Hi! I have a large price comparison website, which includes users reviews and listing of products crawled from several online shops. Recently, my visits dropped from 8000-10000 a day to just 800. However, my PR is the same, and Googlebot activity remains the same, with 150000-250000 pages explored per day. I checked at Webmaster Tools and the only "wrong" things are about 9000 duplicated description tags (note that this website has about 700000 pages indexed), 13000 duplicated title tags and these crawl errors: HTTP: 2 Not followed: 4200 Not found: 750 Restricted by robots.txt: 230 Soft 404s: 2 Unreachable: 71 I'm fixing the duplicated tags issue, but there's something else I want to share with you guys. The website shows very dynamic content, because it depends heavily on the offers from the shops, that change continuously. So, lots of URLs are created and destroyed. So, I decided to implement something to avoid losing traffic. Let's suppose I have a URL related to an offer: http://www.example.com/28953-canon-eos-500-d.html And this offer has been deleted. So, the script reads the "canon-eos-500-d" string from the URL and searches for it in the website's products database, so it makes a 301 redirection to another URL: http://www.example.com/84975-new-canon-eos-500.html Whose content may not be the same, because two offers can be related to the same product but have quite different texts, photos, prices... Can this be causing the penalization? Also, I must say that offers (I have one page per offer) with few text/content have "nofollow" tag to avoid them to get indexed. And I think that's all potentially wrong I do. Any recommendations? Thanks! PS: the website is in Spanish and it's been online since mid-2007 with no penalizations at all (if I'm not mistaken about this)
Hi, First off, when you created your website, you did some mistakes or might used some gray or black hat technique. I am not sure rather I can easily say your website traffic dropped because you have dropped your search engine rankings. Google latest updates called panda update 1 and Google panda update 2.2 - In this update Google give a big dropped to many big giants who are always listed in top searches for every high competitive keywords, EzineArticles.com is one of the case!! I am not saying EzineArticles is dead but Google gives low priority to those links listed in the article on Ezine... Summary is, you might be the victim of panda update and nobody and can get you back except GOOGLE ADWORDS. Thanks
And what if I stop using redirections? What if I send 404 header and show the content of the redirected page, so that users don't get confused about disappearing content? I mean, in the case I described in the first post, let's suppose that when the user visits this URL: http://www.example.com/28953-canon-eos-500-d.html The page sends a 404 error and shows the content of: http://www.example.com/84975-new-canon-eos-500.html But without any redirection. Is this right? In addition, it must be mentioned that all "not followed/found" crawling errors include the "Redirect error" label. I suspect that, redirection algorithm used by the site causes Googlebot to fall into an infinite redirection error. Could this be the problem? Finally, among all websites related, the one I own appears to be the unique with this kind of penalization. I mean, if EzineArticles is penalized, and I have a pretty similar website, it's obvious that I can be also penalized. But if all my competitors are fine, I find it strange that it's caused by Panda revision. Also, penalization started 7th of July and Panda was implemented about 20th of June. Isn't it a bit strange that it would be the problem?
what about the count of your websites pages indexed in Google? is it still the same? and the ranking status?
Yes, it's still the same. It's been around 700000 pages in the index for weeks. Even Googlebot rate is around 200000 pages per day, the same as before penalization.
Yes, those rankings decreased. This can be easily checked with "Search queries" utility in Google Webmaster Tools. For "Top queries" I dropped from about 700000 impressions per day and 6000 clicks to around 250000 and 600 clicks. Note that my main source or traffic is long tail and not particular keywords.
I cannot see anything wrong with 301 redirect. Many auction sites are using this method - when an auction expires, the url gets redirected to the most relevant category. Have you just recently implemented the redirect or has it always been there? How do you generate your content/descriptions? This drop in traffic seems to me like a Panda-inflicted penalty. If you have thousands of pages of duplicate content, you will get penalized!!!
I haven't thousands of pages with duplicate content. But as I show offers from online shops, many of them have similar texts for the same product. As I said, I've updated my website to solve the title-description issues, so that it's unique, but I'm more interested in redirections. Particularly, in infinite loops that Googlebot detect. Can these errors cause a penalization?
Redirection doesn't seems to be a reason for the lost ranking of your website. It is the content that is getting duplicated and causing problem for the website. Infact 301 redirection is recommended by Google.
Some times if we use cracked scripts, they have bad things on their back door we don't even know about that ! so check for that too !
Is it possible that Panda has affected me even more than 15 days after being launched? Also note what I said. There are thousands of infinite redirection errors that affect Google and not "normal" users. Can this be also a problem?
Hi, Sorry for being late to reply you! Panda hit you after 15 days? But, it is surety that you hit by Panda Update! I hope this article will help you: http://searchengineland.com/can-you...-panda-hole-by-offloading-to-subdomains-85613 ..!! Must read this blog! In this post, a person is affected from Panda and recovered by a single technique! Also, you weren't affected from redirections, don't worry about it! Thanks