Panda 2.5 - Were you affected? Let's figure out why! Questionnaire

SuperLinks said:
Update of Results:

61 Responders

Below is a screenshot of the data/results, let's get crunching. If you guys want me to narrow down specifics further I'll see what I can find.

W2lqS
​
Click to expand...


its great that youve created this survey and i mean that. ive never made one before, so its interesting for me to see how its mapped out.

correct me if im wrong, but it seems that you receive the results 'en masse' which means that you cant drill down and do data mining?

imagine if you were receiving the results as an excel spreadsheet so that each respondants answers were all tied together and you could quickly set up various tables and charts, as well as 'sorting' data based on specific criteria.

THAT would provide lots of info to assess in depth.


as it is, here are a few things id like inter-connected information on:

question 5: "how many pages in your website" - approx 25% answered 1,000+ - would that suggest they are running autoblogging sites and googe are able to identify them through duplicate content?

with regards to content, another question that would be worth asking of those who use cuplicate contentm, is whether or not they spin it and if they do, to what % spinning do they go for....

also, are that 25% who have websites with 1,000+ pages a big part of the 46% who said their site(s) dropped by more than 30 places? (question 2)

additionally, are they also part of the 42% whose site(s) are only a year old? (question 4)

those questions give you an idea of my way of thinking but without data mining facility, we're unable to do much more than speculate rather than get down and dirty with hard core data,,,,
 
Advertise on BHW
This is great thanks...given rep. Im no expert but it looks like it's not a good thing to have GA installed on the site. It also looks like longer loading time is being favored instead of punished? Maybe they are assuming that with the longer loading time there is more video, pictures, graphics etc. that would make it look like a high quality site? What do you guys think?
 
Winchester said:
I still think on what we see here, the simple thing is poor quality backlinks and duplicate or poorly spun content seems to be a venomous mix
Click to expand...


how are you reaching that conclusion? i suspect that you might well be right, but as it is, theres no evidence other than a heli-copter view of aggregated data.
 
So no clues at all, we would need to make changes to our panda fuc-ked sites and make a survey after their recovery... Since this is so slow, if we change anything we will not be able to notice if that helps
 
You're a smart man... Brilliant! Get people to fill out the survey and then contact them with your solution. I only wish I thought of this myself!
 
innovalist said:
You're a smart man... Brilliant! Get people to fill out the survey and then contact them with your solution. I only wish I thought of this myself!
Click to expand...


ermm you dont leave any contact details.

The guy is just trying to help the community - maybe you should try that?
 
innovalist said:
You're a smart man... Brilliant! Get people to fill out the survey and then contact them with your solution. I only wish I thought of this myself!
Click to expand...

Congratz Columbo, u just made stupid post of the day
 
Last edited:
Wonderful Idea.

I really love the fact that you took the initiative to do this. You've done BHW a grand thing by providing this information. By using information like this, we can beat Google at it's own game. Google wants us to be confused. If we share our information like this, if we can figure out how to beat Google.

+ REP
 
I think this whole thread is pointless because we don't even know if the next Panda update has finished being rolled out, or even started yet.
 
gorang said:
I think this whole thread is pointless because we don't even know if the next Panda update has finished being rolled out, or even started yet.
Click to expand...

Its on now, everything dropping, gotta wait till the dust settles, no need to panic...
 
A number of my sites have been pandalized, as far as i can tell:

- 60% + index page or total site bounce rate (under 10 seconds) coupled with
-- duplicate content above 40% or
-- 50%+ ads above fold (so "thin content") or
-- sufficient onpage factors like bad spelling / grammar, including spun content that makes bad grammar / nonsensical sentences

Is what trips you over the threshold when they do a manual panda adjustment (which they seem to be committed to do every month).

Apparently, according to the conventional wisdom, links have little to nothing to do with the panda adjustment (BUT of course, link based penalty is another algorithm working behind the scenes). Panda's stated purpose is to remove "low quality" sites from the index, so in/out links are not a direct signal panda checks for, but of course, the main page rank algo DOES.

The survey above seems to confirm most of this. For the massive amount of articles, blog posts, and other information I have acquired that supports what I am saying lmk how a newbie here can post that as I can't post links.
 
eldran said:
A number of my sites have been pandalized, as far as i can tell: - 60% + index page or total site bounce rate (under 10 seconds) coupled with
-- duplicate content above 40%
Click to expand...

What does "- 60% + index page" mean?

Bounce rate is usually a % not a # of seconds

You're saying that you think sites in which the owner copied the content from other sites and pasted it to make pages on their sites were affected by it?

From the results above, that's the only thing that I see in common that people had, duplicate content.
 
double posted due to 502 error. BHW has been having alot of host related issues lately =S
 
Last edited:
I checked my stats today and it seems like some of my sites which were starting to recover from the sep 28th panda update was hit AGAIN!

I searched around the net and it seems another update happened today as some other websites are experiencing the same hit that happened late oct 13th and early morning oct 14.

This is so discouraging, hard to even plan what to do next when you don't know when you'll be hit again.

Theres a discussion about it already on some other forums. Some of their users apparently think that anyone who was affected by this will come back stronger than before because google is in the process of updating. I hope their right! I had a keyword ranking #1 (no search traffic - its a brand name) for 2.5 years consistently through all google update, now its dropped to #8. 50 posts are still ranking on first page, 50 are ranking on page 8-9. (yesterday they were all ranking page 1-2, nothing ranking higher than page 2)
 
Last edited:
This was a great survey, thanks for doing this. I didn't participate since I didn't get hit by panda 2.5 I actually got my rankings up BUT I did get hit again today with panda 2.6. Crazy ride I had a 700+ penalty that actually got lifted by panda 2.5 I got my rankings almost where they were before the penalty only to get slapped again today.

I see a lot of the sites (68.5% according to survey) were 1 year old.

Did you have an option for sites that are only a few months old?

Well now that I've been hit both positively and negatively I can make my contribution :)
 
britcpa said:
its great that youve created this survey and i mean that. ive never made one before, so its interesting for me to see how its mapped out.

correct me if im wrong, but it seems that you receive the results 'en masse' which means that you cant drill down and do data mining?

imagine if you were receiving the results as an excel spreadsheet so that each respondants answers were all tied together and you could quickly set up various tables and charts, as well as 'sorting' data based on specific criteria.

THAT would provide lots of info to assess in depth.


as it is, here are a few things id like inter-connected information on:

question 5: "how many pages in your website" - approx 25% answered 1,000+ - would that suggest they are running autoblogging sites and googe are able to identify them through duplicate content?

with regards to content, another question that would be worth asking of those who use cuplicate contentm, is whether or not they spin it and if they do, to what % spinning do they go for....

also, are that 25% who have websites with 1,000+ pages a big part of the 46% who said their site(s) dropped by more than 30 places? (question 2)

additionally, are they also part of the 42% whose site(s) are only a year old? (question 4)

those questions give you an idea of my way of thinking but without data mining facility, we're unable to do much more than speculate rather than get down and dirty with hard core data,,,,
Click to expand...


I agree. You'll have to drill down to data further more to get insights. Autoblogs with 75%-100% duplicate content should probably be avoided in results.

Given that this is all about user experience, other things to consider are,
1. Use of images/videos on pages.
2. Is the design professionally done, or is it a common template
3. Ads to content ratio
4. Average content length
5. Sponsors/affiliate links content above the fold
 
Might have to redo this survey in a few days. Panda 2.6 has just launched. It seems temporary cuz a bunch of junk sites are ranking in the top now including .info domains.
 
Last edited:
The first question in the survey should be

How did panda effect your websites:

A. Improved rankings
B. Rankings stayed the same
C. Worsened rankings

Then all following questions should show the bar charts for each of these three segments.

I'm afraid without that kind of segmentation your data is more likely to describe BHW users than Panda factors. The only thing that looks suggestive in the results is that panda appears to inflict a site wide penalty on newer websites. But again, it could just be that BHW members tend to have newer sites in general. Without the other control cases you can't demonstrate the actual correlation of the questionnaire factors.

Great idea for a crowd sourced SEO experiment. If you correct the survey and do it all again I'll rep you twice... once for the cool idea and then again for being scientific. ;) It's an all or nothing offer. Take it or leave it, but keep up the good ideas.
 
Last edited:
I'm now #2 after panda 2.6 (been #1 for months). Funny thing is,a MFA site is now #1.
 
Advertise on BHW
You must log in or register to reply here.
Sign up now!

Main Menu

Home Main Forum List Black Hat SEO White Hat SEO BHW Newbie Guide Blogging Black Hat Tools Social Media Downloads

Marketplace

Account Selling Content / Copywriting EBooks / Methods Hosting Misc Proxies For Sale SEO - Link building SEO - Packages Social Media Social Media - Panels Web Design More

Making Money

Affiliate Programs Hire a Freelancer IM Journeys Making Money Pay Per Click Site Flipping Want to Buy

BlackHat World

Dispute Resolution Forum Suggestions & Feedback Introductions Lounge
Back
Top