What is Panda after?

LBrown · Oct 17, 2011

A lot of my EMDs got hammered too, but some are still in their original position. I'm also seeing large sites ranking even though they are not providing the searcher what they are looking for.

I keep thinking about this tweet from Matt Cutts on October 5:

Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).

I know Matt Cutts isn't the bastion of truth but saying to expect 2% changes when many people are reporting an 80% drop in traffic seems a little absurd even for him.

There's been some buzz about Panda 2.5 being rolled back... I still don't think Panda 2.6 is over.

mmmmeme · Oct 17, 2011

Panda 2.6 or what's called is not over yet. I've seen huge movements today, so perhaps the big Panda is coming soon.

kinox · Oct 17, 2011

My adsense sites are fine but anything that had Amazon on them took a BIG hit...back to the drawing board.

TK421 · Oct 17, 2011

The fact that some people have seen their rankings returning to normal gives me hope but as of yet all my pages that were hit are still way down.

homenet · Oct 17, 2011

My whitehat(ish) site, 3 years old, around 80 unqiue hand written posts got hit HARD and has lost around 75% of its traffic, completely disapeared from the SERPS for some keywords I was in the top five for.

On the other hand I have a single page blog.com blog that had nothing but scrapebox blasts for the past month, this is still sitting at #3 and #1 for its keywords, hasn't moved at all.

timshady · Oct 17, 2011

I oversee about 50 sites. I've seen the following:

1. Sites not participating in aggressive link building that have long, quality content are NOT affected.

2. Sites with many affiliate links ARE affected.

3. Sites updated FREQUENTLY are affected (negatively) and sites NOT updated frequently haven't been affected AND / OR are affected in a positive manner.

This is just my experience and what I've seen personally from sites I oversee. Anyone see similar stuff?

Could this be step one of a major shake-up? Many times, when I go "down" far, the sites come back better than ever. Hopefully that is the case.

Any feedback is appreciated.

hamster · Oct 17, 2011

timshady said:
I oversee about 50 sites. I've seen the following:

1. Sites not participating in aggressive link building that have long, quality content are NOT affected.

2. Sites with many affiliate links ARE affected.

3. Sites updated FREQUENTLY are affected (negatively) and sites NOT updated frequently haven't been affected AND / OR are affected in a positive manner.

This is just my experience and what I've seen personally from sites I oversee. Anyone see similar stuff?

Could this be step one of a major shake-up? Many times, when I go "down" far, the sites come back better than ever. Hopefully that is the case.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Yeah, probably the most accurate post in this thread.. but it's easy to guess when you don't know what's actually going on.

Affiliate links which are not cloaked are getting hit for sure, the only issue I have is finding out if cloaking the affiliate links doesn't affect the site.

Either way, I've noticed sites with amazon and clickbank affiliate links getting hit the most.

hamster · Oct 17, 2011

Also, it's so stupid to depend on one shitty company.. they don't care about people making websites at all, thinking they are gods just because they have the biggest % of market share. At least they could give us guidelines on what needs to be done to improve the site and not just make up random shit and penalize sites.

I've switched to bing for my personal searches, I know that won't change anything, but if we all switched to different search engines and displayed different search forms on our sites, that would be a little better! just imagine if Google had less than 25% of market share, then nobody would give a fuck about their experiments which destroys people's motivation.

timshady · Oct 17, 2011

hamster said:
Yeah, probably the most accurate post in this thread.. but it's easy to guess when you don't know what's actually going on.

Affiliate links which are not cloaked are getting hit for sure, the only issue I have is finding out if cloaking the affiliate links doesn't affect the site.

Either way, I've noticed sites with amazon and clickbank affiliate links getting hit the most.

Thanks. It's just personal observation and hoping to see what other people are seeing. All for helping each other out.

mmmmeme · Oct 17, 2011

timshady said:
I oversee about 50 sites. I've seen the following:

1. Sites not participating in aggressive link building that have long, quality content are NOT affected.

2. Sites with many affiliate links ARE affected.

3. Sites updated FREQUENTLY are affected (negatively) and sites NOT updated frequently haven't been affected AND / OR are affected in a positive manner.

This is just my experience and what I've seen personally from sites I oversee. Anyone see similar stuff?

Could this be step one of a major shake-up? Many times, when I go "down" far, the sites come back better than ever. Hopefully that is the case.

Any feedback is appreciated.

None of my website participated in link schemes or backlinking. They were affected, one of them died forever. It could be only my case.

I have seen plenty of websites not affected, but they are updated super super daily. Mine is updated daily and it was affected. One of them was affected and I haven't updated it for a while (weeks).

I don't have any idea why. Maybe they are bad and they don't offer value to my readers, but I think they do offer value to my reader. Most of my competition is either scrapers or not offering value to my users, yet they now rank number 1. I think that Google somehow uses bounce rate to determine this and testing those in number 1 to actually put them in lower positions.

TK421 · Oct 17, 2011

@TimShady

From the sites I have I would agree with your 3rd point

"Sites updated FREQUENTLY are affected (negatively) and sites NOT updated frequently haven't been affected AND / OR are affected in a positive manner."

@hamster

I agree with you. It seems all our livelihoods are at the mercy of one fucking company. It's about time we all started having anti-Google sites that promote Bing instead.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Bing is any good, but there just needs to be a more even spread of people using different search engines.

Maybe when Facebook bring out their search engine things will change!!

bstsystems · Oct 17, 2011

dantob said:
I'm wondering what constitutes a drop of say 3-5 spots vs dropping like 7-10 spots.

What do you think? Bounce rate of the exact page perhaps? If bounce rate of 1 page is 80% and your other page is only 20%, you really think google is going to drop both by the same amount?

How about if visitors coming into the site via page 1 and stay for 10 seconds vs pg 2 and stay for 3 minutes?

Alexfrance · Oct 17, 2011

i really love panda updates now!!!

One site ranked #35 on a high volume KW 2 months ago, since then many MFA sites have been cleaned out and I rank #12

Mind you this is a 100k+ local monthly financial topic with high CPC. I on the other hand am NO MFA site, only affiliate links, was originally just a micro niche finance site, but since ranking on popular KW's has increased, why not make more money?

Cash here I come...

PANDA - I AM LOVING IT!

bstsystems · Oct 17, 2011

wejee said:
My sales have dropped this last week, so after seeing this thread, I checked my main ranks... I've actually risen. One site from #5 to #2 and another from page 4 to page 2. Must be the economy? Trying to 2nd guess SEO and sales tactics seems like a crap shoot sometimes...

LOL. My friend's site just dropped from 1st position down to 567th for his keyword

He was ranked 1st for 10 years.

Must be the economy.

Yes I'm kidding.

timshady · Oct 17, 2011

bstsystems said:
LOL. My friend's site just dropped from 1st position down to 567th for his keyword

He was ranked 1st for 10 years.

Must be the economy.

Yes I'm kidding.

A ten year ranking is dang good - was it a competitive niche? I'm seriously baffled, it seems where I'm working smart I'm getting my a$$ handed to me and where I'm lazy and unorganized, I'm being rewarded. #SMH

bstsystems · Oct 17, 2011

CountDeMonet said:
Panda is a "quite" simple update I say quite because people have blown it way out of proportion, when in actuallity panda is an update to simply detect quality content in an organic order.

If you didn't understand that:
Panda likes original, unique content (that isn't kw stuffed) and hates dupe content.
Sure you should add you're kw a bit more than the rest, but keep it natural. Make sure to add image tags and keep your site relevant.

Actually from what I've heard many place, Google doesn't mind duplicate content as long as it's quality.

bstsystems · Oct 17, 2011

2. Bounce. Rate. Does and doesn't matter it really just matters on the amount of traffic you get and how qualified and targeted it is. Its that simple

3. Content: this should be obvios by now with the panda explanations. Write original content! No dupe shit and no spun crap. Keep your kw density at a normal level, but optimized just so google knows what you're aiming for.

Really? Bounce. Rate. Were those 2 sentences?
Bounce rate is the effect of content quality combined with the traffic you're getting. If the traffic is not targeted, you're going after the wrong keywords.

Who is explaining this panda stuff to you....Google itself? Of course they are going to recommend no dupe content, because they don't have to put forth the effort to write it, and it helps the user. But they rank plenty of dupe content #1.

bstsystems · Oct 17, 2011

homenet said:
My whitehat(ish) site, 3 years old, around 80 unqiue hand written posts got hit HARD and has lost around 75% of its traffic, completely disapeared from the SERPS for some keywords I was in the top five for.

On the other hand I have a single page blog.com blog that had nothing but scrapebox blasts for the past month, this is still sitting at #3 and #1 for its keywords, hasn't moved at all.

Very interesting. This either means that you're a really bad writer who has no clue how to give users what they are looking for and just hired out the single page blog to a different writer who did, or Google didn't quite get Panda right yet

bstsystems · Oct 17, 2011

timshady said:
3. Sites updated FREQUENTLY are affected (negatively) and sites NOT updated frequently haven't been affected AND / OR are affected in a positive manner.

The only thing that I can think of is that Google may be on to autoblogging and punishing it. So it would look unnatural to have a site updated exactly every 2 days, whereas a human would update randomly.

bstsystems · Oct 17, 2011

hamster said:
Either way, I've noticed sites with amazon and clickbank affiliate links getting hit the most.

Now we have to figure out whether this is because the quality of the content on those sites of yours was the problem, or the fact that it had an aff. link.

Are your other sites without those links higher quality articles or giving users more of what they want?

What is Panda after?

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