Google Panda and even Penguin recoveries are not all that uncommon but I'd say most people hit, probably have not recovered. That being said, most still want to recover.
Most SEOs say, to recover from Penguin, you need to fix your link profile. While Panda recoveries are more about the content on your web site.
We've been talking mostly about Penguin but I spotted a new Google Webmaster Help thread that has a webmaster who claims to have been hit by Panda 3.6 on April 27th and recovered in the Panda 3.7 update on June 8th or so. He said:
Glad to inform that mine site has recovered from Google panda 3.6 in just 35 days and now the ranking are even much better as compared to the past. I can see a traffic jump of around 150%. Awesome and cheers. Thanks for the suggestions and as now I am a perfect Google panda expert.
What steps did he take to recover from Panda?
- Deeply analyzed mine site
- Participated in Google Forums to discuss the problem
- Discussed with industry experts around me
- Went maximum posts for these topics(articles & blogs) as i was too worried of losing job
- Removed the pages with little content(noindex, nofollow)
- Modified the url structure and placed either canonical or 301 redirection to the old ones.
- Continued link building with brand names that looks natural
- Solved the WMT crawl errors to greater extent.
- Removed some internal duplicate pages that exist on mine site
Now, two things here:
(1) He mentions he recovered on June 6th, which is not exactly when Panda 3.7 was released. It was released a couple days later. Although he said he did see even a greater boost on June 8th. So was this really a Panda recovery?
(2) Maybe he should not have been hit at all. Maybe the changes he made had no impact at all? He was hit by 3.6 and recovered with 3.7. Maybe whatever changes Google made in 3.7 reversed something that hit him in 3.6? Or maybe the steps above really helped.
You see, it is hard to tell with any of these recoveries. Only one who would know for sure is Google.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Image credit via ShutterStock for Panda image.
