[CASE STUDY] How I Recovered from Google Panda - Pictures included

This is all a bit bogus really.

It's more likely Google made some changes in that Panda update that effected the site. I seriously doubt what you did was what made it recover. 15% drop is nothing, if it dropped 50% and you changed a few things and it recovered I may believe it. My site was hit with Panda at in September too and lost 90% of it's traffic, still no recovery and I did a lot of the things you said.

Uh no. It was definitely panda. 15% is the minimum sites usually drop; but it certainly hit the business bottom-line. It had all panda-esque type elements to it. The drops and gains occurred on panda update days. When it dropped it was unable to go higher, it only sunk lower week-to-week.

Now, perhaps it wasn't the changes? One might argue that, but it would make a lot of sense if these changes made a big difference. I cannot begin to tell you how shitty the blog was. 60+ posts of just absolute mess; the very definition of an SEO nightmare. Fixing that and replacing that I really believe made a huge difference. And, no matter what, this highlighted to me the importance of not having overlapping keyword optimiziation on different pages. Even if its like my site where these has to be some cross-optimization it is incredibly important to "get creative".

But on a side note, the volitility of these Google updates is starting to make me throw in the hat for dealing with client websites. I'm happy to do it for myself but client websites? Ugh.

Great post! I've always been a big fan of social links, and social buzz around sites. seems like those are getting more and more important these days, something to keep in mind!

My question is why are you giving recovery tips for an update that happened several months ago? You have good advice here and I appreciate your post but how about the most recent update, the Google Panda 23 Refresh. We need to hear about a recovery story from this update not the September 27th one :-( As nice as your post is, I'm afraid its useless to anyone who's site was effected by the Dec. 21st 2013 update.

Click to expand...

Useless? How ungrateful can you get?
The OP lays out very clearly how he has taken steps to recover from a Panda update on Sept 27th (and it was Panda because my sites were also affected and those of others I know) but it doesn't matter when it was...Panda is all about crap / thin content and what the OP has laid out is a strategy for fixing this going forward. Even if your site doesn't recover for whatever reason, this is good practice and should be used as a guide for doing your website the right way. Let's face it, it's not going to hurt your site is it?

This isn't about backlinking...this is about housework on your site and everyone should be doing it.

Thank you

Yes; Panda is about thin/bad content. But while its clear that you shouldn't have keyword-stuffed blog posts and thin pages, there are some elements often forgotten; such as duplicate meta data and being careful to not optimize 2+ pages for the same keyword. Sometimes this happens without you even meaning to; like with this website, it happens as a result of the nature of it. You just have to say screw it, and use your writing skillz to replace it with new keywords.

And I think that its important to note how quickly the recovery happened; it recovered from just one update. Now, is this possible for small websites? My evidence seems to suggest this is not the case; but this is a big website that is an authority within its niche, and it has an extremely active Facebook page that I've built and nurtured; we had another post go viral the other day.