Panda Diet for Overweight Websites

Confidential and Proprietary © Glassdoor, Inc. 2008-2013
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

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?
8

The Panda Diet

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

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: 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
ehren.reilly@glassdoor.com
@ehrenreilly
"noindex"

Panda Diet for Overweight Websites

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