Use of Google URL removal tool for Panda recovery.

[Dr.Marie]

In the last few months I have reviewed a lot of sites that have been affected by Panda. The vast majority of them, in my opinion are affected by Panda because their site contains too much duplicate content. Thin content is a close second.

I have been advising people that the best way to deal with these pages is to do one of the following to each page:
1. Rewrite the content to make it substantial and unique.
2. Noindex the page.
or
3. Remove the page.

If #2 or #3 is chosen then I usually recommend using the Google URL removal tool to tell Google to remove the page from their index. Sometimes you can noindex or 404 a page and it can stay in the index for months. (I believe this is why some people don't immediately recover from Panda after making their improvements.)

What I'm trying to decide, however, is whether the pages need to be removed from Google's cache as well. If you are using the tool to remove individual pages, then you can select to remove the page from the index AND the cache. But, let's say you want to remove your entire /articles/ directory (because they are all stolen/duplicated articles). You can remove an entire directory from the index in one step using the URL removal tool but in order to remove the pages from the cache you need to enter each url individually. I'm just trying to decide if it is worth the extra work.

[EGOL]

I think that the answer in many cases will depend upon the importance of the website, how many crap pages must be manually deleted, and what you will be left with after the purge.

If you have a business that was converting $20,000/month then yes, by all means submit each URL by hand to get the site back into competitive action as soon as possible - as long as that money was being produced from pages that had substantive content which will still be in place when the purge is done.

However, if you have a big spammy site that has 1,000,000 pages of crap that needs to be dumped and no content left after you get rid of them, then it might not pay to manually dump the 1,000,000 pages because you will have nothing left after the purge.

Other assets that might be left after a purge are off-site SEO and a domain. For pages that have lots of off-site SEO assets it would be a good idea to improve the content.

[Dr.Marie]

These are good points. But do you guys think that removing the page from the cache would provide any benefit for Panda cleanup? I can see that removing pages from the index would help but what about the cache? My gut instinct is that removing them from the index is fine...but I'd love other opinions.

[KernelPanic]

I have only ever worked on Panda issues after the declivity has been noticed. Site managers come to me after they have discovered their once-busy website is now a ghost town. All I have ever done to recover from duplicate content issues is recreate the text thus ridding the site of the problem. This has worked for me on numerous occasions, the ranks and resulting traffic seem to recover quickly once this is done.

I will slash and burn with Penguin, Panda seems to respond in my experience to TLC.

[Test-ok]

A clean up of dup content cleaned up a site as soon as it was re-spidered.

[Dr.Marie]

Thanks guys. This will work well for a site that gets crawled often. However, here's an example where I think using the URL removal tool could have helped:

I created a site for a test project using a CSS template. I uploaded the template files to my server and forgot to delete the stock pages that came with it. As a result, the site had about 15 pages of "lorem ipsum" content that was duplicated on several other sites. The site very quickly was affected by Panda.

I forgot about it for a while (as happens with a lot of my new projects). Then one day when I went to check my ranks it was nowhere to be found. I realized what had happened with the duplicate content so I removed all of the duplicate lorem ipsum pages. I would say it took about 3 months before the content was removed from the index and the site was able to rank again. This is because I had not updated any content for quite some time and also because there were only a couple of links pointing to the site.

In that case, removing the URLs likely would have gotten the site out of Panda hell much quicker.

[KernelPanic]

Thanks guys. This will work well for a site that gets crawled often. However, here's an example where I think using the URL removal tool could have helped:

I created a site for a test project using a CSS template. I uploaded the template files to my server and forgot to delete the stock pages that came with it. As a result, the site had about 15 pages of "lorem ipsum" content that was duplicated on several other sites. The site very quickly was affected by Panda.

I forgot about it for a while (as happens with a lot of my new projects). Then one day when I went to check my ranks it was nowhere to be found. I realized what had happened with the duplicate content so I removed all of the duplicate lorem ipsum pages. I would say it took about 3 months before the content was removed from the index and the site was able to rank again. This is because I had not updated any content for quite some time and also because there were only a couple of links pointing to the site.

In that case, removing the URLs likely would have gotten the site out of Panda hell much quicker.

You created a brand new site, all the content was Latin, you never did any promotion, didn't even look at the site for 3 months then looked at the ranks 3 months later and assumed the problem was Panda? do you think that site would have ranked pre-panda?

Remove the pages, fix the pages, blow it up with C-4 whatever you did would have been an improvement!

[Dr.Marie]

That's just one example..you're right...it's not the best one. There were pages on that site, aside from the lorem ipsum pages that really should have ranked though (and now are).

It just seems to make sense to me that you stand a chance at quicker recovery if you use the URL removal tool. Let's say I got hit with Panda on November 21. I work hard to clean up duplicate and thin content and make my site a better place. I finish my changes on December 20 and on December 22 Panda refreshes. (I'm making up the dates). Most likely Google hasn't crawled all of my pages by then so the index still contains all sorts of duplication and thin content on my site. Hopefully by the next update sometime in January the full site has been crawled and I will recover. But, had I gotten those pages out of the index right away I could have recovered a month earlier.

[Test-ok]

Someones thinking of different uses for the removal tool. However, you said it takes you until December 22 (glad you didn't use the 21st. lol) anyway changing the urls a month earlier wouldn't have helped, you still gave dup content so the first month is dedicated in cleaning up the dup content...no matter which route you take. So that theory is kinda flawed...No? But I applaud you in using tools in ways not intended. Google's been doing it for years...like an analistic program to help users watch site results...yea right.

[KernelPanic]

The URL removal tool tells Google to remove the pages from its index, it does not tell Google the pages no longer exist and they are clean and now contain useful text. Which site is more trustworthy in your eyes, one that has pages of scraped content that you told me not to look at or one that I can see with my own eyes has been cleaned of all issues?

[Dr.Marie]

Now you're making me think. What you are saying would make sense to me if Google manually reviewed sites, but because Panda is algorithmic, I would think that the way they would assess whether a site has changed would be by reviewing the pages that exist in their index (or possibly cache).

I guess what we don't know is how Google assesses a site in the eyes of Panda. Perhaps when a site gets flagged with Panda then when a new Panda refresh happens Google programatically goes back to the site and checks to see if the Panda factors such as duplication and thin content still exist. Actually, this could be true as I have heard many people say that they saw an increase in their crawl rate just before being affected by an algorithm update.

I still don't think it hurts to remove URLs other than the time it takes to do so. But then on the other hand Google says that the URL removal tool should only be used in cases of emergency like if sensitive data got published online.

[KernelPanic]

Dr.Marie → agrees: I'm scared to know what an analistic program is. LOL. Don't think I would use it.

Don't you use those in your veterinary practice? lol thanks for the belly laugh

[Test-ok]

Dr.Marie → agrees: I'm scared to know what an analistic program is. LOL. Don't think I would use it.

I try to keep thing a bit humorous, You picked right up on it.
That and Googles disembowel tool.

[vikasbook]

I think it’s depend on the site that you all are talking about I understand that removing valuable pages that serve thousands of dollars is not good idea but the I think she is not talking to do that and the exact meaning is that every panda updates may become hurdle on recovering your site only because of some spam pages that are becoming a cause of dropping of site.