Pandas aren't always cute and cuddly...

[Fred Sherman]

...especially not when its Google's Panda algorithm.

If you've run a forum for any length of time, I'm sure you've had at least one visit to DaniWeb. They were crushed harder that I had realized by the Google update and came close to closing their doors.

This is an interesting chronicle on Google Webmaster Central of Dani's attempt to restore her site's traffic: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6546710fb55bd11b&hl=en

Its 8 pages long, but well worth reading.

At any rate, I kept coming back to RSS and how it can be hurting sites. I get why she didn't do away with RSS because she had users viewing site content with readers and wanted to maintain that.

But why provide RSS as a non-authorized URL?

A better solution would be to require logon authorization to view an RSS feed. You can already send a user/password in an ftp URL, why not for RSS? It seems like that would reduce the scrappers passing off content as their own.

 

[Dean]

This is an interesting chronicle on Google Webmaster Central of Dani's attempt to restore her site's traffic: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6546710fb55bd11b&hl=en
...

Since it seems you have read it, digested it, and I respect your view on things... any chance on a brief summary?

 

[Fred Sherman]

I'm really only commenting on a small portion of it, the part that stuck in my mind. She do so much to improve her site. What I really respect was her approach. She would take suggestions and then look for way to implement them so that the primary benefit was human usability and the SEO improvements were secondary. There were also some suggestions where she flatly refused - such as tagging - because while it might improve her SEO standings, it would hurt her community.

And honestly, there were things I couldn't follow, ironically, related to the types of link follow/nofollow options and how it did or did not allow page rank to flow.

I was very impressed with her talent and passion, big reasons why her site is such a valuable IT resource.

 

[0ptima]

I read the first and last page. This is what she said on the last page

I did improve a handful of things that, in retrospect, I feel I deserved to be penalized for. Therefore, I think that our recovery was Google reclassifying our website as non-Panda, but the fact that we're stronger than ever before can be attributed to all the SEO work I've been doing since February. I don't think I can say for sure whether our recovery was 100% Google's algorithm update or 100% work that I've done, but rather a bit of both.

Looks like Panda was right on the money and the big G will get you eventually.

 

[robdog]

This is a good article/story to NEVER implement keyword tagging. Also download speed of sites is CRAZY important.

 

[Fred Sherman]

To her credit, she figured out a way. One thing I found upsetting was how unhelpful the so-called SEO experts were.

 

[Dean]

I'm not sure I've seen many peoples problems truly solved on those forums. Generally, the obvious things are suggested, but what people really want to know is not found.

I learned more in 1 day viewing the server logs and experimenting than I could in a week on those support forums.