So further reading on the Panda Update today suggested there was a link between those who lost rankings post Panda and a high bounce rate. A little digging into my analytics and that would kind of match with which of our websites were hardest hit. Highest bounce rate = hardest hit. and vice versa. I had read other advice to get rid of pages with high bounce rates, but I wanted to see what I could find out about why people were bouncing off these pages first.
And it was really weird, there was no rationale that I can see anyway, as to why the pages I'm finding with really ridiculously high (90%+ on one page) bounce rates should cause people to bounce. So, dig deeper, and I discover that pretty much all the bounces are coming as direct traffic to the page, and bouncing straight off. Not real people then I would suppose from this. I've deleted /renamed the pages that I'm finding this happening with. I don't want to lose the purpose of the pages at the moment, as I think they're pretty useful, featuring sub-sections of valentines gifts, women's Christmas gifts for different types of women and budgets etc - they're pages written for people, not bots at all!
I've renamed (just with an extra _ on the end) and deleted the offending page for: /valentines_presents.php /christmas_gift_woman.php In terms of crawl errors on webmaster tools, I'm systematically going through each website one by one, and looking at every single crawl error. Showed up some interesting stuff, like the fact that the links by seo company built for me recently all link to server error pages. Hmm. He told me today after finally getting to speak to him that he would understand if I cancelled and could offer me a month for free. Double hmmm. He promised to come back to me today with some answers/explanations/analytics on why the site has dropped so badly....not heard back since. He just wants me to go away I guess, which I can totally understand, but he can fix his sloppy, sloppy work first, and pay me back for work they've not done before I'm going to leave him alone, that's for sure. Bloody rip-off merchants. The only reason I'm not naming and shaming just yet is because I feel I should give him a chance to offer me my money back, and fix the faults. So I'll give him till the middle of next week, and then I will indeed tell everyone and anyone about their shoddy, error-ridden, dishonest practices. As many times as I can. People like that company give seo a bad name, and they bring a whole industry into disrepute. Anyway, so any crawl errors I can fix, I'm fixing, one website at a time. One down, 3 to go so far. I'm continuing to put original content on the pages with duplicate content on, a page or two per day. Once all the duplications are sorted then I'll make sure every page has unique content on it, written by me, and obviously unique too, and not 'sales-speak' either, something people might smile at instead, and then I'll go back through the lot and increase the quantity of text. Writing, I can do, and I find it easy. So why I haven't done this before, God only knows!! And bouncy pages are moving house. I'd love to know why the bounce rate thing is happening - just some weird bot or scraper site? I have no idea, and think I've got better things to do right now than worry about why, and instead get on dealing with fixing it!
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