Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Kent - Just guessing here...  IF you had to change your settings, did you clear your cache? Might be worth a try to see if that solves it.  Good luck.

Joshua - I moderate all of the comments to my blog before and remove any links before they go live.   I find this effort worthwhile because the comments seem to increase user engagement (time on page) on the articles that have extensive comments.  These pages seem to become reliable traffic generators and seem to withstand the algo changes.

Nor would it help local search.  This could be a major factor in deciding where to purchase heavy printed materials.

I found Marie's comments very interesting.  Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be my problem.

I agree with Marie's advice not to do anything to respond to a perceived penalty.  Doesn't look like your site is "penalized" but the swings are extreme.

My EMD site dropped from 12 (on last Saturday's MOZ report) to 41 (last night) to 32 a few minute ago for the EMD keyword.  The site has also been affected by Panda (April & again recently) but, as Elia's response suggests, G is probably adjusting the EMD values.

My Moz points seem to increase immediately by a couple of points when I post a question.   I know that Moz awards a point for the question so I assume the "extra" 2 or 3 points come from some sort of caching issue which updates when Moz awards "automatic" points for something.  Just an observation if that helps your techs who are looking into this issue.

Darin & CMC-SD.   Thanks for your comments.  I am highly experienced in my field.  Very few guest blogging opportunities are available in the properties that occupy the SERPs I'm competing in.  Smaller indy blogs (whose owners I've known for years) probably offer realistic opportunities for guest blogging. But I don't want to convert their customers to mine. (The product should be inherently local but there are national providers.)

My concern is how to counter the "authority" of the copywriters.  I'm concerned that G will look at the authority, page rank and engagement (bounce rate & time on page) of larger sites and reward the copywriter with authority status based more upon the platform they publish on than any real authority on the matters they write.

Although G could begin to compare the number of fields an author publishes in and add an educational history and licensing status to G+ pages, I suspect that G wouldn't bother to go through any extra steps (costs).  Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but selling Adwords is G's business and search results just need to be "good enough" without being too darn good.

Again, thanks to both of you.

To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"?

I've been wondering which would be better given G's "authorship" tracking program.

"Onreact.Com" indirectly raised this issue in a recent blog post "Google Authorship Markup Disadvantages Everybody Ignores" as :

"Google might dismiss your guest articles. Your great guest blogging campaign on dozens of other blogs might fail because Google will count the links all as one as the same author has written all the posts and linked to himself. So maybe the links won't count at all."

Assuming all other things are equal, would you use "Guest Author" with G Authorship attribution (if allowed) or just ghost the article and include an in-text link without attribution to you as the author?

Eliathah - I agree.  Blog commenting is extremely inefficient use of time. I wonder how many of the people who promote blog commenting as a method to obtain traffic would pay someone else to put "meaningful comments" on relevant (no-follow) blogs.  I wouldn't and I doubt many people would.

Dexm10 - The substantive text on the sample page consists of 47 words.    In the U.S. 10 on similar legal topics, I doubt 470 words would work on a legal site nonetheless a page discussing such a common subject.

I noticed 10+ sub-topics on the sidebar.  My guess is that you'll need to combine the child articles into the parent and offer much deeper content to be competitive.  It will probably require a substantial investment of time by people who know the subject areas.

Ryan - Thanks for the quick reply.   Soooo, I am overly concerned about strangers who own "spammy" sites taking the widget and putting it site wide on their spammy mortgage sites ?   After what some of the developers went through, I'm concerned about Penguin or its future mutations.

Marie & All - Excellent Discussion.  I've been very concerned about site wide use of widgets and inbound links from penalized sites.  I've been considering developing widgets and licensing them out to particular sites with the restrictions that :  the widget appear only on one page (such as a blog post).  Since the underlying data would require periodic  updates, I could build in an "out of date" statement in case someone hijacks it to a spammy site or an authorized user doesn't listen and installs it site wide.   I view this implementation of widgets as more analogous to guest blogging than developer's site wide footer links.  Providing people I've had contact with a plug in for their specific locales should result in links without much asking.  So long as the anchor text is selected by the site owners (who are even encouraged to use the URL if they ask), I view this as less risky than the web developer's site wide footer links.   Am I still missing something important  / risky?   Thoughts ?

Panda 3.5 and Penguin as it turned out.  You and Miriam were spot on.

THX to both of you.

Wayne - I share your frustration about competing with transparent networks that have few legitimate links and appear to be sustained by continuing growth in the network.  I ran Omega through OSE though and found "tons" of legitimate links from authorative sites (edu sites from major universities) which were NOT hacked.  OSE shows IBL's from 1,241 different websites.   It will require a lot of time and resources to compete head on with the omega site.  Without comparing the competing site or knowing the key phrases, my guess is that the Omega site has enough juice coming in from authorative sites and has not reached  tipping point for manipulated (money) keywords.

Alan : Thanks for sharing your experience in such detail.

I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used - especially on sites that are not large scale ecommerce sites.

Blog site hit by Panda 3.5.   Blog has approximately 250 posts.  Some of the posts are the most thorough on the subject and regained traffic despite a Penguin mauling a few days after the Panda attack.  (The site has probably regained 80% of the traffic it lost since Penguin hit without any link removal or link building, and minimal new content.)

Bounce rate is 80% and average time on page is 2:00 min.  (Even my most productive pages tend to have very high bounce rates BUT those pages maintain time on page in the 4 to 12 minute range.)

The Panda discussions I've read on these boards seem to focus on e-commerce sites with extremely thin content.  I assume that Google views much of my content as "thin" too.  But, my site seems to need a pruning instead of just combiining the blue model, white model, red model, and white model all on one page like most of the ecommerce sites we've discussed.

So, I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used to decide whether to combine a page, prune a page, etc.

After I combine any series articles to one long post (driving the time on page to nice levels), I plan to prune the remaining pages that have poor time on page and/or bounce rates.  Regardless of the analytics, I plan to keep the "thin" pages that are essential for readers to understand the subject matter of the blog. (I'll work on flushing out the content or producing videos for those pages.)

How deep should I prune on the first cut?  5% ?   10% ?  Even more ?   Should I focus on the pages with the worst bounce rates, the worst time on page, or try some of both?

If I post unique and informative video content (hosted on site using Wistia), what I should I expect for a range of the decrease in bounce rate ?

Thanks for reading this long post.

The links from low authority, unrelated sites are not likely to help much.  The anchor text (all keyword rich and targeting a couple of phrases) is scary.  Warn the client about the Penguin mauling you expect when the client reaches the tipping point.

For whatever it's worth, have a site which was also mauled by Panda & Penquin in April, 2012.  Probably lost around 30% to Panda and Penguin knocked it down to around 25% of the pre-mauling traffic.   The Penguin mauling is algo based and is probably caused by anchor text in manually written comments on relevant blogs or pages.  Without doing anything (as in taking an extended vacation from blogging, linking, etc.) traffic is now at 50% of pre-mauling (probably half of the Penguin effect is gone).  Seems to benefit from each Penguin update by 10% - 20% per month.  I am curious how this compares to "link removal" efforts.