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.

[denisl]

"Checking my "Your site on the web > search queries" looks like someone blasted the page with a shotgun."

I wouldn't take too much notice of that. All my sites are showing impressions and click down around 40% that day but traffic wise they have either stayed the same or shown a slight improvement.
I think G must have been too busy to capture the data that day

[Asia_Expat]

Sure, Google uses the various accounts to establish common ownership. Once that's done, removing Analytics or anything else will not make Google forget what it already knows.

I removed Analytics from my sites just over one year ago and replaced it with Piwik. I didn't see the slightest difference in my serps as a result... HOWEVER, I left all my sites details in my Analytics accounts, AND made sure I continued declaring all of my sites in my Webmaster Tools account... for the plain reason I want to show complete transparency in which sites I own and control i.e. I'm showing my hand, showing that I have nothing to hide, nor am I trying to...

Now that I've seen my money ranks tank (in favour of copied, out of date cr@p from sites that clearly game the system), I realise just how woefully naive I've been, to believe this would protect me.

Those $3 articles written by software are doing better than content written by expert in the area

I'm also seeing this... copied, rewritten articles, or grossly out of date/old articles from the depths of history. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with giving preference to very old content, just because it doesn't have ads.

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

Now I got paranoid... I hope it wasn't my site :-D

[backdraft7]

@Ohno - getting the same spam sign-ups here too. Dozens of abandoned sign-ups in the past week. This is something that rarely occurs. It's the return of the Zombie traffic pattern again. Poor quality, poorly targeted traffic during these algo updates. Once they settle out, BOOM everything starts working magically again....right up until Google decides to start twisting the knife some more.

[ErnestHemingway]

WBT is a mess, G results are a mess, Adsense is a mess, nothing adds up, G analytics is going through a mess. I wouldn't be surprised that this update messed up few of the good things within the search.

And I can blow the PhD guys at Google away with solid "queries" that I think they analyzed over and over again. And still the results are a mess.

For instance for a super spammed word which we all know the great "buy V" .edu pages are hacked and ranking.

This is what Google calls QUALITY yes I see that. Quality has been only used as wording to fool people on the net however behind the scenes junk/stolen content/hacked sites are being ranked.

Shows your ignorance G.

[Khem]

Just noticed a few of the sites that have leaped to the top in my vertical have nothing but spam, wordpress themes and blog roll back links.

The site itself is new, has very little content, is not a 'recognised brand' - yet has managed to get the #2 position for 2 word search term - over industry leaders, big brands, recognised accredited organisations as well as government bodies.

This whole thing just seems like such a hit and miss affair.

[backdraft7]

The serps are rolling, just like my stomach. Every 15 minutes the results are different. Maybe this is a new Google minute to minute ever flux. Now where are my Rolaids?

[c41lum]

In my vertical im seeing sites that went out of business back in 2001 popping up on the first page with there "sorry we are closed' message.

Price Comparison sites are still know where to be found in the uk results, they seem to have been replaced by wordpress blogs on keyword domains. The content on these blogs is loose spun rubbish.

[walkman]

Let's hope panda choked, it has caused enough pain these 6-7 weeks

[Reno]

This whole thing just seems like such a hit and miss affair.

All the recent interviews (that I have seen) with Google spokespeople indicates that they are completely aware and pleased with Panda, and it's doing exactly what they want. So I don't think we can grasp too securely to the hope that maybe they see the mess and will return us to a state of bliss. To be brutally candid, I think everyone had better brace themselves for this new reality. Some of us will be out of business in just a few months ~ THAT's the new reality. There have been some very good posts here by Leosghost and others that suggest some pathways, but the question remains ~ how long can a person wait to recover if they've been crushed?

Matt Cutts gave a pretty good interview with Aaron Wall back in 2005 where he clearly says that Google has a "strong sense" of how an algo update will impact the webmaster community, so no one should kid themselves ~ they know what they are doing:

Q. When you guys roll out new algorithms, filters, and patches some good sites end up getting filtered out with the bad. Do you pre-test most of the algorithms prior to launching them? How do you know how strongly to apply filters? By default do you usually lean on one side or the other and then tweak your way back?

A. "We always put algorithmic changes into our test harnesses to poke and prod in lots of different ways. But you also have to be adaptive. If someone in the outside world notices an issue after a launch that you didn't notice, it's important to take that feedback and act on it, and also to try to improve the testing procedure to cover that in the future. We usually have a pretty strong sense of whether something will be a large-impact launch or not. But you can't completely avoid having a large impact with a launch. An example might be if you're replacing a large subsystem in the crawl-index-serve pipeline. We continually go back and improve or replace sections of our system. Sometimes the results can't be bit-for-bit compatible in output, so you have to do the best you can. Update Fritz in 2003 is the canonical example of that; you can't go from a batch-based search engine to an incrementally-updated search engine without some visible impact. To answer your last question, I personally lean toward softer launches; webmasters never need any extra stress. But sometimes launches can't be made completely soft or invisible, as I mentioned."

(Emphasis mine in 2nd paragraph)

Read the... 2005 Matt Cutts Interview [search-marketing.info]

ps. Don't ya' love this line: "webmasters never need any extra stress". Ha! It's just a matter of time until we'll be able to measure the body counts as a result of Panda.

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

[tedster]

Also there's a new interview with MSN Finance in another thread here: [webmasterworld.com...] It gives an interesting description of the testing process Google uses, which involves computer simulation first, then low level live testing, and then, maybe fully live. Last year 500 out of 12,000 tested algo changes actually made it to a full roll-out.

So I think you're right. This is the new Google and we won't be rolling back.

[edited by: tedster at 6:17 pm (utc) on Apr 14, 2011]

[ohno]

how long can a person wait to recover if they've been crushed?

We were crushed for a week, this afternoon traffic & sales returned. At the same time the SERP's looked excellent for our search terms. Will it last? I doubt it, that isn't the point though. The point is IF Google is 100% happy what exacty happened this afternoon? Does this new algo flip flop like this OR was a tweek made? Remember the claims Google made about tweeks last year? I forget the numnber but there were a fair few(hundreds), in other words this new algo will surely mean the same? Constant tweeking?
Edit, Tedster has stuck the number in while I was working/posting! That is a lot of tweeks....

[Shatner]

@ohno Are you saying you lost traffic due to Panda and recovered it all? Because if so, you would be the first.

[Asia_Expat]

I have lost a little traffic, probably 10 percent so far, but individual directories seem to have been targetted. For example, one particular country directory appears to have been completely nuked. A key two word phrase I monitor, where I was previously on page one, has now gone completely. I went all the way down to page 67 to find it (where the results end) but it wasn't there....

However, other directories have either been unaffected, of marked down just a little... any thoughts? The site structure/XHTML/layout is identical for each directory.

[Bewenched]

Massive Google spidering for our US ecommerce site yesterday .... I'm talking 3 times as many pages were hit by google bot yesterday than what has been the normal for over 6 months.

Not sure if i should slowly start the happy dance or run for cover.

We were hit hard by the first Panda that was set loose on February 24th. Down about 40% in traffic (and of course this means sales) We've always been completely white hat, dont buy links, however we do have a few pages with adsense to help cover server costs, but those are on discontinued products and brands that we no longer carry.

[ohno]

@ohno Are you saying you lost traffic due to Panda and recovered it all? Because if so, you would be the first.

I'm saying we lost traffic on the 6th of April, have been dead ever since then this afternoon a switch was flicked. We have done nothing. Much like MayDay last year. We are far from recovered in full & I doubt it will stick. Somethinh happened this afternoon.

[walkman]

Somethinh happened this afternoon.

Pages deleted years ago showed up on my site:domain.com so

[asabbia]

Pages deleted years ago showed up on my site:domain.com so

Larry page now that's CEO is givining more importance to his PageRank, like how it was in the past ^^

[NixRenewbie]

@vandread "Now from what I have heard, they factor in the ad to content ratio above the fold on a 1024x768 resolution. Content >= Ads is fine, Content < Ads not. "

Where did you run into this tid-bit at? I've heard (on this forum) of a site that had only the title of an article showing above the fold -- the rest was header and adv. -- that had moved on to page 1.

[tedster]

only the title of an article showing above the fold

Given the complexity we're seeing in Panda, I'd expect that any one of the negative signals would appear only in some of the loser sites, and it could also appear in sites that were winners, as long as other factors were not present.

In other words, looking for rigidly linear, one-to-one scoring is probably not going to be very fruitful.

[magpete]

For those that lost rankings in country A but kept traffic in country B, C or D. Some ideas for possible factors.
1) Was your page targeting a certain country (WBT Geo targeting)
2)Where was hosted
3)Which country had more visitors
4)Did you had pages written in other languages
5)Finally one of the major factors IMO is how long visitors spend on your site, clever link structure that force the visitor to click on different areas of your site to get more information.

[stevelibby]

since being dropped by around 10 places on most important searches i have been awaiting the new cache. now its just been updated and it show NO adsense ads therefore shows white space. Anyone else seeing this?
Before this update i was creating a new site, should i still go with this?

[Frank_Rizzo]

Here's another weird one.

re: site home page was #1 for 11 years for "widget stats", now nowhere to be seen.

If I search for "widget statistics" my homepage IS #1

This is strange because the word "statistics" is not anywhere on the homepage.

[stevelibby]

I have similar i have ranked #1 for "widget stars" for 10 years, now its dropped to page 2 yet if you search "widget stars uk" im top.

[viggen]

can someone logically explain why ehow.com has apparently (searchmetrics and sistrix) some gains and ehow.co.uk on the other hand a massive drop, doesnt that devalue everything that has been said and analyzed so far, and in the end it means not even Google has a clue whats going on, i am just wondering...

[ohno]

Our traffic has continued to improve, I've not checked search term quality but stats are 6% up on yesterday & 20%ish up on the last 4 Fridays. (.co.uk domain). The .com domain has flipped the other way though, 40% down on yesterday & 30-40% down on the last 4 Fridays!

[walkman]

can someone logically explain why ehow.com has apparently (searchmetrics and sistrix) some gains and ehow.co.uk on the other hand a massive drop, doesnt that devalue everything that has been said and analyzed so far, and in the end it means not even Google has a clue whats going on, i am just wondering...

Assuming they have the same type of content and links, I'd say a new algo.


P.S. Google is doing deep crawl right now, just got 40% of my pages in one burst.

[Jessica]

there is no way that Panda is going to stay in the way it is now

currently, things are just TOO f*cked up for google to just leave it like that

i'm sure they are tweaking and looking into it and we will see more balanced SERPS soon enough

[danijelzi]

things are just TOO f*cked up for google to just leave it like that

I'm also thinking the same way.

This morning I did a search of a keyword (a SKU of a newly launched product) and on the first SERP page are:
- official product page on manufacturer's site (#4)
- related product pages on three well ranked major retailers (#1, #3, #5)
- two pages on price comparison sites with almost no content (#9, #10)
- a MFA site with specs of the product only (and the specs are not correct) (#2!)
- two scrapper sites (#7, #8)

Interesting part is that content of the two scrapper sites is taken and shorten from a relevant site, which is now on #3 of the second SERP page.

I really think that things can stay too long this way.

This is very similar to something that I experienced a couple of years ago (I think it was 2006), after an algo update. The results were nonsense and my site was affected, but after a month and a half I think after the update, everything got back to "normal" without any intervention on the site.

[walkman]

danijelzi, there's a war for clicks and to mak as much money as possible, as soon as possible. Google just doing her part before Facebook, Bing and others really clean her clock . [businessweek.com...]

[ohno]

The results were nonsense and my site was affected, but after a month and a half I think after the update, everything got back to "normal" without any intervention on the site.

Quite right I think. MayDay last year was the same, traffic loss, sales hit, we did nothing & it recovered. Gbot has been all over us today!