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How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

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Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#11

Post by jerrya »

spolsky wrote: post #10
necrodome wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search Hawaii Hotels on Google, the top result is a 7-item list of hotels with a little bit more information (link to the official hotel site, review count, place page, etc). How is that different from travbuddy's list page except that extra information?

The top result I'm getting goes to TripAdvisor. Arguably, TripAdvisor is much bigger and has tons more reviews than TravBuddy. I can't speak to its quality but that does speak to its "canonicalness".

I think necrodome is referring to google's own, similar to travbuddy, reviews presented as Google places. I get 7 hotels listed from Google places as well listed above the link to tripadvisor.

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#12

Post by WalterGR »

I've run The Online Slang Dictionary (http://onlineslangdictionary.com/) since 1996. On April 11, the date of one of the Panda updates, traffic from Google dropped 20%. Between April 11 and a month ago, I made the following changes:

* Correct spelling, grammar, and capitalization errors

* Where spelling "errors" are legitimate "slang terms", link to the definition pages for those slang terms (gonna, wanna, ain't, dat's, etc.)

* Remove unnecessary extra punctuation, e.g. example sentences ending in "???" or "!!!"

* Checked keywords on top landing pages for searches like "slang", "slang dictionary", "slang thesaurus"

* Remove unnecessary extra spaces in the middle of sentences

* Use complete sentences even where completely unnecessary

* Restructure entire /definition+of/word+goes+here directory structure to be /meaning-of/word-goes-here, since people search for "meaning of" more frequently than "definition of", and since Google seems to have stopped treating + as a word separator in some cases.

* Reworked meta descriptions and page titles

* Removed meta keywords. I know Google doesn't use them, but maybe they treat them as a negative indicator of site quality? Who knows?

* Completely re-designed site's front page

* Switched from Google Custom Search Engine to a custom search implementation, because I think I can provide better results, improve the user experience, and reduce search exit rate

* Delay-load Twitter widget to reduce page load time

* Use rel="canonical" on every page on the site, since Google is indexing the IP address of the site and showing it separately in SERPs

* Removed nodes from the sitemap, just in case Google knows better

* Fixed the "HTML suggestions" on GWT, such as short meta descriptions and duplicate meta descriptions

* Excluded directories via robots.txt like /word-of-the-day/, since the words of the day are already spidered elsewhere on the site, in case Google is giving me a duplicate content penalty of some kind

I've also made plenty more changes in the past month, but I haven't written up a list yet.

Sine the Panda update, I've seen no improvement in traffic from Google to my site.

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#13

Post by ackkchoo »

spolsky wrote: post #6

Because of the lucrative nature of affiliate payments and commissions in the travel industry, one of the biggest sources of what Google considered bad content was sites linking to hotels. Look at this page: [ http://www.travbuddy.com/hotels ]. All those links to "Hawaii Hotels" and "New York Hotels" look exactly like an old-school linkfarm. Ask yourself this: if you're Google, and somebody is typing in "Hawaii Hotels…

Hi Joel - Thanks for the feedback, that's really helpful and you do make a lot of valid points, especially about travel affiliates. We definitely aren't trying to rank for "Hawaii Hotels". Those links are intended as a sitemap to help people find our review pages, many of which I believe we do have valuable, original content.

As a concrete example following the Hawaii theme, we used to rank pretty well when someone searched for "Hale Koa Hotel" (a hotel in Hawaii).

Here is our page on it:

http://www.travbuddy.com/Hale-Koa-Hotel-v189806

It's got a few detailed reviews and candid photos from active members of the site. Certainly not perfect, but I think it's helpful and that it provides a different perspective. Right now it's ranked #55 on my browser, and here is a sampling of the sites that rank above it:

#9 http://old.armymwr.com/portal/travel/recreationcenters/hale_... (a site that just links to info from the official page)

#11 http://www.frommers.com/destinations/oahu/H42763.html (A trusted brand but limited original information about the hotel and no photos)

#14 http://www.dollar.com/Locations/gen.aspx?locationId=HNLC02 (no content at all)

#15 http://www.gohawaii.com/listing/Dining/90173401_HaleKoaHotel... (no original information)

#17 http://www.wedhawaii.com/hawaii-wedding-locations/oahu/halek... (a wedding photo album site, but no specific information about the hotel)

#20 http://hotelandtravelindex.travelweekly.com/Destinations/Hon... (no original information)

#21 http://gohawaii.about.com/library/gallery/blwaikiki_hotels_4... (1 photo, nothing else)

#25 http://travel.aol.com/travel-guide/united-states/hawaii/hono... (hardly any information)

#28 http://www.maplandia.com/united-states/car-rental/honolulu-h...

...

I'm not arguing we should be #1, or even #10, but we're certainly better than many of the sites between #1 and #55, and we've seen this pattern repeat itself for most of the hotels and pages we have original and unique content for. While we certainly don't have as many hotel reviews as TripAdvisor, we do have more quality reviews than most other sites, and we have to start somewhere :)

I guess a better question would be, if we have 75,000 reviews, what is the best way of internally linking to them within our site WITHOUT looking like a link farm? We're just trying to put our best content forward, so any suggestions would be appreciated!

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#14

Post by ackkchoo »

elsewhen wrote: post #7
elsewhen wrote: post #5

The site should 410 removed pages insted of 404ing... 404 just means "not here anymore" and google will wait to remove it from their index until they have revisited the page a few more times over days/weeks. A 410 on the other hand indicates that this page has been intentionally removed, and google tends to act quicker on those.

Alternatively, they could 301 the removed pages to the most relevant parent page if that would be a better user experience for those few who did navigate to them. (in my experience 301ed pages also get removed from the index faster than 404s)

Thanks, that's helpful information as well. I didn't know about the 410. We used to 301 some pages, but ran into duplicate content issues where Google would continually spider old 301'd URLs (even when there were no longer links pointing to the original bad URL).

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#15

Post by ackkchoo »

WalterGR wrote: post #12

I've run The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ ) since 1996. On April 11, the date of one of the Panda updates, traffic from Google dropped 20%. Between April 11 and a month ago, I made the following changes: * Correct spelling, grammar, and capitalization errors * Where spelling "errors" are legitimate "slang terms", link to the definition pages for those slang terms (gonna, wanna, ain't, d…

Hi Walter - Thanks for posting your site and describing the changes you've made as well. It's interesting that you've focused on spelling/grammar errors (despite it being a slang site), and still haven't noticed any improvements.

We have a lot of members from around the world, who may not have English as their first language. We've thought about correcting some spelling/grammar programatically, but since we have a UGC site, and each review is tied to a real person, it seems disingenuous to rewrite someone else's words.

I recently read an article about how Zappos uses Mechanical Turk to correct grammar and spelling in user reviews (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110428/02453114067/zappos...), and one of the comments that stood out to me was:

"Grammar, punctuation and style are part of how we decide if a review is credible. For Zappos to artificially inflate the credibility of reviews by changing those qualities is a form of fraud IMO."

I don't know if I'd call it fraud, but it certainly artificially inflates the credibility of reviews, and that's something (in addition to the rewriting someone else's thoughts part) we don't feel comfortable doing.

(For your site, since it's a dictionary, seems like a better fix and I'm surprised that it hasn't yielded any improvements)

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#16

Post by franze »

hi, the funny thing is: all big travel sites lost http://trends.google.com/websites?q=tripadvisor.com%2C+exped...

i did not hear from a single big travel site that won in the so called google panda update.

and to be honest, i understand it

the spammiest verticals are not only PPP (pills, porn, poker), it's PPPIT (pills, porn, poker, insurances, travel). i worked in poker, i worked in travel, i did insurances and yeah from an SEO perspective they are all very disgusting verticals.

and from what it looks like: the whole travel segment got a hit. so yeah, you can try to get out of "panda" but then you should realize that "panda" is nothing you can get out of. it's not a "penalty", it's a new set of rules. try what works, try what doesn't and then iterate. so simple.

and from what i see: http://tools.pingdom.com/?url=http://www.travbuddy.com/Hotel...

you root HTML already takes 900ms to get delivered, then you load about 162 additional dependencies. ... i would work on speed.

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#17

Post by patio11 »

spolsky wrote: post #6

Because of the lucrative nature of affiliate payments and commissions in the travel industry, one of the biggest sources of what Google considered bad content was sites linking to hotels. Look at this page: [ http://www.travbuddy.com/hotels ]. All those links to "Hawaii Hotels" and "New York Hotels" look exactly like an old-school linkfarm. Ask yourself this: if you're Google, and somebody is typing in "Hawaii Hotels…

So,

1) Not much content on that page exclusive of navigation.

2) Not enough site trust.

3) Not enough links pointing directly to that page, the category (state) pages, or leaf node pages, like the individual hotel ones.

Prior to Panda, a domain with a lot of links could have virtually infinite leaf node pages with no links but laser-targeted content and rank a large portion of them. These days, "lots of links to our homepage" plus virtually infinite pages with no links is a recipe for being Panda'd.

I don't think the core "top -> state -> hotel" structure is likely a problem. That sort of tree structure, with variations, is pretty much universal in large sites. Having a lot of links on a page will not, by itself, burn you to bits.

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#18

Post by patio11 »

ackkchoo wrote: post #13
spolsky wrote: post #6

Because of the lucrative nature of affiliate payments and commissions in the travel industry, one of the biggest sources of what Google considered bad content was sites linking to hotels. Look at this page: [ http://www.travbuddy.com/hotels ]. All those links to "Hawaii Hotels" and "New York Hotels" look exactly like an old-school linkfarm. Ask yourself this: if you're Google, and somebody is typing in "Hawaii Hotels…

Hi Joel - Thanks for the feedback, that's really helpful and you do make a lot of valid points, especially about travel affiliates. We definitely aren't trying to rank for "Hawaii Hotels". Those links are intended as a sitemap to help people find our review pages, many of which I believe we do have valuable, original content. As a concrete example following the Hawaii theme, we used to rank pretty well when someone s…

Outside of Panda, in terms of your goals for your business: do you really want to be in the business of arbitraging existing travel brands like Hale Koa Hotel and charging them (Hale Koa Hotel) money for customers who already knew of them? That strikes me as not a great place to be in life, for a lot of reasons. For one: what does Google need you for in that scenario? (Answer: nothing after they debut Google Travel and give it 80% of the non-ad real estate on the search page.) For another, you're in perpetual competition to be in the top ~10 of the 1,000 sites who are adding equally little value, and your best answer on why you should be there is guaranteed to be "OK so we're meh-tastic but come on we're 2% better than our meh-tastic competition doing the exact same thing we do."

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#19

Post by brentdev »

ackkchoo wrote: post #4
jerrya wrote: post #3

Hi Eric, Have you tried approaching Google to discuss it?

Hi Jerry - I don't know anyone who works in search quality at Google, and they have said a few times that they aren't going to make any manual exceptions. I've filed a "reconsideration request" with Google, and only got a boilerplate response saying our site has "no manual penalties". Unfortunately, any spam report, reconsideration request, or communication via the Webmaster Tools interface seemingly goes to a black…

They've admitted that there's al algorithm then also sites can be manually 'reviewed'... layman's terms... yeah they made exceptions and got called out hardcore with this last panda release on it and at least they 'claim' that they're working on fixing it. search google for panda site slap. you'll see lists of all the big ones that went down...

Re: How We Have Attempted to Recover from Google Panda

#20

Post by narad »

brentdev wrote: post #19
ackkchoo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Jerry - I don't know anyone who works in search quality at Google, and they have said a few times that they aren't going to make any manual exceptions. I've filed a "reconsideration request" with Google, and only got a boilerplate response saying our site has "no manual penalties". Unfortunately, any spam report, reconsideration request, or communication via the Webmaster Tools interface seemingly goes to a black…

They've admitted that there's al algorithm then also sites can be manually 'reviewed'... layman's terms... yeah they made exceptions and got called out hardcore with this last panda release on it and at least they 'claim' that they're working on fixing it. search google for panda site slap. you'll see lists of all the big ones that went down...

Matt Cutts has already confirmed that there won't be any manual changes. http://followmattcutts.com/2011/05/25/matt-cutts-confirms-no...
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