indyank - 2:28 pm on Apr 17, 2011 (gmt 0)

I haven't seen anyone post this but did anyone see a huge spike in traffic before it dropped?

This is typicsal "pandalish" behavior. Several have reported it and almost all sites that got hit had seen this. Since this is so unique to this algo, I had to coin the term "pandalish".

It looks like the huge panda lifts the sites above its head and then drops it hard. I have seen wrestlers do this and panda looks to be a wrestler.

But technically I found something interesting in this. It looks like G has some site wide traffic filters in place for every site.This is loosened when panda reaches the site and then the pandalish behavior takes over.Are these the traffic throttling filters that people always wondered? No idea.

But it definitely looks like some filters are removed and then a fresh set of "pandalish" filters are applied.It might even be that G already had a few quality rules in place and these are replaced by the new panda rules, during this two day event.

If anyone untouched by panda sees a sudden traffic increase and the traffic burst is organic and is seen for all pages, run for cover as panda is on your site.