Google PANDA rolls out WorldWide

[incrediBILL]

Today, for the first time, after checking daily, I can now see US Panda results on Google properties worldwide including but not limited to: .co.uk, .ca, .co.in, .com.au, .fr, .de, .se, etc.

Congratulations, it's no longer speculation if you have Panda, it's quite visibly there.

[Khem]

I look after a few sites, none of which seem to have been majorly effected - a few place changes here and there.

The one thing I have seen is a few of my sites have been leap-frogged by Keyword domains. The sites themselves that have ‘jumped’ mine are badly put together, and don’t offer anything unique, are not kept up to date - but have jumped over me and taken the #1 #2 spots.

On one of my sites that this happened to, the site now at number 1 for a 2 keyword phrase - has always been the bottom of page 1, this has the exact 2 keyword search phrase in its domain.

The other site that jumped mine and took the #2 spot has come from nowhere, I follow my competitors very closely and this site has not been in the top 5 pages until Tuesday morning - this site has 1 of the keywords from the search phrase.

The sites I run have no Ads, clean and simple navigation, are kept up to date with news breaking blogs (from its niche) and have a pretty varied backlink profile - 90% of which all natural. – Just my observations.

[darkyl]

Today I'm seeing different results on serps I monitor on Google.it in Italian.
Can anyone else confirm changes in non-english versions of Google?

[dataguy]

One bit of good news in an otherwise bleak outlook:

The U.S. rollout of Panda reduced my traffic by 40% and ad revenue by 60%. (My site is nearly 100% monetized by AdSense.)

This rollout of Panda reduced my traffic by 40% again, but ad revenue only went down 15%. It's still terrible, but not as bad as I first suspected.

[ohno]

Good grief, the phones have been ringing and we have had some sales. A fluke or a chage afoot? Stats show traffic up 20% on last 3 previous Wednesdays. Search queries seem more targeted to our sites too?

[roodle]

Spinmeister Matt Cutts and others have been heralding the ambiguous term "quality" without once (as far as I can see) giving a meaningful indication of what exactly this entails.

Try reading 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by Robert M. Pirsig. It's a great read and it may help you find answers...

[backdraft7]

"Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. "
— Robert M. Pirsig

[roodle]

Hey everyone, 'Google search quality is hiring' [mattcutts.com ]

Now's your chance to get everything sorted out...

[ohno]

Shouldn't they have hired BEFORE rolling out this mess?

[chrisv1963]

Shouldn't they have hired BEFORE rolling out this mess?

Maybe they need to replace the engineers that are about to get sacked because of this mess :-)

[PragaMan]

@darkyl: I deal with some Italian websites but I can't see any big changes due to PANDA update ... there where some smaller changes in the SERPs recently but nobody confirmed PANDA.

[Leosghost]

..sorry to burst your bubble, but its just as easy to get 1k posts, likes, tweets than to make 1k links, actually its much easier and much faster...

Click on the LIKE button to participate in this free contest!" You get 10K LIKES in one week, for what, the price of a small prize. Getting 1K legit links would be far far more expensive.

Sorry I wasn't clear enough ( it was late and I didn't want to make a sidestep for a 300 word "in brackets" ..I didn't mean "likes" as in simple clicks on a like button..;-)

I mean posts that genuinely show interest in and mention your site or page ..really relevant post ..and before you say they are easy to get an can even be machine generated ..junk ones can ..and they can be spotted by the proverbial blind man on a galloping horse ..as can whisper campaigns and sock puppeting both of which are similar ( they both go on here a huge amount and are so easy to spot its ridiculous ..admins and mods frequently let them run just to give those involved enough rope to hang themselves ..no one is "fooled" ) ..

G apparently now think they can can spot the same, plus one cannot "plant" favourable posts into 2 year old fora owned by someone else ..that is the kind of data which is IMO being folded in now ..its not the only story by any means ..but it gets used to a larger degree than it used to to identify if you float up or sink down when other factors are attached to you..

You cant buy favourable posts from 3 years ago for 30 bucks..whereas you can buy junk bulk irrelevant links for not much more ..at least one of the regular sites we see here up at the top right spams me every day on multiple sites offering just that ..1000's of links for $10.oo and "insertion into 300 search engines for one time special offers at only $5.00..

How many people here have this kind of stuff sitting in their link profile from when they didn't know an H1 from a src tag ? ..now they are counting against you..and if the sites linking to you have things wrong with them ? and those who link to them etc etc .. its snowballing ..

I can type in a phrase from one of my domains ..or just the domain name and see who is mentioning it ..you would be amazed at how many times somewhere in the first page is a detailed enthusiastic post on a forum from a while back that I never knew about or a blog I've never heard of that where an long standing member ( join date waaay before their post and many posts to their credit )..says "Hey I read / saw etc this at x domain..So if Google thinks that those kind of comments are important enough to be showing up high in the results for my own domain name ..that tells me what they think is helping me ..

but again YMMMV..

[snickles121]

Can anyone confirm that Panda has hit google canada? There one of my biggest markets but im not seeing any changes for my results there yet. Hopefully thats one Country I can skim by in.

[roodle]

..as can whisper campaigns and sock puppeting both of which are similar ( they both go on here a huge amount and are so easy to spot its ridiculous ..admins and mods frequently let them run just to give those involved enough rope to hang themselves ..no one is "fooled" ) ..

Do you mean posts on forums by bogus users on behalf of a company? Sorry if this is obvious but please clarify...

[Leosghost]

yes

[magpete]

"Maybe they need to replace the engineers that are about to get sacked because of this mess :-) "
Loooooooool, 90% it might be the reason.

[c41lum]

Strange... Google seems to have replaced the UK price Comparison companies in the UK results with cheap scraper Indian and Australian websites.

Well done google, just what someone needs when they are looking for a new fridge price, prices from India. How can this be better for the user.

Keyword names on wordpress blogs with scrapped content also seem to be dominating.

[ErnestHemingway]

@ohno

I feel you my friend we used to hit 250-300 sales by this time of the day for one of our sites (EST ZONE) I am at 55 now. And my blood is boiling because rank #1 site is MFA with 8 pages no social media interaction.

My site? spent over $20k in Infographic and Social media promotions for our blog and now we are down to 55 sales from 300. I thought MC said good quality content and social media works? But my money is gone in vain even with all those digg frontpages and tweets and likes. Why?

@NetSocietySEo

None of these add up. My sites with great social media interaction, user value and all I am not on first 10 pages and mind you my site had 40 links that it had earned in 10 years I would call it legit given I never did anything to gain those other than people loving the content and linking to it. Had 4-5 Digg frontpages and always gets likes.

Further Google spammed us with messages last month as to where we should place the Adsense Ads and across our network that is what we did, I followed their Guidelines so not sure why they would even bother with that. They are breaking their own guidelines.

@dataguy

This update is messing up a lot of things, Monday was dead for us then Tuesday it was hit and today it is dead again total dead.

@c41lum

I am seeing same type of results in my side, .nz/.au for a search term which is so local and I should be getting sites related to my country.

[roodle]

"Maybe they need to replace the engineers that are about to get sacked because of this mess :-) "
Loooooooool, 90% it might be the reason.

Or.... maybe they booted out the guys who wanted to do things how most people here think they should?

Or.... maybe they didn't boot anyone out.

[Shatner]

So basically the "worldwide" rollout also included an update to the original Panda.

After Panda 1.0 my Google traffic was down 50%.

After Panda 2.0, after all the improvements I've made, my Google traffic is down 75%.

I will now officially be out of business in 2 months.

What do I do now?

[Reno]

What do I do now?

You must do whatever it takes to provide for your family. As others have said here, study the top listings in your niche and apply what you learn to entirely new sites. Get cheap domains, cheap hosting, and throw everything you can at the wall. Try not to leave a trail to your old sites, if possible. If you were trying to work under Google's so called "guidelines", and like many of us got smashed for coloring within the lines, then remember Wheel's Law:

"Do NOTHING for Google's benefit".

.........................

[tedster]

Sorry folks - I had to remove a block of discussion from this thread because it was a direct review of a member's website.

As explained in the Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com] we do not offer site reviews in the public forums for many reasons. We do have a Review My Site [webmasterworld.com] forum in the private Supporters area.

[HuskyPup]

Damn...that's what going to the pub does...one misses all the fun here:-)

[netmeg]

Hey, my comment wasn't part of that. Oh well. Wish I remember what I'd said.

#collateraldamage

[crobb305]

Sorry folks - I had to remove a block of discussion from this thread because it was a direct review of a member's website.

Yeah, one of my comments was deleted that had nothing to do with that review, but I guess it was collateral damage like Netmeg said, if it was everything inside a certain block. I'll try to remember what it was.

[Shatner]

>>I had to remove a block of discussion from this thread because it was a direct review of a member's website.

Thanks for taking care of that mess Ted. :)

I wonder though if there might be some way for us to take a cross section of a few specific, actual example sites here that have been hit by Panda and all take a look at them and see if we can figure out what's going on?

So far we are only talking in general terms and we haven't really arrived at anything concrete. Maybe in the Review forum? Up to you Ted, just an idea!

[tedster]

We can visit and discuss any of the sites listed as losers or winners in the SearchMetrics or Systrix lists.

Panda Two
SearchMetrics data [blog.searchmetrics.com]
Systrix data [sistrix.com]

Original Panda
SearchMetrics data [blog.searchmetrics.com]
Systrix data [sistrix.com]

[OldIrish]

A bit of good news. I removed AdSense and Google Analytics from two of my websites and I'm beginning to see some traffic recovery. Going to go 100% Google free from here on out (I'm even going to shut down my 2 GMail accounts). Given the severity of my traffic losses it's not likely that my business will survive this update, but if through a miracle it does then that will be a huge accomplishment.

100% Google free is the only sound business model from here on out. My websites will no longer be optimized for Google. As far as I'm concerned Google no longer exists.

[dickbaker]

Have there been any solid examples of removing Analytics helping a site?

[tedster]

None, and I doubt there ever will be. Webmasters get worried about it all the time - ever since Google bought the technology and started giving it away. But worries and fears or not, Google cannot afford to use GA data for ranking purposes.

They certainly may study the data (they always seem to study any data they have) but it's not in the algo - I've never been more certain about any proposed factor.

[OldIrish]

I strongly believe that Google uses AdSense, Analytics, and Webmaster Tools to identify or tie groups of websites together (by owner). I am 100% certain that Google uses any data it can get on you through it's tools for quality control purposes (i.e. manual site checks). I have the server logs to prove this.

GMail activity is probably tied into Google's Search algorithm as well. Send a couple dozen link exchange emails through your GMail account and see if you get sandboxed eventually. You're guaranteed to be surprised by the results.

I'm no longer leaving anything to chance with Google. Their code, tools, maps, ads, are all getting dumped off my sites. As a child we all learn not to put our fingers on to the hot stove. Sadly as this update proves I'm an extremely slow learner.