What is Panda after?

[proxyzen]

Just to chime in, I have a pretty large network of EMD and pretty much all have entirely falling off the map.

Sad day ;/

 

[webmast]

Build yourself some EMD right now.

I thought Google devalued the EMD in the previous updates?

I think that Google somehow uses bounce rate to determine this and testing those in number 1 to actually put them in lower positions.

Yes, I think the bounce rate is one of the major factors in these panda updates.

Sites updated FREQUENTLY are affected (negatively) and sites NOT updated frequently haven't been affected AND / OR are affected in a positive manner.

First they want new, original and fresh content and now they penalize you for that?

I have to disagree that blogroll matters that much as from my SERPs, apparently most people who rank well dont really use blogroll. However, forum links (doesnt matter if it's in the post or in the signature) does matter much.

I thought Google devalued the forum profiles in the previous updates?

 

[timshady]

The only thing that I can think of is that Google may be on to autoblogging and punishing it. So it would look unnatural to have a site updated exactly every 2 days, whereas a human would update randomly.

Thought of that, but there is no rhyme or reason as to when I update. Usually 3 times per week but not on ANY schedule. All updates are unique, professionally written, and 700 words minimum. The one site I'm really down on is a news site that reports on a niche subject - so, essentially whenever news is released, the site reacts to it. It's as white hat as it can be, and very well maintained.

 

[Abstroose]

You done did find the issue; not get on it and fix it!

Right away, sir!

Upon further investigation, I found a couple of my newer sites which had been updated more frequently, have experienced either no change, or a small boost.

Conclusion: Update your site frequently, with quality content. The ironic thing is that you should have been doing this from the start! Content is king! Always has been and always will be.

 

[timshady]

I have been doing this (frequent, quality content) and just got hammered. Scratching my head.

 

[MandLoys]

Right away, sir!

Upon further investigation, I found a couple of my newer sites which had been updated more frequently, have experienced either no change, or a small boost.

Conclusion: Update your site frequently, with quality content. The ironic thing is that you should have been doing this from the start! Content is king! Always has been and always will be.

One of our new sites with few but very powerful backlinks, 1-10 new articles a day (600+ words, very very high quality) and already 100+ of these articles online, was hit. From 30+ first page ranks it disappeared completely.

For this and mostly for other reasons, content is only king for actual readers, robots don't really care. They can't "read"

 

[homenet]

Very interesting. This either means that you're a really bad writer who has no clue how to give users what they are looking for and just hired out the single page blog to a different writer who did, or Google didn't quite get Panda right yet

No, I wrote them all. The blog.com blog is a single small hand written post (by myself) with affiliate links in and it hasn't moved at all in the SERPS, go figure.

 

[dantob]

Well here is what I've noticed with my sites. Most of the EMD. Just about all of them are about 3 years old. All of them have same them, same setup, same 1 block Adsense ad block on top,etc. All have unique content and all have various backlinks.

So the ones that have like 8-15 pages of content got hit, but a few sites that have just 1 post on the homepage maintained their position. But then there a couple of sites with 8-15 pages of content and those maintain their positions.

So I can't really pinpoint why some got hit and others didn't. One site that has like 10 pages of content was missing from the SERPs for like the past 3-4 months. Then all of sudden after the update it came back ranking on page 2. A few sites that were MIA for a while that came back to the SERPs like 3 weeks and were on page 2 are now gone again. So there seems to be no rhyme or reason on what gets hit and what maintains their position.

There just seems to be something else at play here because having unique content, updated frequently, having various backlinks seems to still your site hit while other sites with very thin content and no backlinking in the past 4-6 months maintain. It's very hard to know what to do right now to the sites that dropped...keep building backlinks or adding content or combination of both.

I did notice a EMD site (not mine) that seems to still be ranking at #2 for the singular version of this keyword (the EMD is the plural) and when I checked their backlink profile it's pretty much all private blog posts with link embedded in the content. I think they might be using BMR or similar service since all the posts are roughly 150-175 words each. Just about all the 200+ links show this in their profile. I wonder if those links is what helped this site maintain rank because they only have 3 pages of content with the homepage being static and a single 336x280 Adsense block on top. I'm targeting the plural version of this keyword and for some reason my site did not drop either, though I have none of the private blog backlinks like his site. Also my site has 10 pages of content.

 

[Abstroose]

One of our new sites with few but very powerful backlinks, 1-10 new articles a day (600+ words, very very high quality) and already 100+ of these articles online, was hit. From 30+ first page ranks it disappeared completely.

For this and mostly for other reasons, content is only king for actual readers, robots don't really care. They can't "read"

How do you know you weren't sandboxed? It's not new for a new site to disappear completely. And I'll bet the bots can 'read' better than many would expect.

 

[Expertpeon]

From the few niches I'm in, some did not change at all, not even a single site moved
One has about 5 new spam websites displacing things like webmd, wikipedia, etc which definitely wasn't the case before
Looking at their strategies, it seems they're doing straight up ******** blog comment blasts

one in particular has a mere 6800 backlinks and is ranking for one of the most competitive terms in pharma (a diet pill type, 1.5 million exact monthly searches)... all blog comment spam

By the way, from what I see on my piwiks, this is a PURELY a US based change... rankings overseas are identical.
The increase in spam at the top spots makes me think this is some kind of "study" google is conducting.

Another term has a ton of blog comment spam (1180 ********s) and is only 2 weeks old. This site is now #6 on a term that used to be next to impossible to crack.

 

[dantob]

From the few niches I'm in, some did not change at all, not even a single site moved
One has about 5 new spam websites displacing things like webmd, wikipedia, etc which definitely wasn't the case before
Looking at their strategies, it seems they're doing straight up ******** blog comment blasts

one in particular has a mere 6800 backlinks and is ranking for one of the most competitive terms in pharma (a diet pill type, 1.5 million exact monthly searches)... all blog comment spam

By the way, from what I see on my piwiks, this is a PURELY a US based change... rankings overseas are identical.
The increase in spam at the top spots makes me think this is some kind of "study" google is conducting.

A lot of my sites got pushed down and since my sites are geared towards products I now see Amazon, Nextag, Ebay, etc. dominating the first page compared to our niche sites.

I knew that before going into any of these niches that if these shopping sites were on the first page then it would be easy to overtake them and that was the case. Now they seem to have popped back into the serps and dominating the top spots on the front page. I'm wondering if this is temporary or if I go ahead build a ton of edu backlinks will that get my site moving again to the top?

 

[dantob]

Has anyone done any new backlinking in the last few days and seen any changes to their sites? I'm thinking of doing some edu backlinks and see what happens to my sites. I wonder if these will help them move again since I already have the various other types of backlinks to these sites. I haven't touched my sites yet and wanted to monitor first to see if they shift back to their positions again before starting something else.

 

[MandLoys]

How do you know you weren't sandboxed? It's not new for a new site to disappear completely. And I'll bet the bots can 'read' better than many would expect.

"Unfortunately" it hasn't disappeared completely, just went back from first page rankings to 30th page and lower rankings... :-/
And another site of ours, established, was ranking high for various keywords with extreme high quality backlinks has been pushed back to 300+ as well :-/

There's nothing else we can do but build backlinks. More and higher quality.

 

[Expertpeon]

Has anyone done any new backlinking in the last few days and seen any changes to their sites? I'm thinking of doing some edu backlinks and see what happens to my sites. I wonder if these will help them move again since I already have the various other types of backlinks to these sites. I haven't touched my sites yet and wanted to monitor first to see if they shift back to their positions again before starting something else.

All work I've done in the last 3 days has not moved sites at all (even my lazy ******** blasting to sites I'm working on foundation work with)

 

[Maja92]

Right away, sir!

Upon further investigation, I found a couple of my newer sites which had been updated more frequently, have experienced either no change, or a small boost.

Conclusion: Update your site frequently, with quality content. The ironic thing is that you should have been doing this from the start! Content is king! Always has been and always will be.

Your conclusion is a myth. Google doesn't care how often a site is updated, as long as it's relevant, unique and useful content otherwise everyone would end up with 1000 pages sites.

Some of my sites that have only 4 pages of content are doing just fine, thank you very much.

 

[dantob]

Your conclusion is a myth. Google doesn't care how often a site is updated, as long as it's relevant, unique and useful content otherwise everyone would end up with 1000 pages sites.

Some of my sites that have only 4 pages of content are doing just fine, thank you very much.

Ya I think that is not an issue here as well. I just add more content because I use Adsense and don't them to ban me for thin MFA site. I have sites that have 1 page of content that moved up a few spots with no new content or backlinks in like 6 months and ones that were updated recently with content/backlinks get the hit. So it can't be just based on content or even backlinks for that matter. Trying to figure out what exactly is causing or caused the sites to get hit while others stayed in place and/or improved a few spots.

 

[waikikicane]

I don't know if this is related, but my sites with the lowest bounce rates have all jumped up in the SERPs.

 

[Kris88]

The fact that some people have seen their rankings returning to normal gives me hope but as of yet all my pages that were hit are still way down.

I really hope you're right, because my traffic has been whiped out for all keywords I had on page 1.

 

[Riseing]

Not to jinx myself or anything but panda has done nothing to my site.
I have my site in Google webmaster and Analytics. However I have no adsense or banner ads along with no outgoing links of any type. My content is also all custom written. I'm really starting to believe that panda is hunting affiliate sites.

 

[LBrown]

By the way, from what I see on my piwiks, this is a PURELY a US based change... rankings overseas are identical.
The increase in spam at the top spots makes me think this is some kind of "study" google is conducting.

Yes and yes. My non-US traffic is about the same too, but non US traffic doesn't convert as well for me. The idea that Google is just data mining has been alluded to a few times in this thread and it seems to be the most logical explanation.

Not to jinx myself or anything but panda has done nothing to my site.
I have my site in Google webmaster and Analytics. However I have no adsense or banner ads along with no outgoing links of any type. My content is also all custom written. I'm really starting to believe that panda is hunting affiliate sites.

I have several affiliate sites that were untouched. If Google were hunting affiliate sites it would not be hard for them to do at all. Some affiliate sites offer value to the searcher and Google knows that.