Product Pages & Panda 4.0

[Kingalan1]

Greeting MOZ Community:

I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Of the 600 pages, about 350 of the URLs are product pages, written about specific listings. The content on these pages is quite short, sometimes only 20 words.

My ranking has dropped very much since mid-May, around the time of the new Panda update. I suspect it has something to do with the very short product pages, the 350 listing pages.

What is the best way to deal with these pages so as to recover ranking. I am considering these options:

1. Setting them to "no-index". But I am concerned that removing product pages is sending the wrong message to Google.

2. Enhancing the content and making certain that each page has at least 150-200 words. Re-writing 350 listings would be a real project, but if necessary to recover I will bite the bullet.

What is the best way to address this issue? I am very surprised that Google does not understand that product URLs can be very brief and yet have useful content. Information about a potential office rental that lists location, size, price per square foot is valuable to the visitor but can be very brief. Especially listings that change frequently. So I am surprised by the penalty.

Would I be better off not having separate URLs for the listings, and for instance adding them as posts within building pages? Is having separate URLs for product pages with minimal content a bad idea from an SEO perspective?

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover from this latest Panda penalty?

Thanks, Alan

[SEO5Team]

Hi Alan,

Handling a Google penalty is a delicate issue as there are a lot of factors that need to be considered to assess the penalty on the site accurately. It is not a black and white issue where there is one right answer and doing that will fix the issues and lift the penalty. The whole process includes an in depth analysis of the site including the on page and off page factors. I would really suggest you to consider hiring an expert on this subject and have them do a thorough evaluation and provide recommendations. I've included links to some resources below that you might find helpful.

Recover from a Panda Penalty - QuickSprout

SEW Article

Cheers,

SEO5..