Another webmaster claims to have recovered from the Google Panda update. Like the rumors about actual updates (or refreshes) occurring, it’s probably best to take this with a grain of salt, because there are so many factors at play, and it’s hard to tell for sure that it’s really Panda.
Either way, the story is about a webmaster who claims to have recovered Google traffic, so looking at what was done to achieve that could prove useful.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a Google forum thread where this person shared his story: “Glad to inform that mine site has recovered from Google panda 3.6 in just 35 days and now the ranking are even much better as compared to the past. I can see a traffic jump of around 150%. Awesome and cheers. Thanks for the suggestions and as now I am a perfect Google panda expert.”
He doesn’t mention what the site actually is, despite being asked. He does share a LinkedIn profile, which includes a URL to: Americasjobexchange.com, though it’s not clear if this is the site in question. If the grammar used on the site was anything like the grammer used in the forum post, it’s not hard to see why Google may not have liked the site.
The webmaster claims to have “deeply analyzed” his site, discussed the problem in Google forums and with industry experts, written “maximum posts” on specific topics, removed pages with little content (noindex, nofollow), modified the URL structure and placed canonical or 301 redirects to old ones, continued link building “with brand names that looks natural,” solved WMT crawl errors to a greater extent and removed some internal duplicate pages.
Much of this seems like stuff that could help regardless of Panda, kind of like what we saw with DaniWeb, who was also able to recover (before being hit again, more than once).
Scwhartz points out, “He mentions he recovered on June 6th, which is not exactly when Panda 3.7 was released. It was released a couple days later. Although he said he did see even a greater boost on June 8th. So was this really a Panda recovery?”
Perhaps rather than focusing on specific algorithm updates, webmasters should just follow these types of best practices and Google’s quality guidelines. Chances are, they’ll help in the long run anyway, regardless of which update is rolling out (and don’t worry, there will be more).
Image: Awesome fat Panda eating=]] (YouTube)