claaarky - 8:02 pm on Jun 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

Well done for asking that question manny123. I was thinking the same thing!

This week I hit on a theory which seems to fit with all the advice from Amit Singhal last year, so I started re-reading lots of posts here to see if someone had already said what I've discovered and perhaps I didn't interpret it correctly. It seems clear that people who have recovered from Panda don't know which factors made the difference.

If I'm right it's actually very simple. If I'm right, I'll be very angry at google for being so unspecific with their guidelines. If what they want is quality, why don't they help people understand how to identify good and bad content on their site so they know what to attack. If I'm right, a lot of people may be destroying their sites and spending huge amounts of time and money unnecessarily trying to solve this silly riddle (the goal is admirable, but the secrecy is almost childish).

As for recovery time, it may depend on how busy your site is. A month is long enough for google to collect reliable stats for a busy'ish site. For example, if you were conducting a survey in a busy high street it wouldn't take long to gather a reliable sample but a quieter location would take longer. Stats aren't reliable with low numbers.

If I'm right about my discovery, Panda is not even about google, it's about your users and what they inadvertently tell you about your site while using it. Google has just figured out the connection and used that to classify sites. Now I can see that, everything about panda makes sense - why they implement it each month, why they say it's about content and to think about your users. Once I could see that, I could see where my bad content was.

All the guidelines are appropriate, but what I found is it's so difficult to judge your own content without some help. Once you know a page is bad you'll understand why. I found its very difficult to judge what most people think is good content. You need stats. The clues are there and the answers are in front of your eyes. It's so simple it's brilliant.