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]

People are becoming 'experts' on guitars, heart surgery and rockets at the same time just to get someone to click on an Amazon or adsense link.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. There's something wrong with the idea you need a PHD to be an expert.

Not to say everything written on the web is accurate but some of the greatest inventions in mankind's history didn't come from individuals of notority or education, they came from the average everyday individual.

[browsee]

Walkman, almost 2 weeks ago. Friday and yesterday, G robot visited 100% of my pages.

[crobb305]

Pandalized

haha Love it. :)

One aspect of my site's "penalty" is very tough to discern. Using WMT, I can pinpoint the pages that were hardest hit. These are my "thin" pages (that also tend to be linked from the top nav on every page), averaging a -200 to -400 position drop. This sounds like Panda. On the other hand, my homepage ranking has dropped for 3 specific phrases: Two fell into the -300 to -500 range (one has jumped back to the top 100 since Saturday), the third phrase fell exactly -50. So these sound like the proverbial over-optimization penalty given that I specifically targeted them on my homepage back in January when I added <H> tags for the first time ever. I have removed the <H> tags, but I still don't know if I'm seeing an OOP, Panda, or a combination. Are you guys seeing phrase-specific drops (some phrases/longtails still ranking well)?

[SEOPTI]

Finally a re-ranking happened today for the first time, I'm seeing 20% more visitors from G on sites where I did changes (removed thin URLs (noindex,follow + more content above the fold)).

Additionally I added a Blog (no shallow or duplicated content), Videos ... so the sites have more content. Not an easy task with long-tail traffic and thousands of URLs.

G traffic for sites which I didn't update is still down by 50%.

It seems Bing and Yahoo also love these changes but it will take longer since B and Y crawlers are 1000% slower than GBot.

My seven cats also love this re-ranking, better and more cat food ;) Now it's time for a drink.

[crobb305]

I'm seeing 20% more visitors from G on sites where I did changes

I am seeing the same thing. 20% to 25% more traffic. I can see some ranking improvement, including a 400 position jump on a phrase that tanked to -500.

[SEOPTI]

crobb, -200 -500 this sounds like a -950 phrase based re-ranking invented by Anna Lynn Patterson.

[seobythesea.com...]

I believe tedster was the first who connected this -950 monster with the Anna Lynn Patterson patent a few years ago. Thanks tedster, this saved my business!

[edited by: SEOPTI at 1:55 am (utc) on Mar 29, 2011]

[tedster]

Now we're getting somewhere.

Sounds like you both have confirmed that Panda does not apply a one time "penalty" demotion, and that individual pages can improve on their own. I'd guess that the more individual pages improve, the more the sitewide score improves, too. Time will tell on that.

[walkman]

crobb305, 20% more compared to pre-Panda, post-Panda?

Either way congrats. If this stays it's very good news for everyone

[edited by: walkman at 1:55 am (utc) on Mar 29, 2011]

[Lapizuli]

If you change from "people" to "pageviews" the spike for hubpages becomes twice a big, matching their pre-panda levels. Don't what that means altogether, but it's an interesting factoid.

Since writers were required to change their non-compliant articles by March 25, the spike around that time probably reflects self traffic while they did the modifications. (See the page-views-per-person metric.)

[crobb305]

crobb305, 20% more compared to pre-Panda, post-Panda?

I am seeing 20% to 25% more compared to POST-Panda. More specifically (after looking a little more closely), I am seeing about 24% to 25% more traffic from Google today than the last several Mondays. Panda knocked me down 60%, so this is a big step in the right direction.

I actually saw improvements in rankings about 2 days ago (around the 24th/25th). A phrase that had been knocked down about -550 (page 56) jumped to the top 100. I have another 2-word phrase still at -300 and one at -550. All of these are my main target phrases, and I believe their penalty has trickled over into longtails that utilize them (out to 3 words). For longtails that are 4 words or longer and contain the penalized words/phrases, I actually see my site in the top 5, with four sitelinks.

[edited by: crobb305 at 2:15 am (utc) on Mar 29, 2011]

[browsee]

noindex,follow + more content above the fold

noindex is same as noindex,follow right, do we need to use both keywords?

[TheMadScientist]

yes, no

[browsee]

I am actually using "noindex" instead of "noindex,follow". Do you think it is better to use both keywords?

[walkman]

Looked at logs, traffic increased on two not-hit-by-Panda sites. I cannot say what happened to my Panda one since a specific and very popular section has been hit post-Panda. That may skew any total stats

[SEOPTI]

noindex,follow means, follow the links do not index this URL, that's all. It works like a charm.

[browsee]

Thanks SEOPTI.

Overall my traffic went up little bit today.

I lost 40% due to Panda
I lost another 10% due to additional changes to fix Panda

Based on today's stats, I am still down 30% compared to pre panda.

[crobb305]

crobb, -200 -500 this sounds like a -950 phrase based re-ranking invented by Anna Lynn Patterson.

I believe tedster was the first who connected this -950 monster with the Anna Lynn Patterson patent a few years ago. Thanks tedster, this saved my business!

Seopti,

If you experienced a similar issue, was it resolved quickly upon identification and repair, or was it a long-duration "penalty"? Looking at the document you provided, it definitely sounds like part of my problem. You used the phrase re-ranking, so I am hopeful it isn't a penalty per se, but something that will revert on the next re-ranking (since I have eliminated what I believe was the trigger).

[crobb305]

I lost 40% due to Panda
I lost another 10% due to additional changes to fix Panda

Based on today's stats, I am still down 30% compared to pre panda.

If you were down roughly 50%, and now you're only down 30%, that's a 40% recovery. Another positive sign. I'm seeing 25% improvement, so it's looking up. :)

[SEOPTI]

crobb, the -950 re-ranking is usually resolved within a few days. It's 100% algorithmic. The key was to write whole senteces with good phrases. In the end it was quite easy to get around this -950 stuff. It can be site based or phrase based but usually it is phrase based.

[incrediBILL]

My site had a totally different reaction to Panda than crobbs did, my #1 anchors for higher level pages seemed to drop to #9-#11, mostly. However, my 2nd tier pages, many in the top 10-20 originally, PR4-PR2 pages, no apparent rhyme or reason why any went up/down as they're v very similar except in content, dropped -30, -60, -90 and further.

Worse yet, Google is indexing on phrases matching in the higher tier pages which is actually a worse relevant match which tosses relevant top 10 hits down into -60 or some crud by matching on the wrong page.

I have NO clue what it all means, it's crazy.

It's like they hit me with a loony-toon ranking bomb.

[walkman]

crobb305, to drill down more: how much of that gain do you think it was because of a couple of keywords vs sitewide boost?

[crobb305]

crobb305, to drill down more: how much of that gain do you think it was because of a couple of keywords vs sitewide boost?

About 85% of my traffic comes from the homepage. So when I saw a 60% drop in traffic post-Panda, it was via phrase-based re-ranking on the homepage, but I did see 200 to 400 position drops (according to WMT) on my 5 shallow pages (that had affiliate links). Since internal pages only account for about 15% of my traffic, I really didn't notice their demotion impact.

So what I think I am seeing, is an increase in traffic due to a specific phrase. That phrase (for the homepage) fell 550 positions, but has recovered to the top 100. This seems to have resulted in a slight upward nudge in longer-tail phrases that utilize that phrase. So "blue widgets" fell to -550, but as of Saturday it now ranks about #99. Subsequently, "big blue widgets" went from #20 to #16. For me, this has been very phrase specific, but I see the "shallow content" aspect. I'm not sure which is the chicken or which is the egg.

What confuses matters for me is that the phrases I was hit hardest on are the phrases that I tweaked on my homepage back in January. That's why I have been suspicious that I was hit by both Panda and some sort of OOP, but it seems to be the phrase-based re-ranking that Seopti mentioned above. Somehow I was hit by both (or maybe both are part of Panda via a feedback loop). I have addressed both the shallow content AND reverted my homepage tweaks from January.

[walkman]

Thanks for the update crobb, it's interesting. Maybe at that time Google dished other 'penalties' since they did a major craw and recalc? My head is spinning :)

[Content_ed]

Seeing zero changes here, just the typical Monday spike.

BTW, typical drop for #1 phrases was to #4 or #5, which explains where all the visitors went:-)

[mercedesP]

Since Sat my traffic is up by 20% compared to last week's and about 10% compared to pre-panda traffic.
According to WMT on the 22nd of Feb the num. of impressions had a sharp drop (from 8.000 to 2.500ish), but clicks remain within the normal levels.
According to analytics I couldn't see any sharp drops in traffic, although during this last month traffic was progressively lowering.
The main KW's I track remain on their top rankings, but where also I had a second page shown (normally on the 2nd page)that second page has gone to a lot lower rankings and, in most cases that second page was the home page and it's been replaced by a category one.
Whether my site has been directly affected by Panda is debatable or I couldn't find anything to support it apart from WMT indication of number of impressions.
I have 100% unique content, no ads of any kind, no pay links (I haven't engaged in link building for over a year and previously I did about 20 non-paying directories).
Changes I made in this last month are: 1 new category and I dropped the background image.
Something is cooking and I hope is here to stay!

[mercedesP]

I forgot to ad that my site had a pre-panda deep crawl and it was also crawl in deepth this past 24th and 25th of march.
Most of the natural links are to category pages (I hold quite a lot of quality info in categories, although is an e-comerce site)

My site is a .com hosted on the US, in spanish targeting Spain.

[rlange]

I've noticed an improvement in traffic from Google over the past 3 days. The weekends always see a noticeable drop in traffic on this site (~25% difference between Monday and the following Sunday), but this past Sunday rivaled the previous Monday's traffic. Yesterday's (Monday) traffic from Google is also ~20% higher than the previous Monday.

I think it's interesting to note that I've done almost nothing to the site in response to the Panda update (certainly nothing as significant in coverage as others here).

Back on March 17th I had taken five of our hardest hit pages (by loss of average position), noindex'ed two of them, and made some minor, on-page tweaks to the other three (page title tweaks, removing some rather questionable alt attributes on images, etc.).

On Friday (March 25th), I took some groups of pages that GWT told me had duplicate page titles (5 pages here with the same title, 4 pages there with the same title, etc.) and corrected that issue. I didn't do every page that had a duplicate title, though.

Those changes seem minor to me, especially compared to what others here have done. In light of that and the fact that I seem to be seeing a similar increase in traffic as others, I'm inclined to believe that this recent upturn has nothing to do with *our* changes and everything to with tweaks on Google's end.w.

[Dead_Elvis]

I am seeing a clear uptick in visitors from Google as of yesterday, but I haven't pin-pointed exactly what the ranking changes have been.

I am one of the folks whose most heavily penalized pages were those that were thin, and I removed those pages entirely and they now serve up a 410.

Whether removing those pages has anything to do with yesterdays ranking increase is anyone's guess.

[deanw]

For the past 3 days my overall Google traffic is up 18% from the same period a week ago. US traffic is up 10%, Canadian traffic up 107% Anyone else see a big jump with Google.ca?

[Pjman]

@deanw

I was hit hard by Panda. All international traffic took an uptick on Panda day until March 12th. Then all international traffic started to decline just a bit.

My Google.ca traffic went down 30% from March 12th on.