Were the 2 Pandas different algos, and not just different versions?

[whatson]

Panda v1.0 I believe was to do with user behavior, all those questions they asked users on if they trust a site, etc. then packaged into an algorithm.
From this update my sites improved perhaps 10-30% in traffic.

The second one was more to targeted at content farms, those sites with duplicate, scraped or thin content.

Although they were both major changes in the SERPs and occurred close to one another, I think they are two separate algos.

[tedster]

The biggest difference with Panda 2 was that it was rolled out to all English language SERPs, not just those searches done in the US. No doubt that Panda 2 was a revised alogrithm, but I'm not so sure it had a different purpose. Here's what Google's Amit Singhal said at the time of the 2.0 roll-out:

In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. 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.

The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[whatson]

Sure, but it was US sites that I had that were hit by Panda 2 and not 1. So that is not the whole story.

[tedster]

So you were you in that 2% slot that got hit in Panda 2, I assume.

Is there some way in which your sites might be considered "long tail"? Are they competing on terms with relatively low search frequency, for instance? Or do they use several pages targeting variations of the same search phrase?

[whatson]

Yes Tedster - correct!
I don't think my site/s will be considered longtail by any means. They are definitely high frequency. One of the sites has content from other sites though, so I can understand why that was hit, and I am currently re-writing all of that.
But the other site, was not violating anything in that sense. There were pages that had very little content on them, just directories of businesses, which might have been what caused it.

So in summary, no they were not long-tail, nor overseas - benefited from Panda 1, hit hard by Panda 2.
My theory - Panda 1 user-behavior, I believe my sites are very good for users.
Panda 2 - content issues, duplicate or thin content.