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]

[walkman]

I have 3 sites that I care about. Two of them bring me about 15%-20% of the money and they are doing much better since Panda. Yesterday they got an extra 15% traffic.

However, my bread and butter site is not doing that good. Yesterday I noticed that my .ca traffic was much higher than usual (and wrote about it) but I can't see the same increase in US traffic. Looks to me like the US site has an extra layer that's stopping me.

There's another strong possibility that I cannot see a 20% or so traffic change: I have noindexed many pages so I cannot accurately compare traffic from week to week.


Odd: as right now, 10% of today's Google traffic is from .au

[edited by: walkman at 5:00 pm (utc) on Mar 29, 2011]

[Bewenched]

I'm really starting to wonder out some of our pages. They have alot of orginal content, however it's in CSS style tabs so that visitors/customers can easily tab through information to find info that they need, but i'm wondering if panda does not favor that style.

@deanw Yes, I've seen a HUGE jump in Canadian visitors and customers.

[browsee]

@walkman, My international traffic went up yesterday. Yes, US traffic is still the same. So, I got 20% boost from international traffic. I still see scrappers topping the search results.

[crobb305]

@walkman, My international traffic went up yesterday. Yes, US traffic is still the same. So, I got 20% boost from international traffic. I still see scrappers topping the search results.

This is something I didn't consider with respect to the 24% increase in traffic I saw yesterday. I will look closely to see what fraction of that was international. Just glancing through, I don't see anything that jumps out at me. Also you're right about the scrapers. The auto-scraping is going faster than Google can index. I bet Googlebot is loving the "content".

[browsee]

@crobb305, just saw seroundtable, they are showing your post on their website.

[dickbaker]

I've made what I think are significantly good changes to a couple of 2nd level pages (one click from the home page or menu) and to the sub pages of those couple of pages.

The traffic to one of those has declined, as has traffic to the sub pages. Not a lot, but this page and the sub pages have consistently been at the top of my daily stats for page views and visits.

I saw what looked like the start of an uptick in traffic (about 10%) a couple of days ago, but it hasn't continued.

[gyppo]

I normally monitor the "Time Spent Downloading a Page" in WMT to indicate if Google is running anything that reduces the latency of Googlebot.

This is normally a good indication when they are rolling out something significant.

During the Panda update the latency shot up close to 500ms, when Panda was announced it dropped to 250ms (and stayed that way from Late Feb -> Mid March).

I'm seeing the latency shoot up again to the 500ms mark, which implies that perhaps they are rerunning the algo after making some tweaks? Thoughts?

[dickbaker]

I'm seeing the latency shoot up again to the 500ms mark, which implies that perhaps they are rerunning the algo after making some tweaks? Thoughts?

Yeah. Next week I'll be working at McD's.

[zerillos]

There's definitely smth happening right now. Some pages that stayed no.1 even after panda, dropped today to the second page, while others that were hit by it came back. No changes in traffic though...

[walkman]

gyppo, my google bot latency data
High Average Low
1,281 377 160

Any update will come on weekends--normally. We're due for a post panda shake up though, unless that was this weekend. The cache for my normal pages is from 3/25-27 so goog is probably doing something with it.

[Bewenched]

@gyppo interesting observation.

I'm seeing the same thing... never thought of it that way and was always concerned that possibly my pages were running slower for some reason.

[Shatner]

So what's the verdict? Are people seeing real improvement or not?

So far I am not.

[crobb305]

@crobb305, just saw seroundtable, they are showing your post on their website.

browsee, thanks for pointing me to that. I'm glad some others confirmed the increases yesterday. Today, the increases for me aren't as dramatic. I am up only about 10% from last Tuesday, so definitely a downward fluctuation from yesterday's improvements. Maybe tomorrow will hold more surprises.

[walkman]

So crobb305,
what does your gut tell you though, came back or not ?

I'm in nuclear winter here :). I deleted so many pages, even though many were bringing a visitor here and there, but removed them for the better long term prospect. Google, however, is not yet giving me credit for having less pages, less thin pages, less links from the homepage, less links in category pages etc.

Today makes about 35 days since I removed my quite numerous tag pages, many were very thin. I also 'removed' about 30% of my other pages just in case, with the intention of taking a look at them as the site improves. The waiting game...

[maximillianos]

My fear is this. Remember when google rolled out caffeine and said they were re-indexing the web from scratch? I have a small hunch they may have overlooked the fact that the process would lose the history of who owns what content. And now they are trying to algorithmically fix the problem. Which leads us to where we are today. Where many of us who have been heavily scraped over the years are being penalized.

Let's hope my hunch is baseless and foolish. :-)

[chrisv1963]

What really worries me is the fact that I own a large high quality site (quality content written by professionals, daily updates, lots of direct visitors, happy returning visitors, articles copied by others like crazy, ...) and a couple of old crap websites. Panda hit the quality website (-40% US traffic) and didn't touch the crap websites.

For me this says enough about the Panda update! Panda rewards small crap websites and punishes large quality websites.

The signal that Google gives me is that I should stop working on the quality site and make more small crap websites. I wouldn't even have to pay professionals to write texts anymore. I can produce the crap content myself and safe a lot of money. Thanks Google!

[walkman]

Hope dies last ;)

This is ab$olutely hurting, but I will really worry when people start coming out Panda's den and I don't. For now I'm working on improving my site, zero broken links, deleting 'thin' pages, adding content, improving navigation etc.

[falsepositive]

@chrisv1963, My sentiments exactly. My one authority, truly unique and interesting site is battered. All my crappy sites in the same niche have gone up in traffic. Makes me think I should just create more of those and take things to the bank. My adsense on the great site is dead. But I can keep churning out small sites and adsense the heck out of those and make up the lost money. New winning strategy, and easier too! ;-)

[maximillianos]

I hear you Chrisv. My situation is pretty much the same. My main site that I spend the most time on, have a team of moderators and have been battling scrapers for years is in the dumps. My other sites that I neglect, don't moderate and pretty much ignore all were not touched by Panda.

Of course those sites are scraped far less since they are smaller. My large site is now 11 years old and has been featured on The Today Show and pretty much ever other news outlet over the years (NY Times, etc). We are 100% UGC and scrapers love us... Copycats love us.

Our two neighborhood copycats who have been scraping us over the years (tens of thousands of pages) have both benefited from this update... now outranking us.

It is sadly comical.

I know my words sound cliche. But sadly they are true... and I'm not exaggerating the numbers above of scraping stats. One of my DMCA filings 2 years ago had 10,000 examples cited mapping URL to URL from my site to the scraper site. Of course nothing was ever done back then. Google didn't care much and told us it was a legal issue we should talk to lawyers.

Now here we are today and suddenly Google cares, but they don't seem to know how to figure out who is stealing from who. Even when our site is 11 years old and our scraper friends are 3 years old (one of which was already booted from G for black hat seo for a year). How is their quality score out ranking ours?

Sad state of affairs.

[\rant]

[chrisv1963]

It is sadly comical

The Google engineers are the ones that should feel sad. They no longer know how to build a good algo. Scrapers and content thiefs are winning the battle with this update. Panda took our content and "gave" it to someone else. It feels just like the bank giving your money to someone else because they no longer know what bank account it belongs to.

[My_Media]

chrisv1963,
I am with you too. I have like 66 sites and only one major large site. All my other smaller sites are going up 33% and my flagship down 40%.
My flagship was all written by Doctors, I mean real doctors with degree. I paid $100+ per articles and now all crappy sites are ranking on top of us.

SOOOOOOO Frustrating! I really want to give the Google search team of their own Panda Black Eye.

It seems like this Panda update attacked large sites..

[Pjman]

It seems like this Panda update attacked large sites.

You know, I haven't seen anything about that. But after reviewing this, I think there is some validity to this at least from the 180 sites I have seen. Only sites with 4,000 or more pages were affected.

It might also be that pre-Panda, outside of bad external links, we were taught that search engines rank pages. So when we're busy and not looking; sometimes we'll add a little bit of content that wasn't the best quality or allow user to generate content with little to no moderation. Who cared, my ranked pages weren't affected. Now that's changed.

[falsepositive]

I wouldn't feel half so terrible if the smaller, crappy sites were not so "rewarded" (okay, artificially bumped up) because of this. Big brands aside, this just means that search has really gone to the dumps if the smaller, less meaningful sites (by our admission) and younger sites, copycats, scrapers (by our observation) are now the winners. Here we've got some empirical evidence that Panda is a bust in its current state. Even if bigger sites are to be punished, is it really worth doing in favor of this new brand of winners? And not that we're sitting at home twiddling our fingers over this either -- lots of us are actually doing something about it and working hard to get out of this mess. Yet, we are met with silence.

That said, anyone care to guess what may be happening in the plex right now? No real news from their end since the initial self-congratulatory announcements they made about this update. The silence is deafening.

[Broadway]

Just in case this helps anyone:

1) 500 page site. Only adding about 2 new pages per month. Constantly tweeking, revising existing pages.
This site benefited from Panda and also this most recent algo tweek.

2) 200 page site. Haven't touched any page or added any new pages in over a year.
This site benefited from Panda and also this most recent algo tweek.

The way people were talking about "large" sites being hit by Panda, I thought possibly the problem was static content (they have too many pages to constantly update and revise). My experiences don't seem to confirm that.

[My_Media]

Now I see alot of eHow site ranking my medical terms. Why the heck eHow can rank with non-medical writers input while my health site is really from Doctors?
Wake up Google, are you all drunk? I don't build and buy links but only premium high quality articles from many Doctors. Now these non-medical sites are re-written by non medical writers killed us.

[My_Media]

Broadway,
You are right about the static contents because most of my other 60+ smaller sites only updates once or twice a month and they got rewarded with a 33% increase in traffics.
I have one Indian friend who told me that all his sites are getting 60%+ increased traffics, all their contents are written by non-native english writers. This is just frustrated to the point of thinking creating many hundreds of crappy sites and spam the heck out of Google. (JK)

[dazzlindonna]

Sorry to knock on the site size theory, but the site of mine that got Pandacized was about 300 pages. All static. Not a lot of tweaking or adding. Probably added 20 pages over the course of a year and tweaked another dozen or so.

[walkman]

My theory: Google has knocked the site score so nothing will rank as it should (or better than scrappers) until your score is upped. Hopefully google runs the calc again. I just saw a Matt Cutts video where he said that 301s take up to 2 months to complete because Google wants to make sure the changes are real.

Maybe the same is true for noindex and 404?

[chrisv1963]

That said, anyone care to guess what may be happening in the plex right now? No real news from their end since the initial self-congratulatory announcements they made about this update. The silence is deafening.

They are probably no longer allowed to communicate about it. The financial press might pick up the story and this could be devastating for shareholders. How do you tell investors you've been working an entire year on something that looks great in tests but disastrous in reality?

[dazzlindonna]

walkman, that cutts statement is probably significant since johnmu also said something very similar, but about changes in general. If two of them are saying very similar things, then I'd bet they are sending a strong message, without actually coming out and giving a time-frame for new Panda calc. So we have until May before full-scale panic sets in, I guess.