Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2011

[Whitey]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

< related Panda Farm Update [webmasterworld.com] >

I keep dropping mentions of this , but no takeup , so i did some digging, for clues to my theory Chrome's passing back intelligence that could influence this new algo and future changes :

New Chrome extension: block sites from Google's web search results
Monday, February 14, 2011 | 12:00 PM

Today the Google web search team launched a new Chrome extension to block low-quality sites from appearing in Google’s web search results. Read more in the post below, cross-posted from the Official Google Blog. - Ed


[chrome.blogspot.com...]

Also - [webmasterworld.com...]

I think user behaviour data is being underestimated in this thread. Each website will have an depth profile building that feeds into a potential quality assessment by Google. What say you ?

[edited by: tedster at 8:15 pm (utc) on Mar 15, 2011]

[TheMadScientist]

<a href="http://example.com/">Link Text</a>?

LOL ... If you don't want to have the links seen or counted, Matt Cutts (in one of the recently linked videos, by tedster, I think) said it was acceptable to put links you don't want them to know about in a disallowed JS file ... That might be the way to go if you don't want them counted in any way.

[falsepositive]

@Shatner, a lot of the talking heads in the Google forums are pointing to ads as one of the possible factors. Yes there are MANY factors involved, but if you can make adjustments across all the issues your site could be facing, then I'd like to understand what my options are.

@Mad, thanks! Heh, yes, before Panda, I must admit, I was simply an ignoramus (on purpose) about onsite SEO. I did not care one whit. I spent my time with marketing and creative work. I've been soaking this up like a sponge over the last month. I appreciate the reply. Am sure many oldtimers see these questions over and over but it sure helps newbies like me. I gotta get more info on that video. :)

[Shatner]

>>@Shatner, a lot of the talking heads in the Google forums are pointing to ads as one of the possible factors. Yes there are MANY factors involved, but if you can make adjustments across all the issues your site could be facing, then I'd like to understand what my options are.

I know I've read those forums. Read deeper. Most of those people have no idea what they're talking about. They can't, because 1) Google isn't talking and 2) No one has seen any improvement from removing ads... or from doing anything else.

So there's nothing to support their theory. It's just a wild theory like all the others out there. No one knows.

Please don't take anyone's' word for it, when it comes to telling you why Panda has penalized their site. No one knows, it's just a wild guess.

In the case of ads, there are just as many "talking heads" who say they aren't the cause. They also don't know, it's just a wild guess.

I will say that a lot of the sites which now dominate in the SERPs have some really heinous ads going on, the patterns in who was demoted and who wasn't don't really support that theory.


>>I was simply an ignoramus (on purpose) about onsite SEO. I did not care one whit. I spent my time with marketing and creative work.

To me that's the saddest thing about Panda, it's forcing people to stop focusing on user experience and creating quality content, and forcing them to put their energy into SEO... which is the exact opposite of what Panda is supposed to achieve. It should be making it easier for people to focus on delivering great content and user experience, not force them to spend all their time thinking about Google. :(

[gouri]

"For Facebook and Twitter outbound links in the footer of a website, is it better to nofollow or follow? "

Doesn't really matter: A no-follow link will bleed PR anyway and FB and Twitter are safe so no penalties from Google.

Thanks for the response.

If you have a few banners on a page and they link to the advertiser's website, can those have a negative impact? Are these outbound links seen differently than an outbound link to a social media page?

Thanks.

[falsepositive]

>>I was simply an ignoramus (on purpose) about onsite SEO. I did not care one whit. I spent my time with marketing and creative work.

To me that's the saddest thing about Panda, it's forcing people to stop focusing on user experience and creating quality content, and forcing them to put their energy into SEO... which is the exact opposite of what Panda is supposed to achieve. It should be making it easier for people to focus on delivering great content and user experience, not force them to spend all their time thinking about Google. :(

Agreed, this whole thing is a travesty for the false positives/victims of collateral damage. I am sure this is just another one of those algo cycles that Google shrugs their shoulders over. The question is whether they'll keep getting away with this.

[outland88]

False Positive since you’re soaking it in like a sponge it was interesting to see those old posts you brought up about the various updates. I’m getting old.

Interestingly I was buying graphic artwork during September and the artist gave me the domains he had legitimately sold to in the past two years. I actually looked at 300 sites. More accurately I ended up who-ising most. Of the 300 only 5 had survived. Four of those survivors were just 2-3 months old. The other had survived 3 years. When I mentioned it to the artist he just simply replied "it's a whole lot".

I imagine this algo will bury even more. Many of those names you saw don't seem to be around anymore.

[dickbaker]

I'm curious about forum links. Does anyone who's been adversely affected have a large number of forum signature links showing in Webmaster Tools? I have, according to WMT, over 200,000 links from a forum I visit a couple of times a day. I have 7,134 posts in that forum with six anchor text links, so the 200,000+ links number is wacko (7134*6=42804).

Nevertheless, I'm wondering if such links do any harm. I have signature links in other niche-related sites, but not nearly as many.

I'm trying to see if perhaps this could be another common problem area.

[AlyssaS]

Is anyone else seeing an unusual jump in traffic and rankings starting March 22nd (to well above pre-panda levels)?

[walkman]

Is anyone else seeing an unusual jump in traffic and rankings starting March 22nd (to well above pre-panda levels)?

Nope, not me. You may have hit the jackpot

[Gorgwatcher]

has anyone considered Keyword density?
for me it seems that if "EXACT KEYWORD" repetition is upto 6 or 7% , there is a significant drop in ranking whereas pages with less keyword density are doing fine...

[dickbaker]

I've been seeing all levels of keyword density in the top ten results.

[walkman]

"I've been seeing all levels of keyword density in the top ten results."

Same here. That's not it, at least not by itself. Looks like Alyssa came back, anyone else?

[ckissi]

Is anyone else seeing an unusual jump in traffic and rankings starting March 22nd (to well above pre-panda levels)?

I'm getting about +10% now. But cannot identify countries yet. Maybe it's rolling out elsewhere.

[TheMadScientist]

I've been seeing all levels of keyword density in the top ten results.

They're far beyond simple keyword density.
It's likely it won't tell you a thing any more...

[chrisv1963]

Agreed, this whole thing is a travesty for the false positives/victims of collateral damage. I am sure this is just another one of those algo cycles that Google shrugs their shoulders over. The question is whether they'll keep getting away with this.

Matt Cutts didn't update his blog for almost a month now. Too many internal problems? I know that he has been traveling, but still his silence is suspicious. At least I expected him to blog about how great this update is and how much better Google got after the Panda update. Reality might be that Panda pretty much wrecked Google and they are now trying to find out how to fix it without making a fool of themselves.

[walkman]

I am sure Matt would have found a few minutes to update, but something is not working as planned. Too much collateral damage.

How can a site be #1 or #2 one day and #80 or #200 the next without changing anything?

[tranquilito]

How can a site be #1 or #2 one day and #80 or #200 the next without changing anything?

OR how can "quality" have different criteria on US vs the rest of the world ? :D

[ckissi]

Well, everything changed 3 hours ago.
Starting from 22 March I noticed some raise in traffic, today at the morning (GMT+1) I experienced +10% so it was nice to see some improvement.
Unfortunately as I said 3 hours ago it dropped completely to numbers from last week.
Don't know what they do in the background but it seems to me like some kind of hidden tests to eliminate collateral damage.

[martinacastro]

One of my sites climb positions (for 2 of the 4 top kws). They are not the same pre panda but are a bit similar.

I made changes on monday but I do not think these changes are responsible of the new positions...

[indyank]

How can a site be #1 or #2 one day and #80 or #200 the next without changing anything?

OR how can "quality" have different criteria on US vs the rest of the world ? :D

Yes Matt had said that this will not have much impact in the rest of the world as it has been in U.S. SERPS.

That was surprising and I could't see the logic behind it.Does anyone know why he says that?

This update had impacted content based sites (including forums and directories) much more than ecommerce.Content sites focus on a worldwide audience.So, if it affects them in U.S., it should also affect them in other parts of the world as and when it is rolled out.Why does Matt say that the impact will be much less when it is rolled out elsewhere?

When they are throwing around the results so much in this update, are they meaning that they had been ranking results so badly earlier and it required such a big change?

[marketingmagic]

Does anyone have any insights as to when this will be deployed on Google.ca?

[tedster]

There are reports today from the UK of sporadic "new results" on AOL and Google Moble - but nothing from Canada or anywhere else. And even in the UK, it's not clear if AOL churning really means Panda is rolling out soon.

I'm pretty convinced that the Panda changes in the US are still not budging, even for sites that made some very big changes. There is some everflux and daily shifts - reflecting some smaller algo tweaks as we have been seeing for a long time. But those big Panda changes are not moving significantly.

[econman]

how can "quality" have different criteria on US vs the rest of the world ? :D

Google never attempted, nor claimed to, evaluate "quality" pre-Panda. So there are no "quality" criteria applicable in the rest of the world -- the SERPs are ranked only on the basis of "relevance."

That means that in the rest of the world (and perhaps in the 88% of US SERPs not targeted by Panda) an extremely relevant page of pure junk can still be ranked at the top provided the page has enough inbound links from other pages of pure junk, with the right "signals" from anchor text, and enough other signals say the page is relevant to the query.

To the extent Panda is related to content farms, it's because Google was struggling with a PR problem because the big content farms were pushing some really bad pages to the top of some highly visible SERPs, by directing enough of their internal link juice to the pages in question.

Not to say that they've been successful at figuring out how to evaluate "low quality" but let's not get confused about what's going on.

We need to remember the difference between goals and outcomes (collateral damage).

[tedster]

Very well said. the Panda Update is but the first step into a brave new world of information retrieval, not merely some tweak of the old "relevance" framework. It is also not the product of a company thinking only about the short term.

Google's "quality" metric may have its closest parallel in Microsoft's new research into a "credibility" algorithm [research.microsoft.com] - except Bing isn't using their metric live as far as we know.

[walkman]

The problem with such radical changes, when the system is in beta or alpha, is the economic impact. Now it's much, much larger then in early days of the internet.

And when a site that has been #1 for 8 years finds itself on page 7, something is wrong and it's hard to justify such a discrepancy.

[helpnow]

When you view the world through a macro lens, like Google has to, it is a zero sum game. There is no economic impact. And perhaps sadly, the key to surviving and moving on is to be able to see things the way Google does. Just like a doctor has to learn to be insensitive to a patient's suffering for the greater good (so he can move on and keep helping others and not get held up with the emotions of each individual case), so too Google has to ignore the micro collateral damage, and focus on their macro view. So, why this happened is moot. All that matters is how you react and move on.

[kd454]

the key to surviving and moving on is to be able to see things the way Google does.

The issue with this update is there is no way to be able to see things as Google does, this was a shotgun blast and if you got hit it was pretty much just bad luck.

I own 40 websites, and I can tell you this has nothing to with quality, out of 40 websites 2 were hit with this update.

What I am seeing is nothing has changed except 2 of my sites were penalized. The same "old" SEO still does work very well.

If you were hit by this is was pretty much just bad luck as far as I can tell.

So what needs to be changed going forward? Not much if anything.

[walkman]

There are at least 2 versions of SERPS, i can tell about the referrals I am getting. Needless to say one is great for me but I have t wait for Matt Cutts' coin toss :)

Helpnow, in my niche out of top 20 maybe 5 are much better than me and 5 are worse. So luck has to do it a lot.

[Shatner]

>>>I'm pretty convinced that the Panda changes in the US are still not budging, even for sites that made some very big changes. There is some everflux and daily shifts - reflecting some smaller algo tweaks as we have been seeing for a long time. But those big Panda changes are not moving significantly.

The only thing I question about that theory is that how much difference are smaller tweaks really going to make to sites actually affected by Panda? Panda penalizes the site as a whole, not specific pages. So if your site has been penalized as a whole by Panda, then all the smaller tweaks in the world won't really make much difference and probably won't have any effect on Panda. So what's the point of smaller tweaks if you don't plan to do a real, recrawl, reranking of the effected sites?

[tedster]

I hear you - and I do expect a full new crawl and re-evaluation. In fact, I expect that will be done dynamically and as an ongoing process the way all ranking scores are done. Maybe that's already happening, but most sites are not really fixing the core issues. Hard to say with no one reporting a lot of success, just little bitty gains.

I am personally no longer willing to call thsee Panda effects a "penalty" - we need to use another word very much to avoid false hopes. Penalties can be lifted, but these ranking losses will clearly not be removed the way it can happen with a penalty.

It's a whole new algorithm scoring method, so we're really seeing a "devaluation".