Has Panda Not Yet Evaluated Smaller Sites?

[My_Media]

Here are some points that I experienced with this 2 algo change. I have 66 sites included is my flagship with all original articles.
1. All my smaller sites that has less than 2000/day got benefited and up 60%+.
2. Panda seems to love my flagship(BIG SITE) and give it a BIG BLACK eye (-65%) down.
3. Panda has not gotten to the smaller sites yet that is why you see lots of crap and smaller sites flow up. Panda is applying to mid to large site for now. Am sure smaller ones will be heading lower by the month.

What is your take on this? How large or small is your site? Has it gotten the panda eye yet?

[aristotle]

According to what I've read, a major target of the Panda updates are large sites filled with numerous "low-quality" articles. These are sometimes called "content farms". In other words Google went after the "big fish", sites that show up in a lot of searches and are the main problem from their point of view. Most small sites are based on a different model and have a different purpose, so they didn't get caught in the net.

[c41lum]

I wanna be a small site again.... ahh i got more traffic ..lol

[zehrila]

some of my smaller sites have been hit. all sites,w hich shared common adsense account and were hosted on same ip, small or big!

[tedster]

zehrila, there's also a chance that your sites received a penalty. Panda is not the only thing happening with Google.

[tedster]

My_Media, this is am interesting idea you bring up. It does look like some factor has floated small junk sites up in the rankings. Whether that is specifically Panda's action, or simply an effect of the machine learning we often see after any significant ranking, is hard to say.

We do know that this second international round for Panda included something they called "long-tail" evaluation - for page's that could not be done on the first round because of some iind of capacity limitation.

[edited by: tedster at 9:13 pm (utc) on Apr 15, 2011]

[walkman]

That's a good observation and a very scary one. The thought that google will ravage the other 87% of searches is not something I look forward too. Google should have a list of 100 brands on their main site and be done.

[zehrila]

tedster: zehrila, there's also a chance that your sites received a penalty. Panda is not the only thing happening with Google.

Interestinglym it happened on 11th of April, which makes me think it has to do with Panda. Mys ite is country specific and it seems out of all my competitors, only i got hit. Anyway, iam doing corrective measures and will wait for 1 or more month to see if i get back, most of my keywords have dropped from 1 to 10 spots down.

[dickbaker]

I've mentioned before in other threads that there's two sites I've worked on, both in creating them and for SEO. Both are small sites that haven't been touched in years.

One has thin content, as thin as the thinnest pages on my Pandalized site. The other has crummy content, and is an MFA site that I gave up on, probably before I'd ever heard the term "MFA".

Both are doing quite well in the SERPS. The MFA site has actually moved up in rank.

[koan]

Both are doing quite well in the SERPS. The MFA site has actually moved up in rank.

Yeah experimental crap from my beginning is actually doing well, more serious smaller sites are left untouched, and my bigger UGC sites that thrived on long tail traffic were the big losers (one in Panda 1, other in Panda 2), except for one. That last one is pretty much my life jacket right now.

[indyank]

We do know that this second international round for Panda included something they called "long-tail" evaluation - for page's that could not be done on the first round because of some iind of capacity limitation.

Tedster, It is interesting that you bring this up - "capacity limitation" and it is scary.

Aren't sites recovering because Google isn't running it again to see the changes they made? If that be the case, it will cause serious damage to larger sites that it is supposed to work against.These sites can only make changes gradually and not all at once.The owners had to go through each page on the site to see if it can be improved.

If google can run this rarely because of capacity limitations, it will take a long time for larger sites to recover.

[Tallon]

I was wondering about this very thing, my smaller sites, some super-thin, haven't been touched by Panda 1.0 or 2.0...including my old, tired, neglected thin affiliate sites. Some have even seen a bit of an uptick.

My main site sailed through 1.0 but has been dinged by 2.0 (looks like a 25% hit).

This theory could also explain some of the results I'm seeing in my niche. It's settling into mostly big brands that have muscled me out and bumped me down a few slots, but there are occasional results with weird stuff too (blogs with just the title showing above the fold and up to 10 ads/page). I thought maybe it was the social media aspect but maybe it's just that they haven't been touched and are floating to the top because there's less competition for them.

Wondering if small sites are exempt or if there's a killer tsunami heading their way...but then who would fill the serps? Just big brands?

Question of the day: time to polish up tired old sites? Build out new domains?...or wait things out.

[tedster]

I've been thinking that with a change as massive as Panda, the full infrastructure for it may not yet be integrated into Caffeine's normal update routine. That's not exactly the same thing as "capacity".

I just double-checked the quote and discovered that the word "capacity" was my interpretation, and not what Amit Singal actually said, which was:

In addition, this change also goes deeper into the "long tail" of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.

I agree that it seems peculiar for Google spokespeople to suggest all manner of changes and then apparently not re-evaluate sites that have made extensive changes. This is a sign to me that there currently is some limitation on rapid re-evaluation.

[walkman]

In addition, this change also goes deeper into the "long tail" of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.

I agree that it seems peculiar for Google spokespeople to suggest all manner of changes and then apparently not re-evaluate sites that have made extensive changes. This is a sign to me that there currently is some limitation on rapid re-evaluation.

This points to a rush job, under the gun of Blekko, the media upset with eHow and the HackerNews kids. This also explains why we lost even more traffic despite the many positive changes: Google never took the changes in consideration.

And 6-7 weeks is long enough not to be called "rapid re-evaluation" :)

[c41lum]

So far :
Panda Slap = NO re-evaluation.

[denisl]

My_media, any thoughts on the definition of small site here:
page numbers, exposure in SERPS, or even page rank?

[diberry]

All my sites are small, and so far Panda hasn't seemed to affect them much. I have noted some "junk" at the top of the SERPS since Panda 2.0, though.

On a keyphrase where I'm #1 and most of the other top results for years have been worthy web pages from companies like Ehow ranging to smaller blogs. But immediately after Panda 2.0, in the top 5 pages for my keyphrase, I found 5 blatant duplicates of my #1 page (and am now working to get them taken down). They're all at least a year old, and I check the serps for dupes every few months, so those pages must have been buried deep somewhere until Panda 2. Ehow and other biggies are still near the top like always - I can't remember exactly who was in every position for 5 pages, but my sense is that these copiers have knocked out smaller blogs for their new position.

Other than that, I do think there's something to the theory that Panda is mainly hitting bigger sites right now, for whatever reason. I'm just not sure that's the *only* reason junk is rising to the top.

[coachm]

Craziness, ya? I still kind find what I need in the serps when I search, whether it's for a product I want to by or reputable content. I would hope we eventually see two new things:

First, that since google, and perhaps most search engines seem to get worse and worse, that they start randomizing results to allow more and different listings to have front page exposure, so that, for example, the top fifty organnic results are displayed so each appears on first page results.

Second, I wish they would stop giving so much "space" to crowdsourced megasites. All these crowdsourced howto and such sites are so absolutely horrid. I don't need to consult other people who don't know what they are doing to find out about something I know nothing about.

If I need to know how to repair a roof, I want to see advice from professonal roofers first, and not sixteen lame a*ssed answers from people who HAVE roofs, or seen roofs and think they know what to do.

The whole search engine failure is so turning me off the entire Internet as a work and learning tool.

So, now I've got tons less traffic, almost no adsense rev. left and I STILL can't find what I want in search.

[Broadway]

In regards to big vs small sites being affected.

I have one big and one small site, both cover the exact same topic but have different but same-topics content.

The big site got hit by Panda II. The small site was untouched.

Elsewhere there is a thread about "content reading level" and Panda. I wrote all of this content myself, so it's all written to the same level.

So maybe the big site was evaluated and the smaller wasn't.

(However, if really both sites were evaluated by Panda, the only salient difference between the two was ad to content ratio. The hit site used a fixed-width format and had two above-the-fold ads.

The site not hit had a floating-width format and only a sky-scraper above the fold.)

[HuskyPup]

The whole search engine failure is so turning me off the entire Internet as a work and learning tool.

Absolutely agree coachm, we're busy considering all options and just like the mid 90s when I decided to go down the "Internet super highway" and most at work disagreed with me, many are now asking me "How do we get valid information back in front of people?"

The one thing the last 16 years or so has brought us is a huge e-mail database of trade users worldwide, looks like I may have to fire it up!

I'm almost getting a sense of déjà vu with fax numbers/telex numbers!

[viggen]

Has Panda Not Yet Evaluated Smaller Sites?

...where does small end and large start?

Would Google actually profile websites and give them variables like niche A up to x amount of visitors no panda?

just wondering how a thing like that would work?

[Pjman]

From what I have seen, all sites over 5,000 pages were heavily evaluated and their rankings have been stuck like glue since Panda 1 in my niche.

Things that seem to back up this hypothesis:

1. MC seems indicates that it is an intensive process to run this evaluation. They wouldn't run it that often.

2. The target was Article Networks (i.e. Big sites, way over 5,000+ pages)

Seems to make sense to build this into the schedule, but concentrate on your targets first.

[brinked]

Most sites effected by panda are sites with many pages. I am not ruling out smaller sites, but I personally have not observed any small sites (under 50 pages) that have been effected.

I guess that makes sense. The typical site that was effected by panda have a lot of variations of the same/similar articles.

If you have a site about widgets, google knows your site is about widgets. Your visitors know your site is about widgets. There is no need to plaster the word widgets repeatedly on every page. Auto generated pages with auto generated title tags are at a bigger risk of getting hit especially if these auto generated pages have no useful content. If you have a page about blue widgets, try taking the word widgets out of the title. Its assumed that the page is about red widgets, try putting a better more unique and useful title.

[diberry]

Oh, I thought with "small" and "large" we were talking about traffic or some kind of authority rankings.

Most blogs would have 5k pages or more, just by the nature of how they dynamically generate pages. This would include many scraper sites, since automatically pulling blog feeds and running them via your blog is a common form of scraping. So if that's what you mean by large sites, then most blogs should have been processed by Panda already.

I'm thinking Panda was designed mainly to make it harder for sites to get ranking authority, and also to divide the overall site authority from the assessment of each individual page for each search query, so that no low quality pages would go to the top just because they were from high-ranking domains. I can see that endeavor inadvertently letting spammers and smaller sites float to the top, hence the appearance the small sites haven't been processed yet (and maybe indeed they haven't).

[underglass]

I was untouched by Panda, and that may be due to my site size: is 3000 pages a small or large site?

However, I see a major brand pages pretending to be blog posts doing well in popular keywords after Panda. They have one to five blue widgets, lots interlinked keyword rich text, but they really do not belong there. For the keyword, not the best result. What is odd is this brand has better "real" pages, but after Panda, they lost ranking for the page's keyword.

I see a small site, now after Panda, dominate many brands in all the niche's competitive keywords. Most of their links are from articles on content farms. They are a great site, but for the keywords, not the most relevant.