23 replies to this topic

[jonbey]

Had an idea on Panda regarding Wordpress sites. Many people saying Wordpress is the problem, although I suspect it is how it is managed. My hunch is that tag pages can trigger poor quality alerts. Of my 1400 articles, I have 3500 tags. Only 10 categories. Every I write fits in to 1 category, but I tag like crazy, whatever seems relevant. Never for any reason other than, why not? But now there may be a good reason not to tag willynilly.

So, ideally need a nice list of Wordpress sites affected by Panda, and ones not affected, then look at tags numbers.

If some Panda winners here wish to contribute anon that that would be cool, such as "10 sites, 4 good, tags in good, tags in bad".

I am trashing many tags which were only used once or twice, maybe thrice...

Of course, may be a wasted effort. Wrote a new article this morning, so a constructive start to the day, followed by a destructive session. Which will hopefully prove to be constructive.... :pieinface:

[DonnaFontenot]

I know one webmaster who feels as you do, who was struck by Panda Round 1, and he deleted all tags. Of course, he's seen no recovery either, so no idea if that helped or not.

On the other hand, my one site that was hit is not a wordpress site. Mostly static site, with just a couple of php includes for menu, etc.

My two largest wordpress sites both use tons of tags. Those sites were not hit by Panda.

You could always just noindex the tag pages, and leave the tags if they help users.

[jonbey]

To be honest, the tags probably do not help users anyway. I stopped using a tag cloud as testing showed that nobody used it, the tag links on the articles are not used much either. I have used them a bit in the past, well a lot, to link to relevant sections / groups of posts, but only the popular ones that I use.

I am not deleting all as I use them as a part of the navigation, as sub-sections of categories. But down to tags with only 3 pages, may stop at 4, maybe 5. Or just have X tags only, somewhere between 20-100 I guess.

One person did claim to recover after removing tags and making some other changes - was mentioned here I think, and speculation that they may have suffered a non-Panda problem. Or it may have been on Michaels blog I read about it. Head is swimming still.

[tam]

I've seen it suggested before that you nofollow tags and date archives as they're just duplicate content reordered, so are for people that search engines.

I've not got around to it though, I kinda dislike the principle of nofollow - if we are meant to build sites for people not SE's, why do we need to add tags specifically for SE's that have no relevance to people?

I don't use many tags and haven't noticed any changes in either site I have running wordpress, though neither are giant.

[jonbey]

Yeah, one of the many pages I read today talked against nofollow (or noindex) as having so many pages for users that are blocked to the robots may seem suspicious.

I have adopted the mass deletion of tags method. All current tags have a minimum of 5 posts now (I think....). Reduced from thousands to 158.

[iamlost]

I would have a hard time ever recommending rel=nofollow for anything, there is almost/always some better method that does not automagically evaporate page value (in G's calculations at least).

Have tried adding the meta noindex to tag pages?
Note: 'follow' is the default and technically should not be necessary but one could make that 'noindex,follow' just to be cautious.
This should remove tags from G's index but the bot and value would pass through normally.

[jonbey]

Yeah, I will stick with my current plan for now of just have much fewer tag pages. Maybe they will eventually rank better after the clean up. I mentioned this only the other day, in happier times!

[Michael_Martinez]

If it were me having to bring a Wordpress site back, I would get rid of every plugin and theme and widget that doesn't fit into the basic package and just go as lean as possible. Wordpress right out of the box doesn't seem to have a problem with Panda. Most of my blogs are very, very lean.

I do use some anti-spam and social media plugins that haven't caused any problems so far as I can see.

Plain and simple -- that's what I prefer. I'm not happy with the whole "Web 2.0" design paradigm for blogs. Too many such sites got dinged.

[EGOL]

Anybody read this about Panda at Barry's site?
http://www.seroundta...hits-13586.html

[Michael_Martinez]

SE Roundtable is the first site I read every morning, Monday through Friday. I'm not sure what to make of the supposed "update", however.

I mean, since June 14 there have probably been 8-9 more algorithm changes.

[DonnaFontenot]

I saw a "tiny" recovery with the latest changes. Definitely not back to pre-Panda levels, but as an example, one main phrase that dropped from top 3 to 50 or so at first, that then settled in at 17-20, rose up to position 13 with the latest round.

That's not a big recovery, but it is movement in a positive direction.

I doubt WP plugins would have any effect unless they just do really terrible things to a blog. My DD blog has 51 active plugins (yep 51) and Panda didn't affect it at all.

Now, yeah, I should probably trim that number down for performance sake, but I don't think plugins are an issue, in general.

[iamlost]

Speaking more to the original question/comment: Many people saying Wordpress is the problem, although I suspect it is how it is managed. My hunch is that tag pages can trigger poor quality alerts.

Beyond content (define as you will) the biggest problems that I have seen on hammered sites I've been allowed to investigate are loss of backlink value (as jonbey has previously mentioned elsewhere if not here) and too many dead ends interrupting value flow through a site. And many WP sites are set up such that tags are dead ends stopping value flow.

If one then applies meta noindex to the tags they accumulate value that goes nowhere. However, so long as the noindex page links out the value continues to flow ... the key is not whether a page is noindex rather whether it is a dead end. Know your internal link structure. And then optimise it.

Anybody read this about Panda at Barry's site?

Yes. Interesting. And not unexpected.

[test-ok]

Could Panda be as simple as blogs are just not as popular as far as seo as it use to be. I have a bunch of sites that don't use blogs or ever have and I wouldn't have known the Panda was even alive...except for reading about it at places like this.

[rustybrick]

About to do a follow up post on SER and SELand - this was an official update to Panda. Should have more at SELand in a couple hours.

[DonnaFontenot]

It's definitely not just about blogs. My biggest site ($-wise) is an old non-CMS site. A couple of slightly hit sites that got hit in round 2 are also old non-CMS sites. None of my WordPress blogs were hit by Panda.

Looking forward to reading your post, Barry.

[jonbey]

Yeah, I think it is probably just a case that so many people use Wordpress so naturally there are a lot of Wordpress sites in the mix.

[rustybrick]

Okay, live:

(1) Official: Panda 2.2 live http://searchenginel...2-is-live-82611

(2) More on how Panda works from Danny : http://searchenginel...hm-update-82564

[Michael_Martinez]

Well, now that the horse has run out of the barn and the barn has almost completely burned down, I want to say something about the Panda numbering convention: It's WRONG.

I think Panda 2.0 should really be called Panda 1.1.

Oh well. Just wanted to get that off my chest....

[jonbey]

Well, I am guess that either the update has failed or it has not rolled out to the UK yet as scrapers are still outranking me.

[iamlost]

jonbey... I've read that G is supposed to working on the scraper problem that Panda 'exposed'. ha.

G has always had a strange symbiosis with scrapers... but there have been some interesting if inconclusive (a G specialty) comments (by JohnMu among others) on duplicate content that go well beyond exact match duplication... so the possibility of significant change exists... whether helpful to originating webdevs unknown... so hope, but don't hold your breath...

Edited by iamlost, 21 June 2011 - 01:33 PM.