This past February I lost half my traffic to the Panda update. This week it all came back, and even more. How? I finally figured out why (probably) I was being penalized under Panda. On each separate page, near the bottom, I had previously posted a full-paragraph copyright declaration. I had also added a couple of short paragraphs pointing links to other pages on my website. These paragraphs were not relevant to the main text of each page's article and were there mostly for SEO purposes. Google probably interpreted them as spammy. This past week I removed them all and just put something like this: ------------------------------------------ ©2008, My name. Copyright statement. ------------------------------------------ The hyperlink pointed to one single copyright page that covered the entire website. And I just deleted the for-"SEO" paragraphs. Result? Traffic immediately skyrocketed back to, and even a bit above, the previous high levels. Comments?
Bravo! It's taken five years for Google to get around to recognizing 'SEO footer spam' and your results following the revision shows it was part of the Panda update.
Is it really true?? Cos frankly my footer is also pretty spammy with keywords of all the states in the country, words like "buy online" "paypal" and things of this nature.
Nice. It always feel good to find out the reason why your site is dipping and then being able to bring it back up.
1-stop, I think you are exactly correct. That a very descriptive term: "SEO footer spam". I'm virtually certain that was my problem, and since removing it all, my traffic is going through the roof.
Every panda update I had traffic halve. Last few days it has been really high - I think I finally figured out how to un-panda my site. Its still not there yet, I have to wait for google to fully re-index the content I have the dup penalty with (it is incredibly hard to get rid of content from google's cache). The best thing is, after years of barely scraping to $1 or $2 a day on adsense, the last few days I've been sitting at $5-10 a day. And this is with maybe 30% more traffic over last week. The RPM is *way* up. It almost hit $1 today after being under 10c for ages.
So is the only thing you did removing the paragraph where you asked for people to link to your website with specific text? Or do you think the external link within that paragraph was more likely to be the problem?
Isn't it possible that all the other sites that lost ranking recently due to Panda update on Oct 13/14 allowed for your site to come up and so you are getting more traffic?
I owned both sites so I had a duplicate content issue with my own content. Didn't even occur to me that it was a problem since there are no copyright issues at all. Unfortunately one site is 7 years older than the other. Don't 301 redirect is all I can say, the trick was to delete and REPLACE the content with something containing absolutely none of the same content. When it is all 100% purged from google I might put the redirect back, seems a waste of 20k backlinks pointing to pages that don't exist. Irony is, its only been a few days of high traffic and I've already got queries from direct advertisers. So when I would happily have sold them 200k impressions for $20 for the entire month just to earn more than Adsense, I've suddenly got to where Adsense is paying a decent amount and I'd want to sell the same space for at least $150. Argh!
I am not sure that was the reason. It seems a lot of sites that were hit by panda earlier this year recovered somewhat October 14 although many sites took a hit this recent update, for no apparent reason. Don't get me wrong, taking measures to remove over optimization are good things to do, but this recent update isn't making a lot of sense, and I wouldn't be so quick to attribute the changes you've made to the recovery in traffic. Please don't tell me the panda update is all about quality content or not having duplicate content, plenty of sites with unique content took a dive and lost significant traffic with panda. Honestly, the SERPs at the moment are a mess, and I don't think anyone has a clue what is going on right now.
I agree, no one know what the perfect site is, all sites are losing traffic to sites that are owned by google
Not just google owned web properties but sites with a lot of authority like wikipedia seemed to really benefit from this recent update.
That's great to know that you have picked your mistake and you are back in business. I am still trying to find this out
I did indeed remove the paragraph in which I kind of "invited" a link to each page. Also I removed from each page a copyright paragraph and replaced it with a simple, short link to a separate copyright page. And finally, I removed from each page a paragraph with links to other pages within my site. That paragraph was mostly unrelated to the content of each page, so it was probably interpreted as SEO spam. I am very happy with these changes, and they have made my pages more user-friendly
Are you sure it was Panda? Maybe it was another Penalty, because I know Panda it's automatically on a certain period of time and websites don't get traffic back until Panda is rolled back. If this was Panda (there are certain ways to find out), maybe it's possible to recovery from it.
This is very interesting. Most of my sites were hit by the recent panada update 2.5.2, I lost about 50% of my traffic. I almost forgot that I have a small resource box below my footer, this contains keyword rich content with links to some of my articles. I am going to remove this box from all my sites - 8 in total and see if makes a difference. The box serves no purpose but to boost certain keywords, so maybe it has been classed as spam. I shall remove all the boxes and see what happens....
webgold, my situation was pretty much like what you have described, and which a poster above called "seo footer spam". When I removed all those footer links on 200+ pages, my traffic doubled. It is holding steady now above pre-Panda levels.