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Google Panda Recovery: Site Clean-Up with Google Webmaster Tools

By Julie King |

Seasoned webmasters rely on Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to help them pinpoint problems with their sites and clean up issues.

GWT helped us identify Panda issue in three main areas:

1) Under Optimization > HTML Improvements, you will see a list of things you can address to clean-up your website. In our case this identified some duplicated content we weren’t aware of from our business events calendar, where the same event held in multiple locations and/or on different dates had duplicate titles and meta tags. A simple fix will be to automatically add the city name and date in these key places.

GWT also pinpointed 228 “short meta descriptions” in this section, many of which were events that have expired. Pushing expired links back to the main events page is a step we intend to make that should help.

2) Under Health > Crawl Errors, GWT identifies errors such as links coming into pages that don’t exist on your website (404 errors), as well as server, access denied and other errors. We had already been acting on a number of things flagged in GWT, most notably hundreds of 404 not found errors and the report from Reliable SEO reiterated the importance of this.

As CanadaOne has been around since March 1998, we have thousands of inbound links and unfortunately along the way many linking errors have occurred. One of our biggest ongoing issues is keeping up with the errors, as Google finds these broken links, along with the frustration of not being able to easily find them ourselves before Google does.

For example, here are two broken links Google picked up in the past week:

Each has a different issue. The first link was a valid page that was likely truncated by the person who linked to us. In the second the text in the link seems to have been converted to ascii characters.

Legitimate links that are deleted or archived can be saved by creating 301 redirects either to new versions of the page or to another appropriate page. Broken links like these are difficult to proactively anticipate and correct for, as you would not expect them to exist. The only way to find them would be to initiate our own crawler to build an inbound link list, then identify the 404 errors on that list and correct for those broken links with 301 redirects in the .htaccess file. The scope of a project like that, unfortunately, is not viable for a small, independent website like CanadaOne.

3) GWT can pinpoint the start of a negative SEO campaign.

This point will be discussed further below, but by providing a list of links to your site on the web under the traffic tab, you can see if unnatural link patterns - that you did not initiate - start to emerge.

Recommended action(s) for other sites:

  1. Use GWT to identify problems with your site health, then clean-up duplicated tags and information.
  2. Use GWT to identify 404 and other server/access errors on your website, then be sure to clean those up as well with 301 redirects.
  3. Going forward, if you are not doing this already, be sure to add appropriate 301 redirects when you delete, archive or otherwise move a page on your website.
  4. Use GWT to detect unusual linking patterns that could indicate someone has started a negative SEO campaign against your website.

Page 1:Google Panda Report: Introduction

Page 2: Google Panda Report: Understanding How Google Views Duplicate or Thin Content

Page 3: Google Panda Report: Site Focus

Page 4: Google Panda Report: Site Architecture (previous)

Page 5: Google Panda Report: Site Clean-Up with Google Webmaster Tools

Page 6: Google Panda Report: Negative SEO (next)

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