I've run The Online Slang Dictionary (http://onlineslangdictionary.com/) since 1996. On April 11, the date of one of the Panda updates, traffic from Google dropped 20%. Between April 11 and a month ago, I made the following changes:
* Correct spelling, grammar, and capitalization errors
* Where spelling "errors" are legitimate "slang terms", link to the definition pages for those slang terms (gonna, wanna, ain't, dat's, etc.)
* Remove unnecessary extra punctuation, e.g. example sentences ending in "???" or "!!!"
* Checked keywords on top landing pages for searches like "slang", "slang dictionary", "slang thesaurus"
* Remove unnecessary extra spaces in the middle of sentences
* Use complete sentences even where completely unnecessary
* Restructure entire /definition+of/word+goes+here directory structure to be /meaning-of/word-goes-here, since people search for "meaning of" more frequently than "definition of", and since Google seems to have stopped treating + as a word separator in some cases.
* Reworked meta descriptions and page titles
* Removed meta keywords. I know Google doesn't use them, but maybe they treat them as a negative indicator of site quality? Who knows?
* Completely re-designed site's front page
* Switched from Google Custom Search Engine to a custom search implementation, because I think I can provide better results, improve the user experience, and reduce search exit rate
* Delay-load Twitter widget to reduce page load time
* Use rel="canonical" on every page on the site, since Google is indexing the IP address of the site and showing it separately in SERPs
* Removed <priority> nodes from the sitemap, just in case Google knows better
* Fixed the "HTML suggestions" on GWT, such as short meta descriptions and duplicate meta descriptions
* Excluded directories via robots.txt like /word-of-the-day/, since the words of the day are already spidered elsewhere on the site, in case Google is giving me a duplicate content penalty of some kind
I've also made plenty more changes in the past month, but I haven't written up a list yet.
Sine the Panda update, I've seen no improvement in traffic from Google to my site.
Hi Walter - Thanks for posting your site and describing the changes you've made as well. It's interesting that you've focused on spelling/grammar errors (despite it being a slang site), and still haven't noticed any improvements.
We have a lot of members from around the world, who may not have English as their first language. We've thought about correcting some spelling/grammar programatically, but since we have a UGC site, and each review is tied to a real person, it seems disingenuous to rewrite someone else's words.
"Grammar, punctuation and style are part of how we decide if a review is credible. For Zappos to artificially inflate the credibility of reviews by changing those qualities is a form of fraud IMO."
I don't know if I'd call it fraud, but it certainly artificially inflates the credibility of reviews, and that's something (in addition to the rewriting someone else's thoughts part) we don't feel comfortable doing.
(For your site, since it's a dictionary, seems like a better fix and I'm surprised that it hasn't yielded any improvements)
* Correct spelling, grammar, and capitalization errors
* Where spelling "errors" are legitimate "slang terms", link to the definition pages for those slang terms (gonna, wanna, ain't, dat's, etc.)
* Remove unnecessary extra punctuation, e.g. example sentences ending in "???" or "!!!"
* Checked keywords on top landing pages for searches like "slang", "slang dictionary", "slang thesaurus"
* Remove unnecessary extra spaces in the middle of sentences
* Use complete sentences even where completely unnecessary
* Restructure entire /definition+of/word+goes+here directory structure to be /meaning-of/word-goes-here, since people search for "meaning of" more frequently than "definition of", and since Google seems to have stopped treating + as a word separator in some cases.
* Reworked meta descriptions and page titles
* Removed meta keywords. I know Google doesn't use them, but maybe they treat them as a negative indicator of site quality? Who knows?
* Completely re-designed site's front page
* Switched from Google Custom Search Engine to a custom search implementation, because I think I can provide better results, improve the user experience, and reduce search exit rate
* Delay-load Twitter widget to reduce page load time
* Use rel="canonical" on every page on the site, since Google is indexing the IP address of the site and showing it separately in SERPs
* Removed <priority> nodes from the sitemap, just in case Google knows better
* Fixed the "HTML suggestions" on GWT, such as short meta descriptions and duplicate meta descriptions
* Excluded directories via robots.txt like /word-of-the-day/, since the words of the day are already spidered elsewhere on the site, in case Google is giving me a duplicate content penalty of some kind
I've also made plenty more changes in the past month, but I haven't written up a list yet.
Sine the Panda update, I've seen no improvement in traffic from Google to my site.