Panda Diet for Overweight Websites

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Click to edit Master title styleClick to edit Master title styleThe Panda Diet for Big, Fat, Overweight Websites

Ehren Reilly | Glassdoor.com

SMX München

March, 2014



Bigger isn’t always better

Big and strong and lean? …or fat?


Sometimes, bigger is better

PageRank

Interlinking

Economies of scale

Brand


When You’re Big, It’s Easy to Get Overweight

Pages Indexed (Webmaster Tools)

SEO Visibility (SearchMetrics)


Overweight Sites Are Food for the Panda

PAGES INDEXED % USEFUL


How Big Sites Get Fat With Junk Pages

“No results” pages

URL based duplicates

Content topic repetition

Multiple versions of site, multiple countries


8

Is Google Sending Traffic To Your Junk Pages?

Panda looks at all the pages of your site (not just the good ones). Junk pages drive down your overall score.

Pre-Panda: “Send me any traffic to any page, it can’t hurt!” Post-Panda: “Don’t send traffic to my junk pages, because that

will ruin my average.”

How do you get Google to stop sending traffic to your junk pages?


The Panda Diet


Panda Diet: 1. "noindex" Pages with No Content







Benefits of noindex,follow Still get credit for links to these pages. Users can still access these pages via navigation. Google won’t send users to these pages.

Why not Canonical?

Sometimes you can’t figure out in real time which is the most relevant other page.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow”>


Panda Diet: 2. If no one ever visits a page, remove it

If no one ever visits a page, it’s because:A. No one wants that information

B. Google doesn’t think that page is a good result for any user queries

If you have a page with no visitors, do you really need that page?

If a page has no value, then remove, canonicalize or noindex


Panda Diet: 3. Identify your pages with the highest bounce rate. Fix them.

Too expensive to improve all of your content?

Only fix the worst pages.


Panda Diet: 4. Only One Page Per Unique Title


Panda Diet: 4. Only One Page Per Unique Title


Panda Diet: 5. Only One Page Per Topic





How to automate detection of similar articles:

For 1,000,000 pages, which pairs of pages are very similar?

All Pairs Problem

To compare every pair of items in a set of 1 million items requires billions of comparisons.



Create a search engine index (Solr)

How to tie a tie

How to tie a tie for a suit (0.92)

How to tie a tie in a Windsor knot (0.82)

How to tie a tie step by step (0.97)

How to tie a neck tie (0.90)

How to tie a Windsor knot (0.65)


Case Study: Successful Panda Diet

Before 12 million pages of article content. 95% of URLs get <3 visit per year. Panda problem

Project Remove “no content” pages (3 million) Merge duplicate title pages (80,000) Merge similar topic pages using a Solr search index (2 million) Remove pages with <3 visits in prior 12 months (5.5 million)

After 1 million good quality pages remained. Noindex or merged 11 million pages

– 2% loss in traffic in first 30 days

Panda problem went away– Increase in traffic 22% in 60 days– Increase in traffic 118% in 120 days


Case Study: Successful Panda Diet


Conclusion

Bigger isn’t better.

Don’t try to get bigger, try to be more useful for more users.

As your site grows and you add new features, stay lean.

If your site gets overweight, put it on a diet.


Thank You!

Ehren Reilly

[email protected]

@ehrenreilly

"noindex"

mailto:[email protected]

Marketing

Panda Diet for Overweight Websites