should I nofollow the articles or rel="canonical" them? what can help......

Cheers

[RyanKent]

If this content is merely duplications of articles which exist elsewhere then yes, you can add the canonical tag pointing to the source.

You would definitely not want to "nofollow" these pages. By adding a nofollow tag you are telling search engines not to flow page rank to the other links they find on the page. That is not the result you desire.

You could noindex the pages as well. Prior to doing such I would ask if you are offering comments or other user generated comments. If you are not, then the noindex tag is fine. If you do offer UGC, then I would recommend the canonical tag.

[adamzski]

Thanks, is there any way that I could trial this on the site by just adding the tag to a few pages or sections? Is it domain level metrics google is using, they have decided that the site is junk now as it has so much duplicated content?

The articles are slightly changed and there are comments on them.

What harm could I cause by trialing the  canonical tag? if I took it of there later could there be some recovery time?

thanks a lot

[RyanKent]

Panda isn't a penalty per se. It is a algorithmic change to how Google ranks sites and pages. If your site has duplicated content on it, you will need to fix all of it. Once your site has been cleaned up, it will can take a month or more for Google to fully re-index your entire site and see all of the duplicated content gone or properly handled (i.e. noindex or canonicalized).

It's not as if you have 1% of duplicated content that your site is affected but no one knows for sure what exact percentage triggers this effect, so your best course of action is to clean it all up.

By using the canonical tag, these pages will be removed from the index for your site. The "harm" would be that if someone searches for the pages your site wont be listed unless you have relevant comments for the search query.

[adamzski]

Thanks again, I guess I will have to look through keywords and see what traffic these news pages are still getting from google, then weigh up whether to tag them.