Many Weeks since the Panda Update - Any Improvements? [part 2]

[rustybrick]

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

So, still, no one is seeing any significant improvements?

[edited by: tedster at 5:00 pm (utc) on Mar 25, 2011]

[Shatner]

Today I got a message saying Google had processed my reconsideration request.

This was the reconsideration request I sent in, after 1 week of Panda.

It doesn't say what they're doing with that reconsideration request or anything, just that it has been processed.

I see no changes in the SERPs.

[Shatner]

Regarding people talking about using Webmaster tools to examine which pages have dropped in ranking...

It seems like it's all gobbledeegook. It's nearly impossible to get usable data out of there. I've tried, I can find no pattern in the SERP drops, and honestly the WMT data doesn't seem to be valid anyway.

[walkman]

It's definitely not in .ca as I see a traffic increase. But my google.com traffic has crashed even more.

[SEOPTI]

Getting a new domain and moving your content is the only key at the moment to escape hell. I won't mention this again. Flexibility is the key.

If you lost 50%-80% of traffic get a new domain, don't wait for all the Illuminati Billionaires to fix their #*$!ty algo, do not wair for re-anking in six months, do not wait for death. If you are not flexible get a new job at Burger King.

With their caffeine infrastracture they make it easy.

[crobb305]

folks, any updates on the improvements?

Seeing a nice yo-yo pattern today with some larger spikes. Traffic is up 15% to 20% from the past 4 Mondays. This is an improvement from the downward trend I saw over the weekend. The yo-yo seemed to kick in early afternoon. Who knows what that means...I've seen it all before, but it's better than a downward traffic trend.

[Shatner]

>>Getting a new domain and moving your content is the only key at the moment to escape hell. I won't mention this again. Flexibility is the key.

This is only an option for content farms with no dedicated user base and no value in their brand.

So the irony here is that the only sites with a way to escape the Panda update are the very content farms it's targeting.

[Shatner]

>>Seeing a nice yo-yo pattern today with some larger spikes. Traffic is up 15% to 20% from the past 4 Mondays. This is an improvement from the downward trend I saw over the weekend. The yo-yo seemed to kick in early afternoon. Who knows what that means...I've seen it all before, but it's better than a downward traffic trend.

Yeah I wouldn't put much stock in it. I see the yo-yo now and then but it always goes right back to my standard, post-Panda levels.

[walkman]

Getting a new domain and moving your content is the only key at the moment to escape hell. I won't mention this again. Flexibility is the key.

My name is 16 (sixteen) years old, hand registered and very good name. So I can't do that, but I do have another name where Google is kept out with robots.txt /noindex and I might block google from one name to try my luck temporarily at the other. Google sees the pages as link only and the other domain is in the same category.

This is clearly not a fix your content, and we'll readjust as soon as we see it. Google wants us to suffer. The sad part is that many things that Google promoted now seem to have stabbed webmasters in the back. Tag pages for example, and too many and too prominent Google ads. I absolutely remember Matt Cutts telling people not to get too worried about internal duplicate content since Google will pick the best pages and knows not to punish and that tags helped Google find and rank content. Now they are making it obvious that they are punishing for thin /shallow /repetitive content.

[indyank]

shatner, I think they have sent it out in bulk to all those who filed reconsideration requests.When that happens, don't expect any changes.

[crobb305]

Two of my hardest-hit pages have word counts below 500. These were two articles written by one of my former writers years ago. They don't appear to be scraped at all; so, my guess is that, despite their quality, Google deems them "too short." This particular writer had a habit of splitting articles into parts to create a series, so each individual part on its own url seems quite short. I am thinking about combining two into one, but my concern is with creating duplicate content for the duration of time that it takes Google to forget about the old version. Good idea?

[Content_ed]

@crobb,

I doubt it would help. The least impacted high-traffic pages on my sites are the shortest ones with the highest number of outgoing links. It's the 1,000 to 5,000 word pages that got creamed the worst. Go figure.

[incrediBILL]

I can easily dial up the amount of content per page or down, didn't matter. no impact.

The impact of my last efforts which is reducing the number of times the same content shows via different internal URLs, ie. index of content, actual contnet, showing on a different index page, etc., things that naturally happen in a website.

Wrote some code to automate insertion of meta NOINDEX as needed to reduce redundancy to an absolute minimum.

Now waiting on about 40K more pages to crawl and index, should take a week at this pace, ugh...

[Content_ed]

@incredibill

Wasn't the cannonical tag supposed to fix those issues for Google?

[incrediBILL]

Wasn't the cannonical tag supposed to fix those issues for Google?

Nope.

Think how blogs work, you have a page indexing your content, then each content page, the pages indexing content by date, keyword, etc., meaning the index pages show a lot of the same stuff over and over again.

I picked one page as the default to be indexed, all the other data cross sections are now NOINDEX.

[Content_ed]

@incredibill

But the cannonical tag is supposed to tell Google that they are all really the same page, no matter what the path, etc. Or, that's what I thought that was what it was for.

In any case, glad I don't have a blog that does that. But if everybody else does, it seems unlikely that Google should have trouble with it.

Morris

[indyank]

Here is something interesting that I noted. While I see the ads clearly in the preview tool on the affected site, I don't see this happen on most sites that I know are not affected. You can even take the example of cultofmac and digital inspiration.

I know that ads aren't the only thing in this panda update but it is definitely one of the factors that is used.
When I do use a site:domain.com and use the preview tool to see the preview for the various pages, I see the content of the google ad being highlighted in the preview.Why is google highlighting the ad's text in the preview tool? What can i do to overcome this?

[Dan01]

I took the Commission Junction and Linkshare ads down today. It was easy to do. A lot easier than sifting through 30K pages to determine which pages are of "low quality". The CJ ads are still running on another domain.

We will see.

After Panda I didn't see drastic changes. The traffic went down, but most of the SERPS I looked at dropped from maybe number 2 to number six or eight. Doesn't seem like a big deal, but it cost me money.

[edited by: Dan01 at 8:03 am (utc) on Apr 6, 2011]

[Shatner]

>>The impact of my last efforts which is reducing the number of times the same content shows via different internal URLs, ie. index of content, actual contnet, showing on a different index page, etc., things that naturally happen in a website.

I've been working on this too, but if you look in the post I started elsewhere on this forum it's just been revealing new problems.

[indyank]

With all these crawl errors (404) and now with this instant preview bug that i noticed (explained above), google seem to have introduced a lot of crap in their code in the name of panda. All these started with it.

[DanAbbamont]

Not going to link it because it might be BS, but I just read on a blog that duration between clicking a result and clicking back is now a big factor. Is there any reliable information about this?

[incrediBILL]

Lazy Googlebot barely passed crawling 14K pages today - how the heck am I going to ever know if my changes have had any impact at this pace?

Sheesh.

I'm really tempted to toss a 16 year old site brand in the toilet and start with a new domain name.

[DanAbbamont]

I've seen a single tweet ranking... not a very popular term, but for a longtail phrase. I was nevertheless surprised to see it #3. The tweet was a promotional tweet by a well known art museum referring to a favorable newspaper review of one of its shows. I was searching for reviews of the show.

I don't think that's anything new or anything to do with Panda. The museum site is obviously probably #1 for it's own name, and links to it's own twitter, which will also become extremely relevant to the name of the museum AND have the benefit of being on Twitter. Tweets have been able to rank really well for years, I just think we're seeing more of them as trusted entities make use of them.

That's a whole different thread though.

[Dan01]

Not going to link it because it might be BS, but I just read on a blog that duration between clicking a result and clicking back is now a big factor. Is there any reliable information about this?

I am not sure, but I thought the bounce rate played a role in the algo for a long time now.

[maximillianos]

Don't do it incredibill. For a site that old I would give it a year before trying something that drastic.

Plus the penalty may just follow you to a new domain if you haven't fixed whatever is wrong.

12 months sounds extreme. But I'd at least give it 3-6 months if you are hard pressed financially. If you can!

[TheMadScientist]

Bounce Rate & SERPs [webmasterworld.com]

[walkman]

Lazy Googlebot barely passed crawling 14K pages today - how the heck am I going to ever know if my changes have had any impact at this pace?

That's not the worst that could happen Bill, Google could see the changes and do nothing. I don't see anyone that has come back yet. My US G traffic hit a new low today, I'm sure my site doesn't suck more than it did.

I did a tally, out of my 6 sites (3 are commercial) 5 gained rankings. I wish I could pick which one though :)

[incrediBILL]

That's not the worst that could happen Bill, Google could see the changes and do nothing.

That's already happened to my first wave of changes.

The second wave of updates was much more extreme, if this doesn't change anything I have one more idea, then I'm done.

Maybe a reinclusion request if it doesn't work.

The only thing giving me hope is my site is still riding high outside the US so I've been focusing most of my efforts on the US content areas. Additionally, if G isn't ready to roll Panda worldwide yet, there's also a chance they're still planning to make some changes to Panda in the US first and test it again.

The upside is the site is in better shape now than it has been in years.

Like I said before, I'm not alone, I see a lot of competitors all trapped in the same Panda quagmire yet I don't see them making any changes to escape their fate.

[DanAbbamont]

You know, every once in a while a big change happens that clears a lot of garbage out of the serps, but causes some false positives. I don't remember it ever taking this long for them to publish some guidelines to avoid taking an unfair hit. All this business with needing to noindex stuff or make it canonical, ruining subdomains to take care of subdomain spam. At least they'll tell you how to take care of that if it's giving you a problem.

[Content_ed]

Tried reinclusion requests a day or two after the hit. Both came back as "processed" this last weekend, with some standard verbiage about "if your site doesn't appear in Google, read the webmaster guidelines." Typical BS answer, and it took around six weeks.

[browsee]

Same here @incrediBILL, my international traffic has been growing. US traffic still sucks... Some pages are doing great(#1 result) in US, not sure why? I tried to compare good traffic pages and not so good traffic pages. But, I could not find anything...

Have you considered sub domain option?