Panda has affected so many of us and at the moment, very little of it really seems to make sense. Seriously, there are so many weird things happening right now.
Point in case: I've had a 301 in place on a certain IP for all requests not starting with www.mydomain.com since (jeez) 2003 or 2004. I moved my www server in 2008 to keep up with traffic. I inherited several domains pointing to my IP address and I recognized that almost immediately. Until recently, they always simply redirected to www.mydomain.com. Searching for any of these completely irrelevant domain names with quotes would just turn up our site.
Each inherited domain name has:
- No more than 5-10 backlinks with really no value on Yahoo!
- Results "Abandonedsitename.com" with basically nothing on a Google or Bing search.
One of these domain names was finally reclaimed by the owner and the owner or whoever controls it changed the content of atleast the homepage sometime 3-4 months ago. We noticed no ranking changes on a daily basis, except for the fact that we no longer had any request from that domain name.
Since Panda 2.0, only the most recently reclaimed domain name now ranks #3 after ours and a somewhat related Wikipedia article (which is actually 75% scraped content) at #1. It even ranks above another site with the same trademark and very relevant content from another country.
Even weirder, the site's real <title> is something like "These are not the droids you're looking for" and the actual <body> content would continue with "you can go about your business", yet Google still lists the title as "Our Brandname". It's been like this since Panda 2.0.
Obviously, "These are not the droids you're looking for" != "Company Name" nor "Registered Trademark/Site Title".
We have a rather popular site and the vast majority of our community know we aren't Wikipedia, yet I did receive an email a couple of days ago asking what “The Star Trek joke was about?”
(I know, it's Star Wars but I digress).
Mods: The titles and page contents above are not exact, just approximate.
