Panda is a brilliant move. Here is one BIG reason why

[My_Media]

Hi All,
My site consider midsize to large with pre-panda traffic of 60k unique/day. Am sure that most of us feel the frustration. My site now hangs on life support of 18k/day and declining weekly.
But here is one reason why Google make a brilliant move that I give them a A++.

1. After months of searching and fixing my site. Boom! All of a sudden I figure out that is what Google want all webmaster do and be serious about your site and make it as perfect as possible so that the internet will have more and more great content.

Smart move Google. If Bing and Yahoo still sit around and not force webmaster to put some work on this site then they will lose the search war.

[Shatner]

>>You seem to be saying Google should 'dictate' what their visitors want to see or need to see ... Is that the case? IMO it's the other way around ... Google's visitors dictate what Google should show more of or less of...

That's fine as long as you don't care about quality. Because the average user is uninformed and will just click +1 on the first thing they see and not the best thing they see.

[mrguy]

Your putting every Webmaster in a box with that statement.

People create websites for different reasons and not everybody can or has the time to site and make one web site be all that it can be.

To many new Webmasters get caught up in thinking Google is the Internet and buy into their hype. It's just not true.

If Google were to go under tomorrow, the Internet would still be here. If the Internet would go away tomorrow, then Google would be toast.

For every reason people have posted why they think this or that about Panda, there is an example to counter that reason.

I build my sites for the users, not what Google seems to think it should be. If Google don't like my sites, I don't really care.

[Shatner]

>>If Google were to go under tomorrow, the Internet would still be here. If the Internet would go away tomorrow, then Google would be toast.

That's absolutely true. But as it stands now 80% of the traffic on the internet flows through Google.

So while Google may not be the internet, it is the gateway to the internet for the vast majority of the people you're trying to reach with your website.

It's impossible to replace that using any other means... though by all means you should try to diversify as much as possible anyway.

[asabbia]

That's absolutely true. But as it stands now 80% of the traffic on the internet flows through Google.

just wait when facebook will make his search engine (or maybe it will use baidu international)

[AG4Life]

The way I think about it, if webmasters do build for their users, and their users are happy with the result, but Google aren't, then that's Google's problem. And if enough websites are like this, where there's a disconnect between the happy users of those websites, and Google's dislike of those websites, then pretty soon Google won't have 80% of the net's traffic, if they even still have that today.

The problem is, and it's hard sometimes for webmasters to subjectively look at their websites, are we really building for our users? Are we doing the best way can to serve them, even if it means sacrificing revenue, or increasing cost? Have we solved all the technical issues with our websites, do we really have the best content or design, or have we become complacent about it all. Regardless of what you think of Panda, and I think it's a POS (from the point of view of a web searcher that now has extreme difficulty finding good quality content these days on Google, having to manually filter out tons of scraper sites, or choose the number 2 ranked link because the number 1 result is crap), at the very least it has forced me to examine these problems and inspired me to improve my websites in the same way I think it has inspired My_Media, and hopefully to rely less on Google as an end result.

[Planet13]

That's fine as long as you don't care about quality. Because the average user is uninformed and will just click +1 on the first thing they see and not the best thing they see.

"No one ever went broke by overestimating the ignorance of the American public."
- P.T. Barnem

"The public gets what the public wants..."
- The Jam

If Google were to go under tomorrow, the Internet would still be here.

True, and people trying to SEO their sites would face an even more difficult challenge.

One of the ironies is that the success of google in "monopolizing" the market has actually made their job more difficult. Because it is only ONE major algorithm that webmasters have to try to rank for, it is easier to "game" organic search.

[My_Media]

If you anyone of you thnking that you can build something without the help of Google's search engine then you are in the less than 1% companies like Facebook, twitter, Groupon and so. Sure I believe there are companies have good products and loyal users but lets face the fact that it is so hard to build a something without the help of Google. So as long as Google still here, so I guess we just have to swallow it just I am now. Painful but a man has to do what a man has to do.

[Planet13]

So as long as Google still here, so I guess we just have to swallow it just I am now.

Yes, but let us just be happy we only have one boss (google) instead of four or five or more bosses, because then we would REALLY have a hard time making the boss(es) happy.

And your comment about only 1% of the internet business being able to survive without google's help is appropriate. People are so ready to curse google when their SEO fortunes turn, but their memory seems so short when it comes time to thinking about what the vehicle was that allowed them to have a successful business in the first place.

Ebay and google are quite similar in that they have made it possible for small and medium size business limited to small regions to be able to compete nationally and internationally. You just have to remember that if you are going to leverage the access these two companies provide to a national / international market, then you have to play by their rules, no matter how unfair they might be.

Believe me, I am not an apologist for google. Show me something that will put more money in my pocket, and I will be delighted to kick google to the curb.

It's just that until that day comes along, I think it is best to stop complaining and start thinking about how to best utilize the big g.

An remember the joke about the two hunters in the woods who are attacked by a bear? You don't have to outrun the bear; you just have to outrun the other hunter.

[viggen]

Every single one of you (me included) have to ask ourself every time a visitor comes via google to our websites,

what are you doing to keep this visitor remembering your site, make him stick to your site, make it possible to reach him without needing google...

...if you can answer that question positively than you are on the right track, to liberate yourself from Google (or anyone else)...

[SEOPTI]

I would not use the wording "brilliant" in conjunction with a poor SE algorithm, it is brilliant to save lifes so it seems to me you should think again about the terms you use.

[koan]

SEOPTI, if their search algorithm wasn't brilliant, there would be tons of real competitors who could do a similar job. Right now, it seems only a company with the financial resources of Microsoft could approach that level, and they're still pretty far, so you can imagine. Something doesn't require to save lives to be brilliant.

[SEOPTI]

This is a damn machine, a machine can not be briliant. Amen.

[hitchhiker]

My 2 pence..

I'm a mid-sized site, about 120k visits a day. I used to worry about optimising my site back in the day. Since I stopped doing that, and focused on making the site as useful and as full of quality content as is possible - life (SEO-wise) seems to have gotten better. I noticed a lot of talk about Panda, so went back in my stats and noticed I jumped another 10% due to this update.

Most likely (I've been a programmer for over 29 years) things have gotten too complicated to anticipate, as far as G's algos are concerned. It made sense back then to listen to their advice and throw caution / detailed SEO to the wind. My urls are clean, I avoid dupe content, I keep the experience clean and simple for the users. I think in terms of whether the spiders can reach my content, and in terms of whether the content is rich in quality. That's about it these days.

Anyway, I'm sorry for those who've been hit - I remember how scary that was. It was tough to abandon heavy-handed SEO thinking, but it seems to have paid off. It's just my humble observation, for what it's worth.

[rlange]

My_Media wrote:
1. After months of searching and fixing my site. Boom! All of a sudden I figure out that is what Google want all webmaster do and be serious about your site and make it as perfect as possible so that the internet will have more and more great content.

This doesn't seem like a smart move to me. Why? As others have pointed out, it only works if we know what it is that Google considers an improvement. Otherwise, webmasters struggle without success, get frustrated, and then give up on Google. They instead focus on Bing and Yahoo, further driving down the quality of Google search results.

Also, because throwing your weight around like that, essentially "forcing" the "entire Internet" to conform to your version of quality, is a massive, flashing, neon sign that screams, "We welcome antitrust investigations from the government!"

--
Ryan

[scotland]

Until Google goes below 30% of all internet searches we are all dependant on Google. Panda update is not good for anyone - webmasters or users, it is designed to make Google more money, nothing else.

[mromero]

Mr. Wall's blog has an excellent analysis today on the Panda mess:

"This dilemma, repeated a thousand times across a thousand markets, is going to create the Internet of 2020. Break out your straw hats, folks: we are all going to be farming or, at best, a step removed from farming by paying intermediaries (Google and the farms) to do our farming for us."

I think I would like to see Webmasterworld move more in the direction of a blog, the forums format is looking a bit dated IMHO.

< Here's a link to Patrick McKenzie's article on Aaron Wall's blog:
Why Content Farms Are Here to Stay [seobook.com]

[edited by: tedster at 7:43 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2011]

[albo]

Sticky issue, but: @Shatner, you speak of "INFORMED user" and "...the average user is uninformed", and @Planet13, you provide a quote about "...the ignorance of the American public".

But what is the difference (simply in numbers) between "informed" users and those "uninformed" (making the likely assumption that YOU are not likely to take the time to give them training or lessons)?

With that count (numbers) in mind, does Panda provide greater profit for the Gorg? Or, perhaps, simply, better search results? The "greater good" (a "democracy of search"?) and not that of the few masters of SEO.

[edited by: albo at 1:56 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2011]

[heisje]

I think one of the keys to long term success is building something different and unique

Let's for a moment digress and have a look at the car industry: cars : all with 4 wheels, a single steering wheel, four doors mostly, but some 5 doors or two doors, mostly 5 seats, but some 2 or 4 seats. A single engine (!) an exhaust pipe -- and so on, and so forth.

A lot of "thin duplicate content" there, seems to me - millions of them are identical too - still the consumers find them useful and even desirable, to the point of paying a lot of hard cash for them.

The notion that sensibly and beautifully presented "thin duplicate content" is at the same time useless and undesirable is a novel Google one. The notion that only an encyclopedia-style internet, a scientific library, is useful & appropriate is a novel Google one.

The reason we pay so much attention to what Google thinks is "right" is not because Google is right, it is because Google is a powerful monopoly that has usurped the world wide web, and it is forcing upon us what a bunch of individuals feel fit. If Google represented 5% of search volume, and talking exactly the same bs they are talking now, nobody would be paying any attention to them.

It is the duty of anti-trust authorities to protect the consumers and the citizens from what is happening in the last few years on the 'net. Where are these highly paid incompetents hiding?

.

[walkman]

This doesn't seem like a smart move to me. Why? As others have pointed out, it only works if we know what it is that Google considers an improvement. Otherwise, webmasters struggle without success, get frustrated, and then give up on Google. They instead focus on Bing and Yahoo, further driving down the quality of Google search results.

Exactly, he thinks he 'fixed' his site to Google's liking. Many sites were not broken to begin with and ranked #1 for years only to be called junk by Google overnight. That means Google was junk for all those years.

Fixing 404 errors and /page.php?cat&2 pages is common sense, anyone that needed Panda for that, has bigger issues.

[mrguy]

That's absolutely true. But as it stands now 80% of the traffic on the internet flows through Google.

In the US, Google does not have 80% of the traffic.

I've got sites that are positioned equal in Bing/Yahoo and Google and they get 50% more traffic from Bing/Yahoo.

It all depends on your market.

Until Google goes below 30% of all internet searches we are all dependant on Google.

Where do people come up with this stuff?

I don't depend on Google for nothing.

[Play_Bach]

> In the US, Google does not have 80% of the traffic.

It does for me:
Google 82%
Yahoo! 6.2%
Bing 4.6%

[mrguy]

It does for me:
Google 82%
Yahoo! 6.2%
Bing 4.6%

I sure wouldn't want to be so dependent on Google like you. Glad my stats don't look like yours.

For me, it's very dependent on the niche the site is about.

[iamlost]

When most/all one's revenue comes from one source, i.e. AdSense, and most/all one's traffic comes from one source, i.e. Google, it is both a great strength and a great weakness. The great strength is that one can optimise, specialise for a single source - very efficient and often fairly straightforward and the rewards can be enormous. However, the great weakness is if that single source is cut for any reason one's business is, for some amount of time, dead.

I know that I am beating a drum long heard and a drum long dismissed, for various reasons, but not all of us are solely dependent on one source, be it revenue or traffic.

I currently fluctuate between 39-42% of traffic coming from SEs with Google in the low to mid twenties or under 60% of SE traffic. The rest is direct or from other sites. Was it easy? No. It took planning and a lot of work and time.

The same goes for revenue diversification. Not easy to do sustainably well. Planning, time and effort.

However, while I have faired well (so far, knock wood) through Panda, if I had not, my business while down would have remained comfortably profitable.

For most queries Google has indexed millions of potential 'answers'. Given that single fact I have never treated Google as a dependable traffic source. We are not friends. They have not given me (or my sites) any promises. In return I use few of their tools and utilise noarchive, noindex, robots.txt, etc. for my business purposes. I appreciate Google but I do not rely upon Google.

[rlange]

Alright. Let's not get distracted by what percentage of search traffic Google accounts for. It's going to be different from site-to-site, obviously, but as of July 2010 it's about 64% [blog.nielsen.com] for the U.S. in general.

--
Ryan

[underglass]

I'm so close to done posting here for a while. It's absolutely pointless. I already know what I'm sharing. I can't remember the last time I asked a question other than for a reference, but I continue to get jumped on, for sharing. I can defend almost every single statement I make, and it's quite obvious my posts are HIGHLY scrutinized ...

TheMadScientist - Please keep posting. There are probably many of us who do daily WebmasterWorld check-ins, but do not respond. And like Tedster, Netmeg, DeadSea, etc, your words are read. They have authority.

Just don't waste your energy defending your posts. State them like Tedster and move on. For instance, after your take a good look at your site post, I gave mine an honest look.

So keep posting for the masses. WE ARE READING THEM!

[explorador]

Mr Guy: People create websites for different reasons and not everybody can or has the time to site and make one web site be all that it can be.

Very true. Some webmasters in fact can, and kill their websites on the mid or long term. I support the "grow" attitude but the obstacles I complain about helped to keep my sanity in this field.

I really try to build sites for the users. I see along the years my "competitors" dry theirs while mine are still alive. Of course my sites are not in the major leagues but following the basics of this forum (those old posts) I'm not living a nightmare right now.

For the users? I find that risky. Google, technology in general are making people lazier. Years ago I found people reading search results page 1, 2, 3 and 4. Now they stay in page one mostly. This is not off topic, consider, the internet is not being perceived as a tool anymore, but a "must". And if people don't get what they want they complain while is not our obbligation to solve their questions and become "top quality free content for everyone". People don't read or research anymore they way they did, I see a huge change on the emails I get from my sites sharing info. More demanding and less willing to do some work.

Take per example some recent posts at the forum "I need this blah blah and I need it fast". No hi, no please, not even a thank you, no, straight to the poing asking for a solution. Those comments were not so common before.


I guess some people try hard, some try harder. But some try sooo hard they end up being more like servants, slaves putting their world upside down to make G happy, some users happy, to get money (we all love money). Is not easy to see it but when I read some posts of webmasters wanting to do sooooo much, I can't help getting that idea.

TheMadScientist - Please keep posting. There are probably many of us who do daily WebmasterWorld check-ins, but do not respond. And like Tedster, Netmeg, DeadSea, etc, your words are read. They have authority.

+1. One of your readers here too.

[explorador]

After months of searching and fixing my site. Boom! All of a sudden I figure out that is what Google want all webmaster do and be serious about your site and make it as perfect as possible so that the internet will have more and more great content.

I agree with that after some thinking: BLOGS.

Blogs exploded everywhere with the help of Wordpress, even Google gave them some special treatment. That has to end. Suddenly the web filled with crap and double of everything, even on the same domain lots of duplicated content: archives, index, monthly archives, category archives, tags... just too much.

[ziajunu]

> 1. After months of searching and fixing my site. Boom!
So what changes you have done? It would be great if you can give some hints on that. I think that is not too private.

[econman]

Mr. Wall's blog has an excellent analysis today on the Panda mess:

I put the first part of the poster's quote from the blog into Google, surrounded by quote marks, as a quick way to jump to the referenced post.

This dilemma, repeated a thousand times across a thousand markets, is going to create the Internet of 2020. Break out your straw hats, folks: we are all going to be farming or

Google listed 8 results -- all from scrapers. The original source was not shown.

But, there was a warning at the bottom of the page:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 8 already displayed."

I clicked the link, and Google finally listed the original source (seobook) but it was listed third.

I tried the same query without the surrounding quote marks -- and got about the same result -- original source buried in the "omitted" results, because Google decided to limit the list to the most "relevant" results!

I tried the same thing with Bing and Yahoo -- they choked on the query with quote marks (no results listed) but after removing the quote marks, they nailed the query perfectly, listing the original first. And none of the scrapers were listed -- all of the other results were for various documents that happened to include these words in a different context.

Admittedly, this is a random example, but as anecdotal evidence it seems to be rather vivid proof that Google is having difficulty accurately distinguishing between original content and scraped content.

In this example, junk sites filled with duplicate content are being listed above the original source, and yet the original post was published on a site that is obviously more successful and legitimate than the sites that are doing the scraping.

In my view, Google's intent in paying attention to quality, and not merely "relevance" is good for them, and for the internet economy as a whole.

But there are obviously some serious problems -- either with the way they are scoring "quality" or with the way they are evaluating duplicate and near-duplicate content, or with the way those two issues relate to each other.

TheMadScientist - Please keep posting. There are probably many of us who do daily WebmasterWorld check-ins, but do not respond. And like Tedster, Netmeg, DeadSea, etc, your words are read. They have authority.

+1

[crobb305]

TheMadScientist - Please keep posting.

+1