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About a month ago, we asked our readers if you can fully recover from Google Panda.
68% of those who responded and there were about 200 responses, said you cannot fully recover from Panda.
Let me give you the break down on the responses.
The question asked was, "Can You Fully Recover From Google Panda?"
- 45% Said "No, Did Not Improve At All."
- 23% Said, "No But Improved Since First Hit."
- 20% Said, "Yes & More Traffic."
- 12% Said, "Yes But Same Traffic."
Please read my poll disclosure policy before jumping to any scientific conclusions.
Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.
Note: This story was scheduled to be posted on this day, but was written earlier.
Comments:
sara
10/09/2012 12:26 pm
this article = least encouraging poll.
Bobert
10/09/2012 03:28 pm
I more interested in penguin recovery... have yet to hear a legitimate recovery story outside of the fluke WPMU.org.
Milania
10/09/2012 03:55 pm
Here is my personal experience. - Panda hit al of my sites. - I left several alone; there was absolutely nothing to amend and there was no use in adding new content because until the site is released from the penalty, it's time wasted. - I worked on the remaining websites. These have all taken additional huge tumbles. - The sites that I left alone have slowly crawled back to about half the place they were in search. - On the sites that have been amended (longer articles, page headings added) they will crawl up a good ways in the search and then when another animal is unleashed, they fall again, even lower than they were at the last update. Now my personal demon is this; how am I to know that if I would have left all of the sites alone that they would not have faired better? Sure, Barry as you have said, we can check our stats to see when we fell or rose and that can signal we were hit by the animal. But here is the thing; when the sites have been worked on, we have no way of knowing for certain that if we hadn't worked on the pages, if the site would have stayed the same, rose or fell. Whenever pages are changed, it takes a while for things to kick in and I do realize that. If the main title (as seen in the nav bar) is changed, content updated and so forth, it's going to take time. My hope is that many of us will see recoveries in the future, after the dust settles. In addition, my other concern is that while I've been trying to satisfy Google, I may have sacrificed my positions at Bing and other SE. It's like Dr. Evil once said, only it applies to Google: 'There's just no pleasing you...'
Winson Yeung
10/09/2012 04:21 pm
Lol its just hard to recover but not impossoble
Winson Yeung
10/09/2012 04:22 pm
The ironic is when my sites get hit by the Google update, my ranking in Bing actually increased...
Rob Woods
10/09/2012 10:19 pm
Milania, when you say the articles have been "worked on" by making them longer and adding headings, is there anything that makes the articles different other than just that they are longer? Just making them longer won't make them "better" in Google's eyes. Do they get more pageviews, links, or social shares after making them longer? Sites hit by Panda are characterized by lots of pages that individually get little interaction from users. If all you are changing is on page factors but there are no signals being sent to Google that the content is actually more valuable to people than it was previously, you are unlikely to have a sustained recovery.
Michael
10/09/2012 11:36 pm
These days with Google, regardless is you are a whitehat seo or blackhat, the chances of your website getting hit once your site has reached page 1, is extremely high. Arriving at page 1 in Google is the new threshold! when an update occurs, chances are that your website will be hit, especially if your keywords are competitive or receive a lot of traffic. See for yourself!
Marcus Miller
10/10/2012 07:49 am
If we consider what Panda is and that it is an attempt to remove weak or thin content from the search results. And then we consider the most common approaches to fix this which is generally to remove the weak pages (noindex) then the sites in question are often losing a lot of the pages that were seeing search traffic. So, whilst a recovery of sorts is possible, many of the pages that were probably bringing in traffic are no longer a viable search result so for many sites, a rethink is required beyond the technical SEO we can do to get them to stage 1. Ultimately, if a site that had thousands (or tens of thousands) of low quality pages that were ranking removes them then even if they noindex these or canonicalise them to an improved, parent page, they are not going to have the scope they had before. True recovery needs to deal with the technical issues and quick fixes but must also consider the problem and approach that got the site into this situation and then look at a more Google friendly content driven strategy to start targeting more search traffic.
Terry Van Horne
10/10/2012 12:20 pm
Many ecommerce pages receive little or no engagement or shares. What you might want to do is add a way for users to rate pages. I have seen this recommended in a few of Google's Help forum hangouts. It's also a good way to figure out what should be pruned and what should stay.... however, IMO, pruning content is the last thing you wanna do... often pages seemingly affected by Panda are so because the page that links to them is just a list of links or a thin page itself.... address the HUB pages first.... then the pages they link to
Terry Van Horne
10/10/2012 12:32 pm
45% had no improvement at all...tells me almost half simply didn't know how to fix it at all...which is probably how they got smacked to begin with!
Blah
10/10/2012 12:32 pm
That is an incredibly broad statement for something which you could not possibly know. Has there been a series of changes that are coming down hard on people who were within what appeared to be acceptable 'best practice' boundries? Yes, most certainly yes. Is a blanket statement such as 'white or black hat, you will be hit hard once you have achieved page one' absurd on its face? Yes, of course. Regardless of how you or others feel about Google web spam actions these last few months, setting your hair on fire and screaming isn't going to accomplish a conversation or actionable insight.
Milania
10/10/2012 05:08 pm
To Rob, Terry and Winson. Hey, thanks for the feedback. Rob, the content is all unique and geared towards specific topics and subjects. The competitors to like-sites are running pages of ads on their index page. Mine is all rich, specific-subject driven content. It just makes me sick to see sites that have full pages of ads ranking so high. I viewed one yesterday that had less content that what I have written to you thus far in this post; the rest of the index page contained blocks of ads, flashes and so forth. Terry, I agree about ecommerce pages. As to rating pages, I get excellent feedback. It's just that I've been knocked so far down, I can't crawl back up. Winson, Terry and Rob, thank you for your advice and comments. I don't want to sound like I am explaining away anything; I will take your advice seriously and review things. Personally speaking, it's irritating to try to help someone and they try to explain things away, so I don't want to come off sounding like that. Thanks to all of you.
Jenny Halasz
10/10/2012 08:14 pm
No offense, Barry, you're awesome, but polls like this are GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
pars g
10/23/2012 10:35 am
Hi If for example the domain demo.com get penalized by Google Panda Or Penguin and its rank fell down or its visit from Google become less than usual, if the administrator of the site change the Domain of his site in Google Webmaster Tools and make it demo2.com is it possible that the penalty transfer to new domain or not? Is it a good way to cheat Google Panda or Penguin? Is it possible for any changes which administrator of the site make to be infected by penalties for the prior ones? Regards
Robin G
12/14/2012 07:44 am
I think, it is possible but after removing penalty causes. Whats your opinion?? Please let me know