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]

[Pjman]

The number of complaints?

you're 100% correct. I have heard tons of complaints about search quality. I thought it was just us scorn webmasters, until a meeting I just got back from.

My wife is a teacher and the head of county committee around here. Interesting thing, they control the base systems of all the computers in our county. They just voted to change the default search engine in their browser to Bing. Reason being teachers were complaining that it took too long to find useful stuff for their classes with google.

The head dude in charge scoffed at the idea of dropping google, so at this meeting they did a random demonstration. They asked teachers to find an activity idea for their students on things they were working on.

They had two computers projecting what the teachers did. One using bing and the other google. They had 5 sets of teachers run through this. They also didn't tell the teachers what was going on. They told the teachers
they were just displaying network speed. Long story, a little shorter Bing was markable faster to find what they needed on 4 of the 5 searches. We're talking like 15 minutes faster. The guy end of by saying, "this simple demonstrated that switching to bing saves us about 15 minutes of time for one search. We have 500 teachers, that's 7,500 minutes we save each day. Do you think we should switch now?".

He had me sold.

[browsee]

Here is another Panda story. Just saw an article in TechCrunch , Panda actually classified Google places as a content farm. Apparently, Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora and Marissa Mayer very upset with Webspam team.

[crobb305]

Just saw an article in TechCrunch , Panda actually classified Google places as a content farm. Apparently, Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora and Marissa Mayer very upset with Webspam team.

Interesting. I think they are definitely shooting themselves in the foot, given that many webmasters are removing Adsense units in order to reduce the ad/content ratio. I can't wait to see how much their revenue numbers drop in the coming months. Google forgets that despite their silly penalties, traffic is still coming from Bing; so they are going to lose Adsense revenue in all directions.

[edited by: crobb305 at 10:24 pm (utc) on Mar 31, 2011]

[ascensions]

I can't tell if that TechCrunch article is satire or real... if it's real... I think we've reached Google Armageddon

[tedster]

Let's discuss the TechCrunch article in this new thread: Google Got One Right! - Places Classified as Content Farm [webmasterworld.com]

[crobb305]

I can't tell if that TechCrunch article is satire or real... if it's real... I think we've reached Google Armageddon

Haha, yeah, the last sentence definitely makes it sound like an AFJ.

[Shatner]

Panda Penalty update:

Today Panda hit me again, it looks like most of my remaining keywords with any decent placement at all took another 3 or 4 position drop in the SERPs.

I don't get it. What am I doing to deserve this?

[walkman]

Shatner, it's still in a flux. But it's possible that once tagged as a bad site by Panda, they'll keep pounding you.

[zerillos]

I think panda just made the web a game for the big boys. Big in terms of brain power.

@shatner
Many people report another hit.

[Shatner]

I really think that's what's going on. If you read the "Google Got It Right" thread in this forum, there's a link to a techcrunch article where Google admits that part of the way they figure out their SERPS is based on what will make them the most money.

[kd454]

I am seeing a decline as well, seems they are pushing all the big brands/players/link buyers/big money to the top and in turn pushing others further down.

What's funny is some of what they are pushing is a page with very little content or it contains links to other parts of the site that might be related, basically pages with little value to the search term.

The death of the small time webmaster is upon us.

[Shatner]

There are numerous examples of keywords where I used to rank at the top, but am no longer ranked there, and have been replaced by big corporate brands like AOL... only those corporate brands being linked to aren't relevant to the keyword at all while my content which has been de-ranked and dropped two or three pages down was.

Actually I'd say I'm seeing that even more than before today, lots more big corporate branded, often keyword irrelevant stuff at the top than there was before as my stuff has been dropped down.

[kd454]

@Shatner

Yes they are turning up the big brands way up today, seeing it as well, also seeing lots of junk results in turn.

[koan]

Shatner, that article was an April fool joke. If you want to know more, just read the linked thread.

[crobb305]

I am shocked to see Yahoo Answers ranking #1 on one of my top phrases. Those are always junk responses in there, and many of the answers tend to contain SEO links to junk sites.

[grimmer]

Yes, we are seeing a hit today as well, traffic is in the variation, but conversion rate is much lower.

[mromero]

Another anecdotal observation in a certain niche we follow. We managed to gain confirmation of what we had suspected a certain government of doing - something like the PAYOLA of the past but for big media and the web.

The government agency through a major advertising agency in the U.S., targets a big media property, say a very big newspaper or luxury magazine, and offers an all expenses paid trip with the requirement that the article include only the government website URL in its story. No other URLs allowed.

It is hard to fight this expensive link buying as their budget is several million a year.

But one tactic that has worked for us is to do the research and "out" the article and the writer on social networks.

These folks monitor comments via one of the big corporate spy companies.

In like two days the article is "fixed" by having the writer or maybe his / her editor insert a disclaimer at the top stating something along the lines of "agency of X government sponsored our trip for research".

This to us devalues the story and maybe G or other search engines will use this as part of their signals - if they are not doing it already.

[chrisv1963]

No improvement yet here. In fact, it got worse.

For many years I was on the first position (286,000,000 results keyword) for "widget".

I'm on the 3rd position now. Still good for this keyword, but the 2 results above me are saying a lot about how bad Panda is.

First position: An about.com page with one picture of a celebrity with a "widget", 41 words of content and a lot of advertising.

Second position: A Twitter page "Widget (Widget) is on Twitter. Sign up for Twitter to follow Widget (Widget) and get their latest updates."

Google, please wake up!

[Shatner]

@chris Those results sound like exactly the kind I'm seeing in the SERPs.

[walkman]

Famine or feast, Google is crushing small sites. If you are a brand name you get all the traffic, as long as you mention the keyword, somewhere.

[incrediBILL]

If you are a brand name you get all the traffic

Yes, but the last laugh may be on Google.

By promoting brands they're making it less likely people will click on AdWords, or affiliate sites with AdSense, so they're slashing into their own profits as well.

[Dan01]

Yesterday our site was in the number one position for a keyword. If fact, we had the number one and two positions.

Today I checked an noticed that we dropped to number four. About.com took the number one position.

That number one position was good. Interestingly, we were not in that position before, but we jumped up for one day and it paid off.

Is About.com a content farm? I never thought so, but I was wonder if others thought that way.

[Dan01]

Also, I noticed that the Huffington Post now outranks Wikipedia on a term that I follow. That is a little strange, IMO. I know both of their content on the subject.

I don't consider the Huff post much of an authority on anything.

[chrisv1963]

Is About.com a content farm?

It is a content farm.

[walkman]

I don't consider the Huff post much of an authority on anything.

It doesn't matter. I have seen a single tweet (not even their tweet) be #1 for a very popular term. Then you click and go to the site and you see ONE LINE OF TEXT with what seem hundred of ads on the sides.

I am afraid that Google will eventually cut off 100% of the traffic to other 'not trusted' sites, so far with each update they are sending less and less visitors. Yahoo answers, eHow, about.com, Huff Post etc are ranking very high on many searches.

[dazzlindonna]

My site took another big hit today. The downward spiral continues.

[tranquilito]

Mine too. I've lost some positions for other keywords. They tweaked the algo a little bit more for sure.

[dickbaker]

With the exception of one class of key phrases, every key phrase and key word on my site has been demoted. Some from #2 to #9, some from #2 to #12, some from #2 to #120. I have a list of ~500 key phrases I'm following, all of which were page one pre-Panda, and all except that one class have fallen, most of them severely.

Yesterday many of them fell even further.

With the few exceptions already noted, my entire site has been demoted. Every single page has been demoted. I've taken sections of the site (Acme widgets and then all of the models of Acme widgets) and re-written the pages to add more content, but nothing is moving.

I've noindexed hundreds of pages, including entire directories.

As I look at it, I don't think things are going to improve unless Google comes out with an upgrade to sites that have improved, or until I've changed every page on my site.

[dazzlindonna]

Yeah, I'm starting to think sites that were hit are blacklisted for life. I know that Johnmu says otherwise, when he said, "I can assure you that our algorithms are not one-way streets. As a website is updated, recrawled, reindexed, and with that, the site's signals reassessed, our algorithms will take those changes into account and treat the website accordingly." But as much as I like John, I'm starting to doubt his words at the moment.

[walkman]

Well, not for life but it appears for a while. Google is so sure of itself that automatically decided that many businesses be locked out of good SERPS for at least 2 months, no appeals, nothing. The first hint we got is Matt Cutts when he said that "CultofMac wasn't hit by Panda, if they were they would not have come back" (paraphrasing)

One thing is for sure, my site isn't any worse that it was last month and google has spidered it many times since 2/24. The cache alone was updated twice on all my pages and daily on 3 pages.