Shatner - 9:25 pm on Apr 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

>>>I know you don't want ads to be the reason, but after checking all the sites on the list (and not just the home pages) ads are what scream out at you. However most of the ads are animated - thus very distracting. It's like revisiting the world of websites of the 90s with their animated gifs.

It's not about what I or anyone else wants. Really that's not constructive.

There seems to be a dedicated group of people who just run into every thread and shout "ADS!" without any evidence to back their claim up.

Those who are doing actual analysis in this thread like calculating content versus non-content space are accomplishing something. This constant "oh it's ads!" cry is getting a little tiresome.

It's unproductive.

Let's take the two examples we've looked at so far, to show just how unproductive and pointless this excercise is:

blogcritics.org
cinemablend.com

Now compare their ads to other sites in their area which were NOT hit by Panda.

comingsoon.net
joblo.com
slashfilm.com
darkhorizons.com

You will see that they're all running pretty much the exact same ads. In fact if you view source, you can tell that some of them are even using the EXACT SAME ad providers.

So how can so many continue to sit here screaming "it's all ads!" when the affected sites aren't using ads any differently than the non-affected sites?

What's far more productive and far more relevant is to consider the ratio of content to non-content areas on the affected sites. And to only consider that as ONE POSSIBLE FACTOR. There will and must be multiple factors.

Panda isn't the "penalize people for having ads on their site" algorithm and the sooner we all give up that notion the more likely it is we'll finally make some progress in figuring out what's going on.