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]

[ascensions]

I find some consolation in the irony of the name of the update with a almost extinct species...

I've decided to give up the Internet for a while and go back to binge drinking...

Because I see nothing getting better in my little corner of wonderland.

[crobb305]

I sincerely HOPE that Google with their dupe-detection technology (alpha level at best) didn't give us a set time penalty. Just today a well documented case on Google Support forums shows how an original publisher ranked below a dozen or so sites that had copied her story-verbatim

I posted part of this in another thread last night, but it has as much relevance here, so I will paraphrase part of what I said:

Last night, I searched a few random snippets of text from the homepage of my site hit by Panda (searched full sentences), that I added in January. Google returned over 6,000 results! Each of those pages contain MY content (or at least the snippets I searched). Several of those pages are outranking me. One of those is a 1-page junk Wordpress blog (no ads, just my content from my homepage). Again, this is content that I added just 2 months ago when I reworded parts of my homepage. Now, over 6,000 stolen copies exist, and some are outranking me for it. This is a BIG Fail by Google. They should be ashamed of themselves and truly embarrassed.

I am tired of do/redoing all my hard work so leeches can have my content. Two weeks of content rewrite, content deletion, DMCA, etc. Thanks Google. You did a great disservice to my visitors and to those who may now be sent to a scammer's 1-page blog using my content. Incidentally, one of the pages outranking me actually uses my site's name in the content followed by a 1-800 number (so consumers can get scammed with my branding), and is also running Adsense. Yes, I intend to file DMCA on that one, but I am just worn out right now. This is all Google's fault. 100%.

[edited by: crobb305 at 9:08 pm (utc) on Mar 26, 2011]

[outland88]

I love that post. I consider the Panda a Chinese bear and we will likely be extinct as the Chinese take over more and more of our economy. Perhaps they're transitioning us to Baidu-West.

[outland88]

Crobb I've had to file about 500 DMCA's in the past 3-4 years just to control it. The amount of time you have to invest in Google is beginning to become staggering.

[Jane_Doe]

I've decided to give up the Internet for a while and go back to binge drinking...

Don't give up! Just build algorithm changes like this every so often into your business model. I have brought many sites back from the dead over the years. One site that was all but de-indexed just came back to life with this latest change.

Just study the sites that are ranking, the sites that got hit, the pages/sites that you have that did the best and did the worst and look for the patterns.

[tranquilito]

One site that was all but de-indexed just came back to life with this latest change.

"Momma always said.... Google Search is like a box of chocolates... you never know what you're gonna get!"

[crobb305]

Crobb I've had to file about 500 DMCA's in the past 3-4 years just to control it

Yeah, I am very proactive when it comes to monitoring my content and I stay on top of the DMCA. I have never seen 6,000 copies get indexed so quickly (2 months). I've seen a couple dozen in that length of time, but not thousands. This is insane. No way can I handle DMCA for thousands of copies, all from auto-generation/scraping. The hardest to pin for DMCA are the ones who take paragraphs from many sources and combine them into one page. I have the most success with exact duplicates of my site.

I am shocked by this show of incompetence by Google. The fact that within 2 months they can become so seemingly primitive that they can't identify the original source, at least within a ballpark estimate. I have articles that are 5 years old that are now being outranked by scraped copies. A simple cache comparison should reveal to Google the first use of the article (within a ballpark estimate -- copies that come along 4 to 5 years later are NOT in the ballpark).

[dstiles]

> Google Search is like a box of chocolates

Except that someone has always eaten all the coffee creams and left you with nougat. :(

[outland88]

Crobb I just compared six phrases with Google and Bing. With Bing I was credited properly and there were no other sites duplicating. You can guess the verdict in Google. It seems lately everybody is crawling on board stealing content to attempt to knock out competitors. I can't even touch some of the domains emerging out of China. Google needs to learn a thing or two from Bing.

[mromero]

crobb305

Checked one of our sites in Google as you stated and several sites have scrapped the new content uploaded last week.

As an example of the junk sites listed in the search is this one freshly indexed by G - snippet of their home page:

"Hey Yall JSYK the cool kidz over here at the Oxford English Dictionary are really hip and with it. When you hear Oxford English Dictionary you dont usually picture. The Telegraph lists the various.

OMG we this news LOL The Oxford English Dictionary added the three initialisms OMG LOL and Thursday making them real.

Ah the august Oxford English Dictionary OED grammatical gatekeeper to all that is proper and just in the world of.

Its official OMG and LOL are no longer just timesaving shorthands.

OMG LOL and the symbol for heart have all been added to the Oxford English Dictionary Online.

The Oxford English Dictionary announced today the addition of a bunch of news words in addition to the initialisms of OMG and LOL and many are of the culinary bent including."

[crobb305]

Checked one of our sites in Google as you stated and several sites have scrapped the new content uploaded last week

Yep, I am seeing the same thing. The auto-scraping is running at such a rapid pace, that it is rendering my new content pointless. My site is 7 years old, and this is the respect it is shown from Google. And like Outland88 said, Bing has it spot on -- my content is #1 for ALL snippets searched. Good work Bing. Again, Google should be humiliated. The junk coming out of China and other scrapers win.

[tedster]

The Scraper Update [webmasterworld.com] at the end of January looked like a botch job at the time. Now with Panda leaning on it, it is proving itself to be a botch job.

Panda itself might be a solid start on an algo that measures quality, and remember that it's supposed to be a year-long focus for Google. But because Panda assumes that the Scraper Update was done well, it is producing a lot of unintended and bad results.

[supercyberbob]

In other words, the Panda update has been a giant ______.

Beep beep bleebity beep beep.

On a more serious note, I think there's a certain trust factor with webmasters that has been flushed down the toilet.

Maybe someone from the big G should man up and admit things are pretty messed up with a lot of search results.

[tedster]

I'm not so sure that Panda as a whole IS a mess. Yes, for some searches there are ridiculous problems but that is always true at any point in time. The actual verdict will be delivered by Google users as a whole, and we'll see by the actual stats for the month of March and then April.

[falsepositive]

I'm only seeing the clamoring increase over at the G forums. The question is whether we're being heard. If there's ever an organized front on getting this point across, count me in. I do think that even as a completely objective user of search, the results are just terrible compared to a few years ago. I do a lot of research in my niche, and what I'm finding is really lamentable. Same goes for when I shop and hit spam instead of ecommerce sites.

[walkman]

Tedster, Google can ban, without reason, 30% of sites and users will get used to the new results. But Google has to make sure that good sites should not be penalized or send to page 6 all of the sudden. There is a sense of fairness involved here, especially if people work hard.

[ascensions]

If there's ever an organized front on getting this point across, count me in.

Are you suggesting a protest?

Say like everyone effected placing a link to use "Bing Search" as a message on their homepage?


Ewwww.... I like your thinking.....

[crobb305]

Say like everyone effected placing a link to use "Bing Search" as a message on their homepage? ...I like your thinking.....

haha. I already said something about really digging Bing in my personal FB page, got a lot of "likes". Over on the official Google/Panda complaint forum, there are over 2,000 posts. No way our voices can be heard. There is no way they (Google) can read all of those, or even attempt it.

In my niche, I am seeing one of the new top-ranking sites across several major keywords, pure spam that happens to utilize 100% SSL (https), with 8 fake SSL logos. Hey, it works, because it improves their performance metric (via consumer trust). This is a scammer's haven now, especially at the rate new content is getting scraped and the originals are getting suppressed.

[Content_ed]

This is the funniest thing I've seen yet. Search Bing for:

Google Panda

And check out the top results. Then search on Google. Bing nails it, Google, not so much:-)

[walkman]

Wow, Bing does have a much neater and crispier site. No one can really say that Bing sucks so Google oughta watch out,

[dickbaker]

And check out the top results. Then search on Google. Bing nails it, Google, not so much:-)

Priceless. One of the first three results on Google is a video of a Panda sneezing.

[crobb305]

Priceless. One of the first three results on Google is a video of a Panda sneezing.

Wow. I needed a laugh. A Panda sneezing. That Panda sneezed years ago lol. And it had nothing to do with Google. Bing has fresh and relevant information about the actual Google Panda.

[edited by: crobb305 at 2:59 am (utc) on Mar 27, 2011]

[browsee]

I've been checking articles about Panda in Google, what a waste of time. Content_ed, thanks. Bing does not have all the features like Google, still it is way better.

[bluntforce]

I haven't really been following the whole Panda threads, but I have seen references to thin content and site owner removal of possible thin content.

What if it's not so much the existence of thin content, but the linking to thin content?

External sites aren't going to typically link to thin content, but if a site had a significant amount of internal links to their own internal thin content, perhaps a quality signal?

[crobb305]

if a site had a significant amount of internal links to their own internal thin content, perhaps a quality signal

I thought about this also. And it's possible that they are using it as a signal, but it's perfectly reasonable for a site to have the same navigation bar on every page, linking to the main category pages (which could also be 'thin'). The vast majority of internal linkage is from navigation areas. We could remove those, but how will the user navigate the site? Just looking at my WMT data, my hardest hit pages are the ones I link to the most (from every page via the top navigation). Let's remove the site navigation for Google. Forget the user. This very well may be what they are telling us.

[walkman]

What if it's not so much the existence of thin content, but the linking to thin content?

Content that is not linked to internally is not found :). Maybe excessive linking, but even then "Buyers also bought this" are quite common.

[bluntforce]

I have thin pages and I have full pages.
Most of the "thin" content can be accessed from perhaps six pages out of 20 or so on the main nav.

Other sections that also have "thin" content such as forums, don't directly link to the main nav "thin" content sections.

Hopefully that makes sense. Thin sections are individually isolated through nav acknowledging those individual sections might not have applicability to the main content.

Don't know if it'll help, but I've got a lot of what I'd consider really thin pages isolated from other thin groups and I haven't seen any Panda impact.

@walkman,
"Buyers also bought this" is pretty much what I was thinking of. It's linked because?

[walkman]

"Buyers also bought this" is pretty much what I was thinking of. It's linked because?

Increases sales as people get ideas and also makes sure that search engines find the product

[tedster]

I think it might be dangerous to throw a phrase like "thin content" around too freely. I doubt that everyone reading has the same idea of what the phrase means. I also note that Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal [wired.com] were talking about "shallow" content and "low quality" content.

Thin content, as Google has used the term traditionally, referred to affiliate sites that mostly duplicated the affiliate program feeds or other e-commerce sites that duplicated the manufacturer's product descriptions. They already had that pretty well handled and wouldn't use a year plus to enhance that area.

I say this because I'd hate to see people ruining something their visitors use just to try to appease the Panda god - who isn't currently responding anyway. I suggest re-reading the interview, and folding in the idea that engineers were creating this new algorithm for more than a year. There are going to be a lot of factors.

Amit said about the engineer named Panda: "He basically came up with the breakthrough a few months back that made it possible." That doesn't sound like their just mashing up traditional factors to me.

[mromero]

The panda handle sounds like a misdirection.

More accurate may be Bang me A Lore ;o)