Many Weeks since the Panda Update - Any Improvements? [part 3]

[tedster]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

I'm not at all convinced that it's any kind of penalty

After some discussion, I think I should explain this a little more. There is one way we might say Panda is APPLIED like a penalty. You basically have two kinds of affected pages - the primary pages that Panda assessed as low quality, and then the rest of the site that received some kind a site-wide demotion.

IDEA ONE
The site-wide demotion is applied like a penalty in that a negative factor is consistently applied to rankings across a lot of pages. However, I'm not assuming that rankings will return after a set "time put" period in the penalty box. If Google feels they identified pages that give their users a poor experience, then they would not let those pages rank again just because a certain amount have time has passed.

IDEA TWO
The site-wide demotion seems to flow backwards through the site's internal linking. This I'm still not totally certain of, but there does seem to be a pattern that says "the negative site-wide factor is strongest for pages that are just one click away from the really bad page and not as strong for pages that are more distant."

Does "idea two" line up with what others see on affected sites?

[edited by: tedster at 3:01 am (utc) on Apr 8, 2011]

[Shatner]

>>I think google is looking at where the text is placed and how much its being pushed down. For example, if I am searching for red widgets, and your site has the term red widgets all the way near the bottom of the page, pushed down by a widget or ad, google will panda that page/site.

Thought of that, but I've never had any ads or widgets above the content pushing it down. The content starts above the fold, there are no ads above it pushing it down. Always been that way.

Since Panda I removed most of my ads entirely, so not only are they not pushing it down there are barely any on the page at all.

My site continues to be further penalized.

[walkman]

brinked, i have tried all possible combos in 5 different pages, on what you said...the first week after Panda. No luck

[brinked]

walkman, depending on how big your site is, it can take weeks before your site is re-evaluated.

Was your entire site effected or was it a few isolated pages?

I am approaching this panda update as I have with every penalty I have experienced. Its a very wait and see kind of game. It requires a lot of patience, just because you see no results the first 2 weeks doesn't mean you should stop. Also keep looking to improve your site. Look for weak areas and keep improving.

Its a really good idea to look at your site through googles image previews, it lets you look at your site in a nice compact snapshot.

[crobb305]

Over the last 5 days, Googlebot spidering on my site has dropped to its lowest levels of the past 3 months.

[ascensions]

Can we catch and waterboard Googlebot?

[Shatner]

Dove even further over the past few days. Didn't think it was possible to sink any lower, but I have.

Gee I sure am glad all that work I've been putting in has paid off.

[walkman]

Traffic is down again but oddly Googlebot takes about 40%-50% of pages each day. I did a site: and it's finally not a mess, but I am missing some 100 pages.

[dibbern2]

There is movement today according to my data accross fifty different pages. The worst-hit, which were in the 300's, moved upward 40 or so places. Those that were demoted from first page to 2 or 3rd page ramkings moved up as a group, approx 5 places. Everything seems to be moving in pattern, there are few exceptions. If its just flux, then its flux in only one direction.

Two pages which had serious content mistakes are losing ground every day. From top ten (they should never have been there) to about 500.

Should there be a seperate thread about daily movement reports?

[edited by: tedster at 12:10 am (utc) on Apr 26, 2011]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[hungry]

Hey guys - Panda has affected my main (90% of income) UK site. Traffic down around 50-75%. Gave my notice on the day job 6 weeks back so scared sh&^*£ss right now as only 2 days left of full time work! Oh well serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one basket!
Site is completely whitehat, 2 years old and was ranking great for some very competitive keywords until Sunday 10th April(I think). Content is all hand written by me (apart from some of the longer articles) - most content is quite short posts the same as the top 2 competitors in my niche. KW density was very high as I had a post footer with the keyword in it so I removed and crossed my fingers but no joy...

The main difference between my site and those that rank in the top 2 spots is that I have some 400-600 word articles on the site targeting some long-tails. In all honesty, the content is not great as some of my writers are not native english but I corrected all the content so it read well and added some value. I am thinking about taking links off the homepage to these articles although I'm not too keen on simply deleting them...

Looking forward on hearing more of your experiences with the update.

[stevelibby]

seeing a shift in google algo again, some of my searches that i was 1st for have come back.

[walkman]

Something is going on, heavy crawling, changes in SERPS, site:domain.com is a mess with all the old data so data might be shifting back and forth.

WMT is also reporting that I am now ranking for some good keywords ( but maybe because some bad ones may have dropped?)

Either way, let's wait but hopefully not for months. Content wise I'm fine, maybe something needs to be shifted left or right, up or down...but it's all in the page ;)

[Pjman]

@stevelibby @walkman

Yeah, based on observations I just ran a ranking report. A good number of long tails that have been down since Panda, just came back today. I'll take it...

[walkman]

Pjman, yep, I am seeing some 4-5 word referrals which are just about right. Sort of "green shoes with free shipping" but I'll wait to celebrate even this small change.

Traffic doesn't matter much to me, if I could I'd settle for just 200 visitors, but targeted visitors and to one to five pages :)

[crobb305]

We have some overlap between two threads. I posted this in another thread, but I will post here also...

I am seeing about 45% recovery from each of the past 4 Tuesdays. Panda killed 60% of my traffic, so about 45% of that has been recovered today. My traffic is at its highest point in 60 days, but not quite to pre-Panda levels. It is coming back incrementally (phrase specific), it seems. I noticed this yesterday when I had a 10% recovery in traffic. I started to see some good rankings for certain phrases. That has increased dramatically today.

I'm not going to start polishing my badge just yet. It's too soon. It could be a fluctuation. If it sticks, I will post more information.

[tedster]

We have some overlap between two threads.

We have a lot of overlap and it's very hard to follow the whole topic, so I'd like to bring a bit more organization to our discussion. Google makes changes daily or better - so we maintain a regular thread for discussing those changes.

Let's take the discussion of ongoing changes to Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2011 [webmasterworld.com] Thanks all.