Content_ed - 2:10 pm on Dec 20, 2011 (gmt 0)

Passed the two week point this weekend with no changes in previously reported ranking. It's the start of our lowest traffic period of the year, this week is poor and Christmas week is horrible, so I won't be able to identify minor changes. If the wheels come off it should be obvious, otherwise I won't post another update until after New Year's.

The pages moved from the worst Pandalized site to the site that Panda loved continue to draw at pre-Panda levels with just two exceptions. The two most popular pages in the group, those that had drawn well over 500 visitors a day from Google each before Panda on the old site, are only drawing half that today, but it's still several times what they were getting three weeks ago.

Both of those pages have been altered since Panda hit by removing links to our other Pandalized site which ranked just as high in the same area (I broke all links between those sites). So it could be that Google really used to like the links on those pages, or it could be that ten months without the steady addition of organic links they would normally have seen has dropped their value such that even if Panda was eliminated, they would still rank lower. That's the sucker punch waiting for small sites that do recover from Panda if they had some super high ranking pages in competitive areas that needed to draw organic links on a daily basis just to maintain their place.

The second experiment won't reach two weeks until midweek, but things there haven't changed either. This was the move from a Pandalized site down about 66% to an unused domain with unknown Panda status. Traffic bounced around 100% but it needed to bounce 200% to get back to pre-Panda.