What is Panda after?

I can't find any rhyme or reason on my sites. I have 4 sites all similar construction, all totally unique content of at least 700+ words. All of the sites are on the same adsense i.d. 2 of my sites took a hard hit including my biggest money maker got completely trashed when its been #1 for its main keyword for months. Backlinks coming from bookmarks, article marketing, directories. The other 2 are where they were, 1 disappeared for a day then came back to where it started.

My wife has a totally legit health based site on a different adsense account and hers took a huge hit too. All hand written, completely unique content, no spammy backlinking at all. Doesn't make much sense, just hoping everything sifts back to normal soon...

chlopzmazur said:

What I can say in my language is: KURWA MAĆ. At least I hope it's not permanent.

EDIT: It's official: http://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/status/124905069748559872

Click to expand...

Yeah, they do this all the time now. Unfortunately I really see a decline in quality of pages ranked on first pages of Google after all these updates.
The only solution is to keep working hard on optimizing, alternative traffic sources and stuff like that. Google won't last forever though...

40 unique articles handwritten by myself for each site with images, etc. 4 of my big earning sites went down a few days ago. I logged into my account and thought my server went down or something, because I was making next to nothing. Sites have been doing great for 9 months. Links were from a couple of blogs, a few articles and some forum sigs. Not really BH.

Killing me. Now what the hell? I was finally going to start adding a few more sites this week because of confidence, and now this.

Funny thing, still no love from yahoo or bing... Anyhow... fml

Also, These sites weren't updated since creation.. no new links.

I also returned to my previous rankings a day after the update. No other major changes over the websites. One news site was obliterated from it's main keywords and didn't recover, rest it's soul.

redrubies said:

I just wanted to report some things. I am back to where I was before Panda for my good keyword. Also, my Facebook page is gone from the search results for that keyword. As I stated in a previous post, my Facebook page was higher than my site for the keyword. This must have happened some time last night because I have been checking every day and it was not like this yesterday when I checked. Also, I am in Google's results for keywords on my secondary pages that I was never in Google for before. Lastly, I did not do anything over the weekend to optimize my site. It just changed on it's own.

Click to expand...

So you got hit on 10/14 for your site for your main keyword and it dropped down 5-10 spots and today your site reverted back to its old serp position? Is your traffic back to normal compared to before and when the update hit on Friday morning? This could be a good sign for many of us that got hit as well.

I've regained several of my positions as well, although not nearly as many as I would like. I regained the positions on Friday evening and they haven't slipped since but I haven't seen any improvement on other keywords since then either.

Wow ... the ONE keyword I've been wanting to nail for the last 3 years had one website permanently affixed to the top of the SERPs with no fluctuations whatsoever. Always #1, no exceptions ... they were EMD, aged domain.

Today I just noticed they are #8. They are very thin for content and haven't updated anything in years (although they have been backlinking) ... I'm thinking if they added some content they'd shoot back up to #1 but I'm not going to tell them that lol. This is for an ecommerce site, a product name.

Incidentally, they were replaced with wikipedia as #1 and amazon as #2.

dantob said:

So you got hit on 10/14 for your site for your main keyword and it dropped down 5-10 spots and today your site reverted back to its old serp position? Is your traffic back to normal compared to before and when the update hit on Friday morning? This could be a good sign for many of us that got hit as well.

Click to expand...

I didn't just drop 5-10 spots. I was thrown into the dark cave of doom. I went down to the 500's and my Facebook page was higher up than my site was. It started right near the first update which was Sept 28 (I think). I fell a little but nothing to panic over. Then I fell to the 300's. Then I fell to the 500's. Today I checked and I am back to where I was before that first update. Also, I am now in Google for keywords that I never thought I'd be in there for. Words on my secondary pages that I never optimized.

zmoney said:

40 unique articles handwritten by myself for each site with images, etc. 4 of my big earning sites went down a few days ago. I logged into my account and thought my server went down or something, because I was making next to nothing. Sites have been doing great for 9 months. Links were from a couple of blogs, a few articles and some forum sigs. Not really BH.

Killing me. Now what the hell? I was finally going to start adding a few more sites this week because of confidence, and now this.

Funny thing, still no love from yahoo or bing... Anyhow... fml

Also, These sites weren't updated since creation.. no new links.

Click to expand...

It will get better for you! If I could fall all the way to the 500's then back to where I was before, then there's hope for everyone.

jakeys1 said:

From the looks of it everyone is affected. As for me i have been ranking for 2500 long tail keywords(around 2-4 words) on 1st and second pages of Google. To be more specific i have a site that covers all niches(broad article directory using adsense), we write our own articles, Xsitepro user and have around 250 unique article pages. Yes only 250 articles for 2500 keywords. I use a method called Micro niche page, so i can rank for at least 100 long tails for 1 article.
Anyways mostly of my keywords are affected, except for around 20% that stayed and some 10% ranked higher(10-30 spots)! Clearly I will lose traffic and hope it will be back soon. But if things wouldn't revert at least i have the stable keywords and the keywords that ranked higher. I'm beginning to see a pattern with those that increased in rankings, this would sound odd but seeing the results I ranked more on keywords that I didn't originally targeted(keyword was only mentioned for 1-2 times in the page).

Click to expand...

I agree with something you said in this post. I have a blog I do for fun, not monetized and I posted a video about a fight and made a small comment mentioning the fighters, suddenly my site ranks for "(fighter name) post fight interview" and I never even had that term in my tag, I had the OTHER fighters name in the title so it was "Fighter B post fight interview" but I am top 10 in "Fighter A post fight interview" search results

I'm pretty much completely wiped out here. It's not like old RSSGM sites where you would just slap more up... These took some time, blah blah...

I really thought doing GH sites, I would avoid all this.. Soo wrong, soo busted...

All the sites above me are pretty much product websites now too. I'm the first "informational" one..

Also, 1 affiliate banner from CJ on site.

:sigh:

I also feel that using affiliate links especially without cloaking is resulting in such results. Not 100% sure but it definitely looks like affiliate sites or even if you include affiliate links such as Amazon, EPN, clickbank etc. then those sites are getting hit hard since the first Panda update. I have experienced it ever since the first Panda. Any of you using affiliate links especially Amazon, EPN or clickbank on your websites which got hit? Adsense sites seems to have got less affected. And most importantly, quality sites with no SEO and only organic backlinks hardly seems to have been hit. To be honest, I am trying SEO on a few sites. And though a lot more backlinks have been created manually but the ones I see in webmaster tools are the ones that are organic backlinks from other sites. And they are steadily increasing and I do not even know who those sites are. So, quality backlinks and more importantly organic backlinks are given the top priority from Google it seems. I am now planning to do two parallel campaigns: I already have quality sites with thousands of organic backlinks and I will let them continue. But I will add a few more sites and especially revive my 3-4 year old sites to build quality sites with fresh content and whitehat backlinks such as manual SEO etc. And the other parallel would be of a selected few sites with mixed SEO such as 80% whitehat and 20% greyhat. But then Google is becoming extremely unpredictable. Even for quality sites especially new ones, I am able to break into top 10 of yahoo and bing a lot more easier nowadays compared to Google. And ranking a site on yahoo or bing top 10 is as good as not ranking them as visitors hardly come through those SE. Confusing but it is now split testing time with more importance on quality.


Editing the post again to mention that I do not mean "product sites" getting devalued as per my observation but "affiliate sites" getting devalued. In fact, if you have a quality product site with your own products rather than affiliates then they are only improving their ranking as per my observation.

zmoney said:

40 unique articles handwritten by myself for each site with images, etc. 4 of my big earning sites went down a few days ago. I logged into my account and thought my server went down or something, because I was making next to nothing. Sites have been doing great for 9 months. Links were from a couple of blogs, a few articles and some forum sigs. Not really BH.

Killing me. Now what the hell? I was finally going to start adding a few more sites this week because of confidence, and now this.

Funny thing, still no love from yahoo or bing... Anyhow... fml

Also, These sites weren't updated since creation.. no new links.

Click to expand...

One of my money sites dropped 50% in traffic since Oct 13. The site is still ranking on the keywords-But doing a few consecutive searches in a row, some keywords drop to the bottom first page or a few pages back depending on what data center I hit. It looks like the data centers are out of sync or Google dancing.

Basically, there appears to be a Panda recaculation in progress. Once the recalulation is finished and synchronized, Panda 2.6 will be confirmed. So, whatever is happening is temporary.

The funny thing is that I saw the same thing back on September 18th and continuing through the September 28th confirmation of Panda.

One more interesting observation. One of my websites where I had only scrapeblasted comments from manually scraped lists and also did an AMR blast a few months back seems to be returning back into the first few pages of Google in the last few days after it was sent to oblivion back at that time. Not sure if Panda 2.6 is the reason though but it somehow seems to negate the effect of the penalty after sometime in say a couple of months. Interestingly, that site had loads of content and I had paid a writer to write around 30 unique posts for that site. So, maybe quality content also worked out there. Not completely able to predict but the mix of my knowledge on organic, WH and BH/GH seo is somewhat making me decipher what is going on in SERPs. It seems quality content and "more content" is mattering a lot more to Google SERPs now.

TheSEOWizard said:

One more interesting observation. One of my websites where I had only scrapeblasted comments from manually scraped lists and also did an AMR blast a few months back seems to be returning back into the first few pages of Google in the last few days after it was sent to oblivion back at that time. Not sure if Panda 2.6 is the reason though but it somehow seems to negate the effect of the penalty after sometime in say a couple of months. Interestingly, that site had loads of content and I had paid a writer to write around 30 unique posts for that site. So, maybe quality content also worked out there. Not completely able to predict but the mix of my knowledge on organic, WH and BH/GH seo is somewhat making me decipher what is going on in SERPs. It seems quality content and "more content" is mattering a lot more to Google SERPs now.

Click to expand...

Great points about the update. Since the drop a few days ago, I've been adding content in the hope that "more content" is what Panda is after. Content per se doesn't appear to be the full story. There doesn't seem to be a way to judge quality via an algorithm.

I still see quite a few sites ranking #1 with content that you can tell was written by non-native speakers. Even some of the content is poorly written. Basically just listing the facts in one sentence paragraphs. Which makes me think that Panda is looking for authority signals.

zmoney said:

I'm pretty much completely wiped out here. It's not like old RSSGM sites where you would just slap more up... These took some time, blah blah...

I really thought doing GH sites, I would avoid all this.. Soo wrong, soo busted...

All the sites above me are pretty much product websites now too. I'm the first "informational" one..

Also, 1 affiliate banner from CJ on site.

:sigh:

Click to expand...

Mine is an informational site too. The problem i see with this update is that the search results contain sites that are aged and have high trust rank. But on the other hand, those search results are not highly relevant to the search performed. They have placed too much emphasis on the trust rank. I guess there will be some changes in a few weeks but i would not say there will be a total roll back.

I've been analyzing the results for a couple of days now and it seems very very strange.

1. Am I the only one seeing Blogspot and Facebook all over right now? How can be some content over Facebook be more important than a regular website page with good information?
2. Build yourself some EMD right now. EMD rank big time after Panda 2.5 and there are plenty of people making money with them right now.
3. Google banned Associated Content Adsense ID? How sad is that?
4. Blogrolls matter right now. I'm seeing websites that use blogroll links rank higher after Panda 2.6. It might just be a coincidence.
5. I see pages with keyword stuffed titles and no content whatsoever ranking as high as ever. They won't be there forever. That's why I have the feeling that Panda 3.0 will land around Halloween.
6. I see that it really doesn't matter how much content you have on your page. 10-50 words pages rank higher as ever. Why? If you give the searcher what he/she's looking for, the number of words doesn't matter.


This update is making me crazy understanding what Google wants?

mmmmeme said:

I've been analyzing the results for a couple of days now and it seems very very strange.

1. Am I the only one seeing Blogspot and Facebook all over right now? How can be some content over Facebook be more important than a regular website page with good information?
2. Build yourself some EMD right now. EMD rank big time after Panda 2.5 and there are plenty of people making money with them right now.
3. Google banned Associated Content Adsense ID? How sad is that?
4. Blogrolls matter right now. I'm seeing websites that use blogroll links rank higher after Panda 2.6. It might just be a coincidence.
5. I see pages with keyword stuffed titles and no content whatsoever ranking as high as ever. They won't be there forever. That's why I have the feeling that Panda 3.0 will land around Halloween.
6. I see that it really doesn't matter how much content you have on your page. 10-50 words pages rank higher as ever. Why? If you give the searcher what he/she's looking for, the number of words doesn't matter.


This update is making me crazy understanding what Google wants?

Click to expand...

After my research, i would agree with some of the points you stated above. I haven't seen a single facebook page yet until now and 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..

and yeah, EMD matters a lot now..

How come EMD matters a lot? all of my domains are EMD and they got raped pretty badly.. the only thing that's important I think is affiliate links, all of my affiliate links were cloaked and nofollow but after I completely removed them, the traffic jumped around 400%, way more than it was before.. coincidence maybe. Don't know about content, mine was all unique and very well written, containing at least 700+ words on each page.

wokaka said:

and yeah, EMD matters a lot now..

Click to expand...

In SEOmoz's latest research & stats (I think they do it 2 or 4 times a year) it shows that EMDs are actually losing "mojo" pretty fast. Maybe after all these years Google realized people are "keyword stuffing" domains now

And my personal experience is the same, I've seen some good EMDs disappear into oblivion during recent months.