Three easy and PROVEN ways of recovering from drops in ranking - Post Panda

[Mike Anthony]

Removed by OP

[David Judge]

Could not agree with you more Mike and this is a really good post.

There are so many corner cutting methods people choose to implement, but you need to be cautious with what you decide to cut on.

Content has always been king and with every update Google is improving their ways of reading content and understanding if it is relevant and quality.

I'm not actually a fan of spinning content at all, mainly as I can see a trend forming as Google improve how they analyse content.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by David Judge

I'm not actually a fan of spinning content at all, mainly as I can see a trend forming as Google improve how they analyse content.

I don't do much spinning on the level that is common among IMers but I will repurpose an article with sentence level spinning. Most of the crappy content I see is by people just hitting the auto spin button

[Chrismiksen]

Absolutely agree on the content quality. Panda is chewing up sites with low-quality content -- which is exactly what Google intended it to do.

[David Judge]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

I don't do much spinning on the level that is common among IMers but I will repurpose an article with sentence level spinning. Most of the crappy content I see is by people just hitting the auto spin button

I think you've hit the nail right on the head when you say "Auto Spin Button". Sentence level spinning that can produce several good quality articles is great.

I used to use a service called submityourarticle and found it really good at producing good quality article variations. But it's really labor intensive so it scares most people off.

The amount of crappy content out there is forcing Google to tighten the belt.

[MaverickUK]

None of this is new but I guess it will help those who deserve their lower rankings. Yes, many people have been hit who truly don't deserve it, but on the whole people should of been adhering to the 3 points you made years ago, let alone post Panda.

[mrtrance]

My sites adhere to those 3 points pretty much and they still got hit? I think maybe I will look at point #2 more since that might be one area that I might be lacking somewhat with actual page PR of the link and number of outbound links.

[Kauzmo]

With the recent leak of Google raters guidelines its pretty obvious their idea of a good article or post is not the same as most Imers.

This is a gem right here. I read the mentioned guidelines and if your content is not useful in a way the visitor expects it to be, Google is coming for you.

Your site content needs to be:

• Relevant
• Easy to read/navigate
• Unique

Anything less and you may struggle. Like it or not content is a "new" primary factor in on-page seo. Now.... where oh where can we find out information about Google's preference in on page SEO?

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[vjandroid1]

I liked your first point bcz it was one the mistakes I was making as by placing my keyword into link but not under the text paragraph...I had changed it and now I'm waiting to see the results..

[dadamson]

Great post, content really is the key here as with all Panda updates.

If you revise all your content to ensure it is keyword focused (without stuffing your keywords) and high quality, easy to read, etc. that you will not only recover from the latest Panda updates, but you should rise when the rest of your competition falls harder next Panda update.

Cheers,
Dave

[UMS]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Bad grammar - yes anything with rules a computer can potentially detect. Grammer has some rules that an algo can spot.

And they can even detect bad spelling.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

"and then when I saw their site and read their content found out it was some of the lowest quality I had ever read."

Funny and on point.

It's like watching the families on XFactor or American Idol or whatever in the early stages... the parents and family members all think their kid can sing. While the audience has their fingers in their ears.

What is worse is people trying to write on topics they know nothing about because it's a "High paying keyword". Escpecially funny in the Mortgage/Insurance/Finance niches.

[Kauzmo]

Escpecially funny in the Mortgage/Insurance/Finance niches.

You mean something like: "A mortgage is something most families will needs upon when they wish to acquire a new domicile"?

I agree totally!

[mrtrance]

I have several of my main money makers that dropped after the update and are now in spots #8-#12 (for their main keyword which the homepage was ranking) in the SERPs. If I can get them moving again up the SERPs quickly I can start to see traffic again quickly since they did not drop too much.

So far the last 1.5 weeks I have not seen any movement in the SERPs for these sites. I've done a bit of backlinking, but no movement.

What would you guys suggest is the best linking to do at this time to get these sites moving again to the top? Any particular backlinks that seem to work much faster compared to others? I think my onpage is fine for these sites as far as I can tell.

These site were previously ranking between #2 -#8 positions.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by UMS

And they can even detect bad spelling.

When I plan on ranking this thread I'll let you know

[TheFBGuy]

Indeed, many people have forgotten the core basics of how search works.

[blogworker]

totally agree with you.
in a word, i think what you said is keeping on update your site, from two aspects: content and backlinks.
high quality content and high quality backlinks.

[Mike Anthony]

Removed by OP

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by jalicia18

There are many things to consider in recovering from drops in ranking and these are among of those.

I haven't found that there are many things at all . in fact I was able since sunday to get two people who PMed back on track with with just the first two points even though they continue to have below average content.

[mrtrance]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Agree with you for the most part and said as much but I do think number 2 is not something most Imers know how to get. I've had the opportunity to look at backlinks of sites people have PMed me as well and There;s still alot of forum backlinks, blog comment pages with massive amount of posts and article directories.

Of those as you are aware there is neither no authority or pagerank on the page of the link or the pagerank is divided up by a hundred or hundreds of links to other sites.

In fact I find that most don't look at outbound link count at all. You see people going wild because someone posts a PR5 and PR6 comment page on the forums. We all know in no time at all those sites will be slammed by hundreds of blog comments but the poster swears he is not hurting the link he put on the site by sharing it. Low OBL is a quality indicator not just Pagerank

Great points you mention there. So in your opinion then forum profiles are not worth it even if the actual domain is high PR, same for high PR article directories, high PR blog post with 100+ OBL, Web2.0 posts, etc.?

If you can sum up the perfect type of links that we should go after what would they be then? Would it be blog comments on high PR page (regardless of relevancy) as long as OBL is like under 50 or 25, private network blog posts when in context anchor link, etc?

Anything else you would add to help my sites get moving again up the SERPs? What's the best way to find blog pages to comment on with high PR and low OBL? What is your view on having a backlink on relevant page or it does not matter as long as high PR and low OBL?

[David Tan]

this panda thingy is all about quality. if you're hit, have a deep honest look and ask yourself: what quality and value does your site offer?

[AToZ]

Has anyone ACTUALLY seen a return in rankings after the October 13th update?

[ttkim]

Originally Posted by AToZ

Has anyone ACTUALLY seen a return in rankings after the October 13th update?

Plenty of people have seen a return in rankings. Many have also seen positive improvements in their rankings.

[Michael R.]

Did you only work with sites that were optimized for one keyword?

My problem:
My site had #1 Rankings for >100 keywords on >100 pages (1 page = 1 keyword). These are all long tail keywords with low competition and the pages ranked because of the on-page optimization and some low quality backlinks (social bookmarks, articles, press releases). It was quite time-consuming to build these links to so many individual pages (altogether I'm trying to rank >300 individual pages, but newer ones didn't reach #1 yet), but it worked and the combined search volume of all these keywords was/is huge.

Now these pages are all in the 30s to 50s and a few even further down.

I think the most important question is if the rankings really dropped because of the algorithm update or because I made too many changes during september/october (added new pages, changed images on nearly all pages, added pages for keywords with higher search volume and homepage backlinks with PR3 to PR6).

In fact, the site had the second highest traffic day on October 16th and the rankings dropped on October 18th.

Did all sites that you looked at, lose their rankings on October 13th?

I think the page has two problems regarding Googles opinion of good websites:
1. All the individual pages that ranked, are quite similar because a part of the page is auto-generated depending on the keyword. However, there is also unique content on the pages.
2. All the pages have a "review" that explains how you can use a certain product to achieve what you searched for (the keyword that the page is optimized for). The only goal is to get the visitor to click one of the affiliate links (3 links in about 400 words. one after the first paragraph, one in the middle and one at the end of the "review"). In Google's eyes this is a bad page...

Btw. I initially (last year) built the site that way because I wanted to have good PPC landing pages for the keywords and they all had a QS of 9 or 10 (I know that CTR of the ads is also a big factor here, but anyway in Google's eyes the pages seem to be related to the keyword...). Since I was only breaking even or made a small profit, but had a lot of traffic, I decided to start to rank the pages organically which worked like a charm until a week ago.

What I did so far:
- I improved the loading time on most of the pages by using smaller images and other things.
- I added links to authority pages.
- I nofollowed all affiliate links.
- I added more unique text on some pages (takes a lot of time if you have so many individual pages), so not near to finished yet
- I upgraded IMautomator to the highest package (to be able to add 80 links simultaneously), bought the biggest package of extra credits and added 80 pages
- I took the highest traffic page and started to build higher quality links: blog comments on high PR pages with low OBL and sitewide links from PR2+3 sites.

In addition to that I plan to:
- Submit articles to ArticleRanks and Authority Link Network soon (waiting for the articles)
- Add a related youtube video to every individual page (Doing that really improved the rankings of one of my other sites some time ago so I'll give it a try)

Despite of all that, I don't see any positive movement, yet. I still don't get how so many optimized pages that ranked #1 for about a year, can drop like that.

I hope some of you take the time to read the whole post . Maybe you have some more things for me to try. I won't stop working on the rankings until they are back up again...

[Mike Anthony]

Removed By OP

[Mike Anthony]

Removed by OP

[Michael R.]

Hey Mike, thanks for your in-depth answer.

Potentially the kiss of death. This year I had only one failure in ranking a site. Client (without telling me) gave me two months to move his site up. He was scraping mega content from another site he was affiliated with. Frankly the site was only good for the owner to get commissions. Really had nothing much besides the scraped content. Post Panda Google HATES such sites. I added content to the sites but even though I saw improvements to those pages it was like walking in deep mud. Proposed a major content building plan but the client gave up saying the site was not worth it to him. If you are getting significant auto generated content form another site then you are going to have an uphill climb.

I didn't say the content is scraped from somewhere else, I just said that the content is autogenerated. The site is not a regular "dumb" wordpress blog with a plugin to scrape content. However, I created a lot of custom scripts that get data from different sources and create text from this data.

Let me try to explain how my site looks like with a different niche:
(Feel free to use that as a blueprint for your next site because it works quite well, except for this one site )

Suppose I wanted to promote some kind of mp3 download service for music (e.g. napster, which is a legal, legitimate service here, don't know about the US... ). I would buy a general domain like freemp3music or something like that. Then I would break down "music" in smaller parts and create categories accordingly, like RnB, country, Rock etc. Then I would search for bands that fit into these categories and create individual pages for keywords like "[band] mp3" (maybe still to broad), "[band] mp3 download", "get [band] mp3s" and so on.

For all these pages I would write a "generic" review of napster and how easy it is to get all [band] mp3s if you decide to buy the napster music flatrate. The first autogenerated thing is that on each individual pages, [band] is replaced by the actual band name.

In addition to that I would try to find data about all bands that can be easily transformed into text, like latest albums, songs, concerts and so on. For example I would add sentences in my review like that:
"If you use napster, you can even download [band]'s newest album [album]."
"I really like [band], their latest concert [concert name] in [concert place] was awesome"
"I remember that we heard [band] with [song], when I kissed my girl friend for the first time"
I think you get the point, I try to make the text unique by inserting facts about the targeted band into a generic text.

Moreover I would add a list of concerts, albums and songs to the sidebar of the page to make that part of the page completely unique (or rather only shared by the pages about "[band] mp3", "[band] mp3 download", "get [band] mp3s").

Well if you say the ONLY goal is to get someone to click a link it probably is a bad page. Seriously if you don't have a goal to educate or inform that's going to play out in your site and the only eyes that will every think its good is yours. Don't you think if you had some other goals with that goal your viewers might be more likely to click? Maybe you just phrased that wrong. People will disagree with me but the writing is on the wall. If your sites really only exists to get a click and a visitor can see that then it really doesn't matter if you recover from this update. Almost all future updates going forward will be targeting those kinds of sites and you will be in constant danger of losing your income from the sites. Plus even if the algo doesn't get you a manual reviewer can tank you any day that you wake up.

What I mean is this: The review of the service I promote is structured in a way that in the end the reader will want to buy the service. But still, on my page the reader gets the information that the service offers something that he's interested in. This works best if it is not common knowledge (at least of the targeted visitors), that such a service exists. For example, I'm sure there are keywords that target a demography that absolutely doesn't have a clue that they can get a legal, unlimited mp3 flatrate for 10 bucks a month. And that is for 3 different IPs simultaneously. (Please click here to find out more about napster NOW )

Nope. More like to flush your money down the drain each month without knowing it. Those are the same kind of links that did not protect you. Paying a monthly subscription just to get these kinds of links is to me a losing proposition. All I can think why these kinds of software are so popular is because in the IM niche we love software for its own sake. Its like going into Best Buy and having to buy some gadget.

You could be right, but it won't harm the site either. So, if it works, great, if it doesn't work, who cares? By the way, I don't know why, but I get stumbles for my pages every time IMautomator submits new bookmarks. That could be very valuable in the long run.

By "drilling down" to very specific keywords that have nearly 0 competition and by having pages that are quite well optimized for these keywords, I would think I don't need very high quality backlinks anyway. I think only time will tell.

of the whole list of things you did this and putting up some content are the only things that have a decent shot at making some difference.

You're right, these two points are the most effective ones, but think about the fact that I have to improve 300 different pages and building links for this many pages is time-consuming. I'm already adding really unique text, in addition to the auto-generated text to the individual pages as fast as I get content from writers.

I'd have to see the site but sounds to me like you are targeting too many keywords so you have to rely on scraping content to fill the pages. You might be making it impossible for yourself. Concentrate on some good keyword research that brings in enough traffic not to need over a hundred keywords to be targeting at a time.

I hope my description above convinces you, that at least in the eyes of an algorithm, my site doesn't target to many keywords and that I'm not scraping content anywhere. A manual reviewer would certainly see what I'm doing, but I doubt that Google goes after sites that target keywords with a search count of 100 a month or even "-" searches. I think my site would have completely disappeared after a manual review, right?

I would really like to show the site to get an educated guess on how to improve it, but on the other hand I don't want to give away a set of keywords that make up to 5 figures a day.

That's why I'm also doing all my backlinking myself, moved the site on a it's own IP address, so that no outsource can potentially steal my keywords.

What do you think, do you still see that many problems with the site as before?

[paulgl]

In reality those 3 things are what people should
have been doing pre-panda, and, what they should constantly
be doing.

Paul

[Raul991]

I have seen strong comeback from sites where I have implemented 3 things:

1. Added new content(at least 3 new pages) - 1000+ quality content without any grammar errors and 100% copyscape passed unique articles.

2. Building high pr backlinks(with actual page pr not only domain pr power)

3. Implementing Link diversity - I used to run huge backlinking campaigns concentrating mostly on 1 backlinking technique, like 90% of blog or forum backlinks, but from now on I build many kinds of backlinks to get to the Google page 1(of course beating the page 1 competition depends largely on the competition as well)

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Michael R.

What do you think, do you still see that many problems with the site as before?

I get the sense of what you are doing and it can be good with some REAL content in it but I get the distinct impression from you that you are committed to doing whatever it is that you have been doing all the way from the way you create content to the way you backlink so whats the point? Wish you the best.

[mrtrance]

Originally Posted by Raul991

I have seen strong comeback from sites where I have implemented 3 things:

1. Added new content(at least 3 new pages) - 1000+ quality content without any grammar errors and 100% copyscape passed unique articles.

2. Building high pr backlinks(with actual page pr not only domain pr power)

3. Implementing Link diversity - I used to run huge backlinking campaigns concentrating mostly on 1 backlinking technique, like 90% of blog or forum backlinks, but from now on I build many kinds of backlinks to get to the Google page 1(of course beating the page 1 competition depends largely on the competition as well)

Are you adding 3 new pages a week to the affected site? And each one is 1000+ words? I did that with the last algo update and nothing moved until I started getting diverse backlinks and saw improvements for 3 months and then the update again dropped the sites to previous spots that they were 3 months ago.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by mrtrance

Are you adding 3 new pages a week to the affected site? And each one is 1000+ words? I did that with the last algo update and nothing moved until I started getting diverse backlinks and saw improvements for 3 months and then the update again dropped the sites to previous spots that they were 3 months ago.

Theres no magic in 1000+ word articles. All that happens in those cases is that somewhere in those thousand words the RIGHT words show up. The sites I have helped to get back to top positioning since Sunday did nothing but change a few words and then I gave them some backlinks with PR and few outbound links on the linking page. Most of them saw movements within 72 hours but there is one site that is lagging behind the rest (but I added the links on that later and I think due to the niche I will need a few more than I did for the rest.)

[AToZ]

Originally Posted by ttkim

Plenty of people have seen a return in rankings. Many have also seen positive improvements in their rankings.

So better question.

What exactly happed on the 13th of October what edit to the algorithm changed and causes the 13th mass spam detection.

What exactly is it looking at?

I'm not saying, does google want quality content and genuine backlinks.

I'm asking what exactly the algorithm is now looking at that it wasn't before.

[mrtrance]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Theres no magic in 1000+ word articles. All that happens in those cases is that somewhere in those thousand words the RIGHT words show up. The sites I have helped to get back to top positioning since Sunday did nothing but change a few words and then I gave them some backlinks with PR and few outbound links on the linking page. Most of them saw movements within 72 hours but there is one site that is lagging behind the rest (but I added the links on that later and I think due to the niche I will need a few more than I did for the rest.)

I agree with you because it's not just about adding content after content to a site to rank. If that was the case then every site out there would have thousands and thousands of page and the index getting way too big.

I've seen sites that hardly add any new content or have the same static content and ranking fine. So it's not a matter of just adding more pages/posts to your site to improve rankings.

I've gone ahead and added a bit more content to the homepage posts of mine, added a relevant video link as well, and doing some blog comment on sites with actual PR2-4 with OBL under 100 and some under 50.

Do you think adding an image or two within the content with the "alt tag" using my keyword would also help as well? I think I will start doing BMR posts as well since I've pretty much got all the types of backlinks covered now except for the high PR private network blog posting.

As far as the rest of my onsite SEO for that one site I have about a 500+ word post on the homepage, 1.5% keyword density, 1 outbound link to wikipedia, and bold/underline main keyword. The title is also the keyword and is an h1 tag.

Anything else you can suggest that I should improve onsite or just focus on getting some high PR links with low OBL?

[jwmann2]

Great advice. A lot of people are poor writers. The content is terrible and thats why they end up stealing articles and spinning them, using other people's content. You have got to be creative when it comes to writing. Outbound links to other quality websites are underrated in my opinion. Especially when it is related to your article.

[Raul991]

Originally Posted by mrtrance

Are you adding 3 new pages a week to the affected site? And each one is 1000+ words? I did that with the last algo update and nothing moved until I started getting diverse backlinks and saw improvements for 3 months and then the update again dropped the sites to previous spots that they were 3 months ago.

I added 3 new pages just once to the sites that had only 1 - 500 word article before. Adding new content constantly, targeting long tail keywords of course isnt bad, but I am building quick 3 pages sites right now and not authority sites.

[Raul991]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Theres no magic in 1000+ word articles. All that happens in those cases is that somewhere in those thousand words the RIGHT words show up. The sites I have helped to get back to top positioning since Sunday did nothing but change a few words and then I gave them some backlinks with PR and few outbound links on the linking page. Most of them saw movements within 72 hours but there is one site that is lagging behind the rest (but I added the links on that later and I think due to the niche I will need a few more than I did for the rest.)

Yes, 1000+ word articles arent magic, but it is one of the steps that I did(before I had 500 word one-page sites) besides high pr backlinks and high backlink diversifying(before only blog or profile links). All in all this tactic helped me recover my rankings.

[rinor81]

Thanks for the post man,

All in all I see there's really nothing new but like you said - the basics.

Build good quality links and have good content on your site...I myself don't spin, I always use original articles, it costs a bit more but it what works best...

OK guys, back to the same things we did all the time I guess...

[GoGetta]

Great post Mike and agree with what you are saying on this completely.

Also, to add, regarding BMR. This has worked in recovery of a few of my sites. My advice which has been said lots of times, is when building links, mix the anchor text up. After doing this on sites that didn't have anchor text variation on incoming links, they recovered also.

Just tests, but they are working for me!

GoGetta

[Oranges]

Good post mike.
I did a High PR aged domain 301 redirect to one of my slapped sites and it completely recovered. Expensive but effective, if you're serious about your niche and lost site.

[mrtrance]

Originally Posted by GoGetta

Great post Mike and agree with what you are saying on this completely.

Also, to add, regarding BMR. This has worked in recovery of a few of my sites. My advice which has been said lots of times, is when building links, mix the anchor text up. After doing this on sites that didn't have anchor text variation on incoming links, they recovered also.

Just tests, but they are working for me!

GoGetta

What sort of percentage should we use our main keyword as anchor text for that page we are ranking and what percent should it be varied? Say if I'm trying to rank a page for "dog training tips" should we build like 75% of the links using anchor text of "dog training tips" and the other 25% a mixture of "dog training", "training tips", "dog tips" or do we need to add on an extra keyword to our main keyword like "dog training tips guide", "dog training tips info" etc. to at least have our main keyword in each one of the anchor text?

Any thoughts on this?

[mrtrance]

Originally Posted by Oranges

Good post mike.
I did a High PR aged domain 301 redirect to one of my slapped sites and it completely recovered. Expensive but effective, if you're serious about your niche and lost site.

When you guys are saying building high PR links to your pages are we talking about PR5 and above and are these comment links, blog roll links, private network blog posts, edu/gov links with very low OBL? Since the majority of the other types such as building web2.0 blogs, article directories, social bookmark, etc.. will not have any PR on the page your content is on?

[FrediDoo]

Thanks for the post Mike. Good to hear that the 'fix' for a bad Panda is doing things how they should have been done in the first place!

Originally Posted by mrtrance

What sort of percentage should we use our main keyword as anchor text for that page we are ranking and what percent should it be varied?

If you're working on percentages you're over thinking it a little. When linking back to your site, just link back with whatever anchor text is natural at the time.

When the company I worked for profiled a number of large websites, we found that about 60% of the anchor text was actually the site name, and not the keywords they were targeting - this seems to be a 'natural' link profile. Remember to use your internal anchor text to boost your rankings too!

[MarksWineClub]

Seriously....one of the fixes is to have your keywords on the page you're trying to rank? Using good grammar?

It makes sense and I guess simple is better-but shouldn't sites suffering from those type of factors be penalized in some way, Panda or not? Personally, I don't want to find a site without the keyword I searched for

[Jon Potts]

Too many Panda posts on WarriorForum these days... after all Panda was put in place to eliminate spamming techniques through low quality content. Seems only right that if you got slapped during the implementation that you were trying to deceive Google. Posting that you had issues during Panda is like saying you ignore ethical SEO...

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Jon Potts

Too many Panda posts on WarriorForum these days... after all Panda was put in place to eliminate spamming techniques through low quality content. Seems only right that if you got slapped during the implementation that you were trying to deceive Google. Posting that you had issues during Panda is like saying you ignore ethical SEO...

Thats actually quite funny when the two sites in your sig are one page wonders and backlinked primarily by forum signatures.

[dagaul101]

Nice tips, if many IMers gave the search engines what they needed then many of the sites would not have been penalised, Google has been transparent with what it wants - Good unique content, and hgih authority backlinks

[mrtrance]

Originally Posted by mrtrance

When you guys are saying building high PR links to your pages are we talking about PR5 and above and are these comment links, blog roll links, private network blog posts, edu/gov links with very low OBL? Since the majority of the other types such as building web2.0 blogs, article directories, social bookmark, etc.. will not have any PR on the page your content is on?

Could I get some input on this from you guys?

[Mike Anthony]

The people i helped out were only given PR3 and PR2 links from me. So no you do not have to put PR4 and PR5s for all niches. Two PR3s and a 2 did it for them. I've seen others talk about this and I am leaning toward it from evidence I have seen - Having some PR links pointing at your site actually may help give all your other links a bit more credibility, boost or whatever you want to call it.

[mrtrance]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

The people i helped out were only given PR3 and PR2 links from me. So no you do not have to put PR4 and PR5s for all niches. Two PR3s and a 2 did it for them. I've seen others talk about this and I am leaning toward it from evidence I have seen - Having some PR links pointing at your site actually may help give all your other links a bit more credibility, boost or whatever you want to call it.

If I am trying to get high PR blog comments should I try to find pages with a certain amount of OBL say under 50, 25, 100? How about if the page is a .edu page with like 50 OBL with PR4, but nofollow? If getting high PR links whether edu/gov or any other type should they only be dofollow to give an impact or will nofollow also work?