Let's test a theory: Did site/content freshness become very important with Panda 4.0?

Hey guys, I'd like to see how your sites did with this Panda 4.0 update released in regards to how often you update(d) your content, so please fill in the poll above.

In my case I was getting about 650 visits (sessions) per day at the end of April. The, on the 29th of April, it dropped slightly. I was in the around 550s for a bit over 2 weeks after that. Then it dropped again on the 14th and I was around 500s until Sunday. It dropped again on Monday, when I got about 400 visits and about the same on Tuesday. Then it went bananas on Wednesday, when the Panda 4.0 was released. I dropped down to 337, and barely making 300 yesterday. Today it seems it will be high 200s, not even making 300 visits. That's a 50% drop in less then a month.

The most interesting thing is that my rankings didn't drop before Wednesday. Unless there are some festivities going on in May in US (most of my traffic decrease was there) that I don't know about, I have no clue why the traffic started decreasing. My theory is that Google already started testing parts of the Panda release. My main keyword then fell from #7 to #13 in the US, and dropped 1-4 places in other countries.

With people saying Panda is mostly an on-page or on-site (entire site) update, I think that the thing that got me the most was content freshness. I lastly really updated this site back in September, when I added pretty much all but the main, front page, post to it. The content is highly relevant to my niche all the way and each post is at least 500 words. I did play with some small layout and visual stuff, but the content stayed pretty much the same.

I am now pondering a major update. Everything from changing my theme and making my site mobile-friendly to adding new content and adding stuff to all content. But before I do that I'd like to see if there's anything else I should keep in mind while doing my updates.

Please fill out the poll and hopefully we'll get enough of a sample that it would be relevant.

Dude, you need quality links, proper on-page SEO and that;s it. It is same as before. Nothing changed, don;t fall that shit. Examiner.com lost 50% of visibility...why? I don;t know. Zimbio.com went 500% up. Why? Don;t know.
Looks like it was:"hey, these sites were up for a long time, let;s take them down a bit, while we're going to push these site up for a change."

too early to tell whats the cause. I am still bouncing around for my main keyword

I got both, quality links and good on-page SEO. It does seem that the definition of that later changed a bit and my site isn't as good in the eyes of the new algorithm as it was with the old. The changes I want to make, were the ones I was planning to do regardless. I wanted to bring in more traffic by targeting new keywords and increase conversion by better layout. The only thing Panda 4.0 did was make me do them sooner.

SkyrocketSEO said:

Looks like it was:"hey, these sites were up for a long time, let;s take them down a bit, while we're going to push these site up for a change."

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Algorithms don't really work that way, though. Unless Google literally started using the duration of a site being in the top 10 as a factor. The longer you're up there the more it negatively it affects you. But that wouldn't be really good for them, so...

I don't think anything changed. They busted some links, rankings changed, not much to see here at all.

Bigzoom01 said:

too early to tell whats the cause. I am still bouncing around for my main keyword

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What was your site's initial reaction, though?

bartosimpsonio said:

I don't think anything changed. They busted some links, rankings changed, not much to see here at all.

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If nothing changed, how important was content freshness before? The thing that doesn't compute with me is the gradual decrease in my traffic a saw in May prior to Panda announcement. That's why I'm asking about freshness/content update frequency...

Algorithms don't really work that way, though

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And you know how Google's algo work?

Love every one of your posts man.

SkyrocketSEO said:

Dude, you need quality links, proper on-page SEO and that;s it. It is same as before. Nothing changed, don;t fall that shit. Examiner.com lost 50% of visibility...why? I don;t know. Zimbio.com went 500% up. Why? Don;t know.
Looks like it was:"hey, these sites were up for a long time, let;s take them down a bit, while we're going to push these site up for a change."

Click to expand...

SkyrocketSEO said:

Dude, you need quality links, proper on-page SEO and that;s it. It is same as before. Nothing changed, don;t fall that shit. Examiner.com lost 50% of visibility...why? I don;t know. Zimbio.com went 500% up. Why? Don;t know.
Looks like it was:"hey, these sites were up for a long time, let;s take them down a bit, while we're going to push these site up for a change."

Click to expand...

To be fair though, attempting to find out is the only way we are going to fly under the radar. If no one knew anything, we wouldn't even be building links.

OP, do you work for Google?
Filling in a Poll like that, is like giving them the exact information they need for Panda 4.1.
Discuss what changes hit you but don't discuss what you got away with.

To be fair though, attempting to find out is the only way we are going to fly under the radar. If no one knew anything, we wouldn't even be building links.

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That's true. But we still know that links are 90%. Everything else (together) is 10%

gligoran said:

What was your site's initial reaction, though?

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Initial reaction was a Slow drop for the past few days.

Main keyword (Very competitive, high volume) slowly dropped May 21st to May 23rd. From mid 3rd page to 6th page. Today so far has been around the mid 4th page. So it moved up. I did change a few navigation things this morning, that I thought were a little annoying (Got rid of unnecessary pages on the homepage and put them in there own category, which cleaned navigation up). Not sure if that was the problem to why its moving back up. Glad its moving up a bit now. I hope it does not go back down. I see a lot of competitors that are not in the top 10 Serps, bouncing around just like me.

SkyrocketSEO said:

And you know how Google's algo work?

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Didn't say that. But I do know how algorithms in general work. The problem with your statement is that it doesn't make any sense in terms of Search results. While I do take everything Matt Cutts says with a huge grain of salt, their aim to show good Search results will never change. Try finding good sites for your personal (not your sites' keywords) queries with Bing and see how they compare to Google's. My experience is that they're not even close, so I always go back to the big G when searching. Shifting sites around for the sake of shifting doesn't make any sense.

SkyrocketSEO said:

That's true. But we still know that links are 90%. Everything else (together) is 10%

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So you think it was a change in link evaluation, like even less of them have to have exact match anchors?

All I want here is to figure out how to get my site back up the ranks. I know reacting immediately to these updates isn't a good idea, so I'm just feeling out what others think.