netmeg - 12:04 pm on Jun 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

None of my sites or client sites were pandalized. Most stayed around the same as far as traffic, some gained a bit. The one client site that I relaunched last year on a new platform has had some big leaps in product keywords in the past month, but I don't know that I can blame that on anything panda-related. They're up against some huge brands, including Amazon, and they'll probably never make it to the tippy top on about half their products, but at least they're getting to the first page now.

Most of the sites are as technically sound as I can make them (but they don't all validate). Most of the sites have elements and pages kept deliberately out of Google as I believe what you don't let Google see is almost as important as what you do (and that's not a recent change, they were always that way). Most of the sites are clear authority sites in their niche (even if it's a really small niche). What I mean by this is that either there is no direct match competition, or else the competition is so weak as to not even be a factor. (except for one client who still sits atop a *murderously* competitive niche and even I can't really say why). Some sites improved slightly just because some of the competitors got knocked out.

All of them are in GWT, have analytics; some have AdSense and some don't; some use AdWords to drive traffic and some don't; most of my sites have social media interactions, but most of the client sites don't.

None of them have what I would call impressive link profiles. Linkbuilding is not one of my specialties (and most of my clients are B2B - makes it even more difficult)

Almost all of the sites have a very strong rate of return visits. Some are practically being stalked.

None of the sites have article content, or anything that was not written or re-written by the clients or by me. (We use no verbatim manufacturer descriptions anywhere, even on the sites with 2000+ products) The writing may suck in certain cases, but it's definitely original.

Some have really shallow pages (category and taxonomy pages), some don't. If the shallow pages serve a purpose to the user, then I don't worry about blocking them.

None use no-follow on links except for affiliate links.

Many get scraped to some degree, but we don't spend a lot of time worrying about that. One client has me keeping an eye out for people who swipe his pictures, and I have a rather aggressive republishing policy of my own that outlines what I may do if I find people using my content without attribution, but for the most part, we ignore it. There are only so many hours in a day. I can't think of any instance where scraped content actually outranks any of the sites that I oversee.

All of them are imperfect, and have room for lots of improvement insofar as we have the time and funds to do so. And we (the clients and I) recognize that. It's always a moving target.

I guess the sum-up would be, they all look cared-for.