How to outwit Panda?

How do you determine that your site has been exposed under attack?

When in February this year, Google has updated Panda, the majority of webmasters do not attach any special significance. Even in April, when the update reached the shores of Albion, no one really understood what it means for websites.

Google traffic

First, we should check in Google Analytics, how many visitors come to the site directly from Google search engine. To do this, go to the next panel:

Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Search -> Organic

Next define how many "organic" visitors pass from this search engine, because the default display option is exposed organic keywords, not visitors. Therefore, we should change it and put Google. Do it in this way: Search -> Organic -> Keywords. And here you can find sources of traffic:

Change perspective

Now, to analyze the dynamics of traffic at the time of Panda renewal, we should increase time interval. In order to keep abreast of key dates for Panda algorithm, we can turn to the article: "Coogle algorithm change history”. In our case, we will compare the data for the period from early February to mid-July (that's when a customer asked for help.)

Expert advice: Check out the analytics of attendance at weekly, rather than days or months.

Examining attendance statistics by days, close by updating data the Panda in the UK (around April 11), was found the following dynamics:

Not very clear, right?

But when the monitored period was changed from days to weeks, the decline in attendance immediately jumped to the eyes (it was as much as 20%).

The number of keywords and landing pages, which enters the main stream of visitors

The next way to determine whether your site has become a victim of Panda is to view the number of keywords and landing pages before and after the update algorithm. Such an analysis is very easy to do in the Excel tables. Export to Excel, data for two weeks before and after the update algorithm. If the number of visitors has decreased for both parameters, the analysis of the situation should be paid more attention.

Another quick method of comparing the long phrases - is to create an "advanced segment» (Advanced Segment), four (or more) words (as discussed in the article on the blog SEOmoz). Create a new segment, and determine by how many words one goes to your website. Check these data for the period of two or three weeks before and after the date of renewal.

Here's the formula of the "advanced segment":

^ \ S * [^ \ s] + (\ s + [^ \ s] +) {3,} \ s * $

Which methods work?

We considered our website have been tens of thousands of pages (mainly user accounts), which had any content or were not relevant. Many of these pages on a site to the same were overlapped.

As a workaround, this client was invited to use meta noindex tag, to cover the above pages from search index. Theoretically, it would be better to remove all but since it was about the online store, the customer decided to leave these pages on the site and instead of just remove links to it.

Among other things, the client was also recommended to slightly change the architecture and site map, put on low-grade 301 pages, and redirect users to a higher level of nesting. After a test, the webmasters of client decided to use the canonical tag rel = canonical, to move link weight of irrelevant pages on a level above that, of course, it was not the best solution in this case.

Even with these incomplete transformations, the flow of traffic began to grow.

Here are some statistics for example.

A week before the upgrade Panda in the UK:

• «Organic" traffic: 3759 visitors

• Traffic with three key words: 2827

• Traffic with four key words: 1635

• Customers who have found a landing page on Organic words: 630

One week after Panda updating:

• «Organic" traffic: 2708 visitors (decreasing in traffic of more than 30%)

• Traffic by three key words: 2165 (decreasing of 25%)

• Traffic by four key words: 1342 (decreasing of 20%)

• Customers who have found a landing page on Organic words: 560 (reducing traffic by 11%)

A visual comparison of the weeks:

Campaign results to restore the site

Thus, we see the data from Google Analytics that after the customer has hidden poor quality pages from indexing and removed internal links on these pages, the number of visitors has gradually increased. Even subsequent Panda updates could not affect to slow but steady growth in traffic on the site, which was observed as early as mid-July. However, more notable races of attendance occurred in August and September. As we see, "recovery" of the site took place rather slowly.

The "recovery» plan of course, will vary from site to site and general recipe, of course, does not exist, but to get rid of poor-quality content will in any case. So recommend Google, and so tells common sense. Google fight against low-quality pages is already underway and a total cleansing of sites will have to make even business sites.

So, the statistics of attendance at our site last week of monitoring:

"Organic" traffic: 4010
Traffic by three key words: 3171
Traffic by four key words: 2006
Customers who find landing pages for organic keywords: 1247

Conclusion
There is no doubt, all sites "recover" after Panda attack, especially if measures are taken in time manner. The only problem is that the improvement is very slow, and pessimized sites are restored not completely. Unlike direct punishment for links purchase (after which the site is fully restored in their rights), Panda reduces the credibility of the domain (which, as we have seen, is worse than direct punishment), and this leads to a decrease in attendance, and painfully slow 'recovery ".