Google Panda update is not an 'Always On' Algorithm change !

Today, I have seen more than 30 threads on various forums about people seeing a dip in their website rankings since 6th June 2011. I would like to bring to your attention that, Google Panda update is not a permanent or Always-ON algo update.

Panda is a Manual algorithm, which means, Google engineers themselves have to RUN the panda algo everytime they want the SERPs to be cleaned. It is not like a traditional algorithm update where, whenever an user searches for something, the algorithm runs and serves the user freshly computed results.

This is the reason why most people are seeing a sudden increase or decrease in the SERPs since the initial Panda update. Google has rolled out Panda 2.2 on 6-June-2011. Panda 1.0 was released in March,2011 for US. Panda 2.0 ( which was Panda 1.0 for international datacenters ) was released in April. And Panda 2.1 was released in May.

Google webmastercentral blog has tried to help webmasters understand how to improve their website in this post - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

My advice to all people that are hit by the Panda update :

1) Concentrate on the content. Publish 100% unique and interesting articles instead of using spun articles.

2) DO NOT build SB or xrumer links directly to your money site. ( if you still are doing so )

3) Get backlinks from within the articles that are related to your webpage. Build GOOD web 2.0 sites and build backlinks using these web 2.0 properties for now.

4) Make your website more user-friendly by adding more images, videos, easier navigation, removing any wanted links, 301ing the dead pages, removing of fixing the 404d pages etc.

5) Remove or fix the webpages with thin or low quality content. As we can see in the google blog post .. Low quality pages in your website can affect the rankings of ALL your webpages.

Disclaimer: These are just my views on the whole Panda algo update. I am not a google engineer, but I have been practising SEO for more than 4 years and all this is coming from my own personal experience.

umairsheikh2002 said:

My site has been hit by Google Panda, I was #1, now I am page 4 without any reason. Even I have quality content and quality backlinks. Never use blackhat tools on my site.

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What is quality content according to you? If you have moved down, there has to be a reason.

daserpent has any of your sites been affected? if so have the rankings recovered after making quality changes?

My rankings have dropped, on was in position 11 and now I am at 82. The site that is now in position 11 is a one page site with 350 words compared to my site that has edu links, gov links, article links, forum links, directory links and many more original content pages than 1 page the other site has. All articles are written by me and they are not spun. Seems like the panda update worked. lol

fujing said:

daserpent has any of your sites been affected? if so have the rankings recovered after making quality changes?

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Yes, 2 of my websites have been affected. 1 website lost all rankings .. site wasn't in the first 1000 after the first update but, I made changes to the site and it now ranks on Page 4.

My 2nd site, saw a huge Positive gain in SERPs. This website was ranking 500-800 initially but after panda update, this website started ranking on page 2 and page 1 for a VERY HIGH competition keyword. Every page of this website ranks VERY WELL in Google and I have seen tremendous increase in the number of visitors.

Neeoo said:

My rankings have dropped, on was in position 11 and now I am at 82. The site that is now in position 11 is a one page site with 350 words compared to my site that has edu links, gov links, article links, forum links, directory links and many more original content pages than 1 page the other site has. All articles are written by me and they are not spun. Seems like the panda update worked. lol

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Don't be disappointed yet. Google is still tweaking the Panda update. This seems to be one of the biggest updates that google has ever made and it also seems like google never anticipated such results from the update either.

Matt cutts has told the webmasters that they have introduced more than 40 tweaks to the update since the original release in March. If your website has quality and does not do common SEO mistakes like - keyword stuffing, malwares, cloaking,etc .. your website WILL be back.

That is nice to know that they are not done with the update. I looked at the sites that are now on page 2 and I can't believe what I am seeing. It didn't make sense, there is one site that is on page 2 that was never there before and when you go to it, it has errors all over it and nothing works. Wacky, I am just continuing with building links, adding content and tweaking my site. Work as usual, I just wish Google would get done with it already.

My website actually went UP 2 spots on the first page of google for a very hard keyword to rank up for.

ProfitNow said:

My website actually went UP 2 spots on the first page of google for a very hard keyword to rank up for.

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That is good news. What aspect of your website did you improve ? Links?

are you hopefully it will get back to page 1? are you still building backlinks to the site that lost rankings?

daserpent said:

Yes, 2 of my websites have been affected. 1 website lost all rankings .. site wasn't in the first 1000 after the first update but, I made changes to the site and it now ranks on Page 4.

My 2nd site, saw a huge Positive gain in SERPs. This website was ranking 500-800 initially but after panda update, this website started ranking on page 2 and page 1 for a VERY HIGH competition keyword. Every page of this website ranks VERY WELL in Google and I have seen tremendous increase in the number of visitors.

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fujing said:

are you hopefully it will get back to page 1? are you still building backlinks to the site that lost rankings?

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I am building links but not spammy links. Like I mentioned in my first post, I am right now focusing on web 2.0 links to improve quality.

Here is how to do well in Google:
-LOTS of unique content on your site
-Lots of relevant keywords on your site... LSI and so on - look at the wonderwheel for ideas
-Build backlinks like they would occur naturally. Senuke makes it very easy to do this if you do it right. Yup... social bookmarks don't hurt, but you probably shouldn't build 1000 in 24 hours. Profile links are iffy and I use them for backlinking my backlinks.

That is about it. Google is not really thinking outside of the box that they have been living in for the past however many years. They've just made a few tweaks and a lot of thin sites got slapped.

But Google is definitely up to something today.

Yes guys if you want to know how to build a quality website just look at google.com...

You know because your home page should be full of content like google's right? Oh wait...

And definitely your site should not consist of other people's content. It should be full of unique, quality content that you write yourself, just like google does. Oh wait....

Well for sure if you want to be a great site like google your website should not be a link farm that just consists of a bunch of links to other websites. Oh wait....

But certainly it is important to focus on a topic for your site, like google does. Make your pages relevant to your topic and don't have pages about anything and everything on one domain. Oh wait...

And whatever you do, don't set up a bot to go out on the internet and grab other people's content and put it on your site. Google would never do that.

And shame on you for monetizing your site and putting ads on it. great websites like google don't clutter their content pages with advertisements. Oh wait...

When I take a look at my websites I see that everything looks normal except one site.

I saw that for some KW that I was 1st my suite dropped on second page, while on first page G placed youtube video with KW in title, site with KW in title that is not looking great and bunch of sites not really related to that KW... Must say that that looks weird

Anyway, I hope that G will fix Panda errors and provide good quality search...

This Panda update actually helped one of my sites get back from the last page of google I had 2 unique content articles on it and boom.. I'm back

how about this keyword "buy viagra" lot of .edu ranks there

LOL Sacrilege that is a great post! I guess Big G figures there has to be one that isn't the same as all the others and that 1 will be them. They definitely dont follow their own rules. They even got thousands of spammy backlinks hehe

goinviral said:

LOL Sacrilege that is a great post! I guess Big G figures there has to be one that isn't the same as all the others and that 1 will be them. They definitely dont follow their own rules. They even got thousands of spammy backlinks hehe

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Yeah and don't even get me started on Youtube/google books pulling shittons of traffic through copyrighted material. The only reason they want original content is so they can FUCKING HIJACK IT. What we need to do is have a huge JV where we make our own fucking search engine and put all of our sites on top and put google in the sandbox.

I'm starting to believe that Panda was really an attempt to make us all nuts.
Panda 1 - killed me.
Panda 2 - brought me part of the way back.
Panda 2.1 - even worse than Panda 1.
Panda 2.2 - most of the way back.

If it didn't affect my income the way it did, it would be funny. I just wish I could go about my business and not pay attention.

Sacrilege said:

Yeah and don't even get me started on Youtube/google books pulling shittons of traffic through copyrighted material. The only reason they want original content is so they can FUCKING HIJACK IT. What we need to do is have a huge JV where we make our own fucking search engine and put all of our sites on top and put google in the sandbox.

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yep I agree. I dont know why facebook just doesn't do a search engine. Google keep going into their territory, they should fight back and put out a bot! once fbbot starts trolling the web I think google will start to worry.