Panda #2: What's the culprit?

There has been numerous reports off people dropping drastically in rank for not only autoblogs but micro niche sites with unique content with backlinks build to them. This is causing people to lose up to 80% of their income which is a MAJOR drop in earnings.

From what I am reading, forum profiles (Xrumer) and blog comments (scrapebox) are the culprit and their value has decreased in Google's eyes.

I can't totally confirm this but it does seem the case. The known dates for the Panda #2 is around May 13, 2011. If your rankings dropped around then, you may be affected.

Could you please post If you are one of those people affected?

If so, were you building quality content or did you syndicate or spin content? Did you have forum profiles and/or blog comments? What was the percentage drop in your statistics and your earnings?

The more information we get, the better we can understand what the real cause is and what we can do to try to avoid it.

For now, focus on building high quality links and Web 2.0 properties along with article marketing. I have been using AMR for a while and it does give a good boost in SERPs.

Yes around the 13th of may my best site dropped about 7 places (from #3 to #10). I did have a few scrapebox blasts prior to that as well as working with spun content and SEnuke. The content on my site is 100% unique. I lost 50% of my revenue

I don't think it has to do with backlinks. My site which i spent $1k on (super high quality content), only had high quality backlinks from other sites. Each backlink was in a unique piece of content (not spun) However on 13th my sites traffic when down due to the update.

The only thing i have, is affiliate links on my site to Amazon.

AgentZero said:

I don't think it has to do with backlinks. My site which i spent $1k on (super high quality content), only had high quality backlinks from other sites. Each backlink was in a unique piece of content (not spun) However on 13th my sites traffic when down due to the update.

The only thing i have, is affiliate links on my site to Amazon.

Click to expand...

What kind of backlinks were these? Were they articles or were they links in high quality blogs inside the articles?

AgentZero said:

The only thing i have, is affiliate links on my site to Amazon.

Click to expand...

Google penalized sites with outgoing aff links too... Remove them and change them into http://yoursite.com/visitnow links

M1ndfluX said:

Google penalized sites with outgoing aff links too... Remove them and change them into http://yoursite.com/visitnow links

Click to expand...

If true, that is ridiculous because even many large corporate sites use affiliate links.

My autoblog site got completely deindexed around 12-13 May. I haven't do any heavy backlinking for this site. I only used bookmarking service here in bhw around 1-2 months ago.
I used wprobot to get content from 3 rss feeds and amazon. But my other autoblog site didnt get affected by the panda. I've used similar tools & plugins for this one.

I have seen Panda eat many sites and this is my findings

1. You need quality unique( Not Spun ) content
2. Affiliate links are ok but NOT if you have many on a page relative to the content size. Google wants to see the ratio on content to ads be weighted more towards content.
3. You need steady inflow of links
4. Panda loves forums, blogs and content that is interactive(comments to articles ). In other words dont let the content of your site get stale
5. Dont autoblog or any automated SEO. It does not pay to do that.
6. Of course do SMO(Facebook, Twitter,etc)
7, Make sure your bounce rate is low and return visitors is high

I hope this brain dump helps you

been doing research about this. Im quite quite sure now google favor in-content (contextual) links in blog posts way too much. I have seen several sites that rely heavily on in-content links get quite a boost EVEN when the article itself is not related to his site.

For example there's this weight loss site that has in-content links in traveling, personal life, family, cooking blogs and he's now #1 in competitive keyword.

The question is...where can I find these kind of blog networks in cheap price? :S

Funny, my sites actually went up. And all I use for off page seo is SB blasts and AMR blasts.
I say more Panda action please.

it came to me on 16th of May....I was on the first page of google and got about 250uniques / day...on Tuesday, my site was on the 4th page and today, it's not even in the top250...how awesome...i only had 100% unique content written by my writers..what happened here is that i have lost all my backlinks I used to have..all links were made with linkspun dot com...so, here's what Im planing now...i used to have 100w articles, now I'm adding minimum 350w / post...i will add unique meta descriptions for every single tag and category on my site, i will reduce the images in the posts...no need for hq, when my body width is 450px lol...will see...I won't build any backlinks I used to have...i will keep you guys updated, and hopefully we can solve this situation!

My main site went up I'm doing a bit of everything on this particular site. Did a sb blast early on, AMR blasts, forum profiles and link pushes. On site SEO is really important. You can have all the great backlinks in the world, but if your onsite SEO isn't right. You won't rank.

Ok. Let me tell my story.

my site, this is my biggest site! has 250k backlinks. almost 2 years till now.

#1 for main keyword >> now its on page 5/6/7
#14 for 2nd keyword >> gone....
#27 for 3rd keyword >> gone...

i am not using scrapebox or any backlinks software..

traffic dropped to 40%, earnings dropped to 20%

i am using wordpress with these plugins : akismet, all in one seo pack, wp hide dashboard, exit rescue, feedburner, wp pagenavi, wp recaptcha, wp private. i have deleted one plugin called "like lock", i am curious this plugin caused it.

i place traffic widget to my site : mgid.com and zaparena.com.

Conclusion : i hate PANDA

My earnings on the site that I was working for past month just skyrocketed this last week... Had some $250+ days, and recently did some AMR/SB blasts... Content was written by me, mostly translated and adjusted from english (not an english site ldo).

If Google is punishing crappy backlinks, time to do some quality ones. The #1 spot has to be owned by someone anyway.

LinkOil said:

I have seen Panda eat many sites and this is my findings
...
3. You need steady inflow of links
...

Click to expand...

I believe steady inflow of SB/Xrumer links is exactly what gets you down-ranked by Panda. Someone above has reported that they actually jumped up - I guess that's because it hasn't gotten to them yet - just to their competitors.

I guess the question is how to make SB/Xrumer spammy links look indistinguishable from natural, if someone wants to keep going that way.

Or did you mean steady inflow of high PR links? In any case - I think "steady inflow" and "naturally looking" doesn't fit into one sentence, at least not in Google's eye, and it's only a matter of time before they crack down on it.

Is there anyone who actually moved up due to this update? Or did everyone get bombed?

One of my Autoblog actually moved up, even above the site from whose RSS Feed I'm scraping. As Maruk too reported that his sites moved up I guess it is the backlinking strategy that differs from a person to another. Time to re-plan everything.

I dropped back 10 spots for a site I've been ranking for over a year with, so I did some investigating.

I checked a site:mysite.com on Google and noticed some weird stuff.

1) I canonicalized my URLs to themselves over about 10 months ago as I was getting some weird bug with Google indexing hash tags into my URLs. Once they re-crawled my pages with canonical, the hash tags went away. Again, this was 10 months ago and I haven't seen this problem for 9 months or so. Last night, I noticed they re-indexed all of these hash tags even though canonical still exists on every one of those pages.

2) The "cached" version of my pages is from February, 2011. I update my pages weekly.

3) I converted every page from static HTML to PHP early early march and 301'd all HTML to PHP. All was fine in that regard, but as of last night, all of my old HTML pages are re-indexed, again, with the weird hash tag junk appended to every URL that I fixed around august/September 2010.

I'm doing some random tests with robots to see if I can block them from crawling HTML, but a 301 should've taken care of that as I've never had a problem with this before until ~2 weeks ago.

It almost seems like they spliced an old junk version of the SERP database in with a recent one and are working from there.. I dunno. Just a theory. My main money site has been replaced by a forum with the domain/title related to my niche, however, every single post inside that forum is littered with spam and porn backlinks.. threads titled things like "big juicy squirting women" and inside is 20-50 links to various porn keywords.. and this is for a "child friendly" niche loosely related to education.

Go figure. Thanks, Google.

Brutang: Very odd.

Whoever said that the linking pattern every week is noticed by Google due to you using Scrapebox to build 50K links a day for example might be true. It does seem realistic since Google does get used to the pattern of link building. Anyone else want to pitch in?

I got slammed again and lost the majority of my income that I had built back up since the first Panda update. Just thought I would let you all know that everyone's income is hurting. Thanks.