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]

[kd454]

I am not seeing any improvements, things are pretty much going backwards still.

Seems there improvements "fine tuning" just means they plan on pushing you further down. It only makes sense that if they liked how it went initially, the improvements they make are to push the effected sites down further.

[Shaddows]

It only makes sense that if they liked how it went initially

I'm pretty sure they absolutley were happy with the results. Your site might be the world to you, but its a statistical anomoly to Google. And thats doing you the courtesy of assuming you're a false positive, not a legitimate victim.

They will clear up a few of the bigger statistical anomolies (mathematically defined subsets that are ranking BETTER OR WORSE than expected), but by no means all.

Depending on the distribution curve, it could be 5% or 95% of quetries that fall into "large" subsets.

Remember, removing a few "Great" sites and promoting a few "Awful" sites is ok, if the total average satisfaction goes up. Restated, getting the extremes "right" is secondary to the overall impression of SERPs. And the same SERP might need to cater to different user intentions, so a blend is needed.

[crobb305]

I took the Commission Junction and Linkshare ads down today.

A couple of weeks ago, I also removed a couple of links that have historically poor performance. There is no sense in risking rankings for a poor performer. So it's definitely worth looking over your stats and deleting any unnecessary ads that aren't performing anyway. I was able to cut my links in half (and I didn't have that many to begin with).

[crobb305]

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

Give it 3 months before you throw it all away. I almost made that mistake when my 7yr-old site got a -50 penalty a year ago and lost 90% of its traffic. I was hit harder then than I was with Panda. Everyone was telling me to start over on a new domain. Magically, the site came back stronger than before. I'd go ahead and buy a domain and start getting some age on it, or prep an existing domain, but seriously give your 16yr-old another month or two.

E-How

One thing I notice about Ehow is that they provide a "Print" button on each article and they have a Google Search box to search within the site. Just a guess here, but I wonder if Google can be factoring in the number of prints (sign of quality?) and the number of intrasite searches. These seem like reasonable quality signals, in light of the speculation about time spent on site or hitting the back button.

[maximillianos]

The only progress I have seen so far is that Google is seeing my new 404-pages in WMT. So their bot is seeing and processing them. It looks like they have crawled them all so now we wait and keep working as usual.

[crobb305]

The only progress I have seen so far is that Google is seeing my new 404-pages in WMT.

Gbot is still requesting my pages that were 410'd two weeks ago. There are no inbound links (external or internal) so it is requesting the pages from memory.

[mike2010]

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

Very true. I'm watching the other guys (that held the top 2 positions for almost a year now) slowly slip slide down the list as well. For absolutely no reason at all. Their pages are very well optimized & have backlinks galore.

So i'm almost starting to believe this 'second wave' is an error that should eventually be corrected. Because right now, results are completely out of wack.

Google, please listen & fix whatever you guys screwed up over the last 2 weeks. (non-panda related)

[edited by: tedster at 9:56 pm (utc) on Apr 29, 2011]
[edit reason] maintenance [/edit]

[maximillianos]

Gbot is still requesting my pages that were 410'd two weeks ago.

I would expect they will check up on the pages for quite some time to make sure they don't really come back. It would make sense that they want to have a grace period (maybe 30 days) before they believe the changes are for real. Particularly in the case of a penalty. It may be longer... maybe 60 days. One a few really know for sure.

But from Labnol's experience one might think the window is smaller, say a few weeks. IF they were really affected by Panda. And IF G has not changed the window size since then. There is a good chance they have tweeked it to be longer to make it harder for folks to figure out. Perhaps it started as a 2 week window and now it is 30 or 60 days.

All just speculation at this point... but when is not speculation when it comes to G's algorithm. None of us will ever know for sure anything. =)

[ascensions]

Interestingly I've noticed a lot of links that robot.txt has blocked showing up under the site command.... even some under the www prefix, and I've been 301'd since like 2005... Something is funky... Also the mobile version of the site that ran under a subdomain seemed to be showing up under the main site's data... I robot.txt that and deleted it in WMT... but everyone might want to check out their site: command... something is weird with Google since Panda... It even found links that were never accessible for Gbot. Almost like there's two Gbots. One that follows commands, and one that doesn't... and some sort of comparative logic between them.

On a side note... my reconsideration request for a 5 year old authoritative medical site went through... and it still isn't showing anywhere in the index. Makes no sense to me why this they would not want to include this site, but clearly... Google is censoring results.... or something is wonky still.

[Shatner]

>>But from Labnol's experience one might think the window is smaller, say a few weeks. IF they were really affected by Panda.

Google already pretty much confirmed they weren't affected by Panda. Matt Cutts said if they were affected by Panda they wouldn't have rebounded.

[crobb305]

Interestingly I've noticed a lot of links that robot.txt has blocked showing up under the site command

Google will still index those links, if they are discovered on spiderable pages. They shouldn't show any descriptions, because Google won't actually follow the link due to your robots.txt denial. Googlebot just "knows" about their existence and indexes the urls in the site: search. If you have any dead urls that are 404, but denied to robots.txt, you might want to allow Googlebot access long enough to see the 404 or 410. This worked for me. I had about 30 dead redirect links from a year ago that were still being displayed on the site: search. Googlebot didn't know they were 404 since they were being denied access in robots.txt. I have allowed access and now those dead urls are gone.

My theory is that, any link that is denied access to Gbot (e.g., tags or affiliate links contained an a blocked redirect file), might be deemed "shallow" if Google doesn't know what it is on it. After all, it's a known url with no content (since it's blocked). I think this might be particularly problematic if you have dead urls showing up, thereby inflating your "shallow content". Just my theory, and I could be wrong. I have eliminated 30 dead urls and now the site: search shows just my 4 active affiliate links, instead of 4 active and 30 dead.

[crobb305]

Matt Cutts said if they were affected by Panda they wouldn't have rebounded

So they have said that Labnol wouldn't have rebounded if they had been affected by Panda, but they also told the whole webmaster community what to do to improve their sites so they could rebound?

This is a contradiction. Not saying he didn't say it, just noting the contradiction if it's true.

[ascensions]

This is a contradiction. Not saying he didn't say it, just noting the contradiction if it's true.

Or it's a time'd penalty. Which makes it like a 3 or 6 month penalty... which means we have another 1.5 months before anything we've done can be determined corrective.

[walkman]

Or it's a time'd penalty. Which makes it like a 3 or 6 month penalty... which means we have another 1.5 months before anything we've done can be determined corrective.

After hearing of no one coming back for 6 weeks, I'm leaning towards that. A scummy Google tactic of course, if true. Ruin businesses with an untried algo.

[tedster]

I'm not at all convinced that it's any kind of penalty - timed or not. A timed penalty would defeat the purpose of measuring quality it would allow shallow content to rank again in 60-90 days or whatever. What would be the point of that?

So I'm sure it's a flat out negative-to-positive ranking factor, measured iteratively so that eventually a site can improve. But the iterative calculations may be integrated into Caffeine very weakly right now, meaning that it need to be done in big batches and just once in a while, rather than ongoing. That second part more of an educated guess.

[crobb305]

A scummy Google tactic of course, if true. Ruin businesses with an untried algo.

I agree. I suggested in another thread that Google could have introduced this algorithm incrementally. Rather than affecting "12% of searches" fresh out of the gate as they dramatically announced in the media a month prior, they could have started with 5% or 3%, then make tweaks as necessary to get it right.

[ascensions]

I understand the reasons they'd do it this way... So you can't backwards engineer stuff....

...but... I think they'd be smart in the future to also consider their "internal customers" during future changes to perhaps prepare them, and give them the benefit of the doubt.... (at least in some cases) to fix the problem before having their lives re-arranged.

I'll fully admit, I'm back in college... did so thanks to Adsense... but this change will be very hard both on me and my two children since its are only source of income... I'm trying to make a better life for myself, and for years and years the income has been consistent, if not rising... now this. It's difficult not being emotional when you see you life change so drastically over something you seem to be being judge for, that you never felt were doing wrong.

Real peoples lives are being effected, and our relationship with Google could have been improved rather than tested by simply helping us to provide them better content rather than make us guess.

[Jane_Doe]

Of course I don't know for sure, but I suspect all of my pages will be back by the end of the year. I may not get it right this first pass when they let demoted pages rank again but I am optimistic I'll be back in two or three iterations.

There is a pretty clear delineation on my affected sites of which pages they liked and which pages they did not.

Personally I wouldn't replace a site with a new domain before at least a year was out. In the past 10 years or so I have only had to get a brand new domain once.

Right now I haven't heard any credible evidence that updated Panda impacted sites have been algorithmically re-evaluated. Some people may have their traffic restored, but I suspect that is because they have been creating fresh content and cleaning things up so they may be doing better in Bing/Yahoo and in international searches.

For now Google still has pages indexed that I deleted weeks ago. So if it takes 60 days or so from when they register the deletion it might be awhile before the affected sites show any improvement. And even then I still have a lot of updates to do to bring those sites completely "up to code".

[mike2010]

Google, it's like your stabbing us slowly with a rusty blade.

Enough playing around, lets switch it back to the way it was.

[vphoner]

Anyone notice a change in listings today? Not only am I seeing sites I never saw before for certain keywords(some junk sites), but I am missing now from the listings where I was there before. My organic clicks from google are down 80%. Not sure if this is Panda or something else.

[zerillos]

There are changes almost everyday. I saw one last friday, and today i see new sites (just like yours) too.

[maximillianos]

I've noticed some changes. Different sites getting mixed in. But we haven't noticed a drop in traffic yet.

A welcomed change since we have had the same scraper site taking up the top 3 spots for weeks now.

[kd454]

Looking at sites in my niche, I have seen what looks like another round of Panda that happened a few days back.

Sites in top 3 losing lots of ground, that have been there for years.

This weekend it looked like one of my sites was gaining ground, then it went even further back the next day, I have given up worrying about it.

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 3:00 am (utc) on Apr 8, 2011]