Why Haven't Sites Come Back from Panda? Matt Cutts Tries to Explain

[walkman]

This is a rush(?) transcript from Dany Sullivan's blog so probably not everything is 100% correct. The italics and bolding are mine.
[searchengineland.com...]

DS: Talking about Panda, says that he’s getting a ton of emails from people who say that scraper sites are now outranking them after Panda.

MC: A guy on my team working on that issue. A change has been approved that should help with that issue. We’re continuing to iterate on Panda. The algorithm change originated in search quality, not the web spam team.
....
DS: Has it changed enough that some people have recovered? Or is it too soon?

MC: The general rule is to push stuff out and then find additional signals to help differentiate on the spectrum. We haven’t done any pushes that would directly pull things back. We have recomputed data that might have impacted some sites. There’s one change that might affect sites and pull things back.

DS: You guys made this post with 22 questions, but it sounds like you’re saying even if you’ve done that, it wouldn’t have helped yet?

MC: It could help as we recompute data. Matt goes on to say that Panda 2.2 has been approved but hasn’t rolled out yet.

DS: Reads an audience question – is site usability being considered as more of a factor?

MC: Panda isn’t directly targeted at usability, but it’s a key part of making a site that people like. Pay attention to it because it’s a good practice, not because Google says so.

Matt mentions 'pull back' but that's nonsense and very disingenuous of him. Pull back to me means letting a previously labeled bad content rank. We're talking about improved sites and content, no need to pull back, just reanalyze it.

So it's clear to me that this is a penalty. Maybe if you got links from every newspaper in the Northern Hemisphere you might escape but for the rest it looks like it depends on Google engineers. It took them 3+ months to admit it.

[suggy]

Danny, at the risk of sounding rude and even though I am a sceptic of such claims, I would say that the demise of your otherwise high quality site is pretty strong evidence that user feedback is in the loop.

To be blunt, that parred down design, whilst admirable, is going to tend toward the "Yukk, I'm out of here" reaction IMHO, before searchers discover the real quality. Superficial I know... please don't take it personally.

Do you have any stats on your bounce rate for (Google) search traffic?

[serenoo]

I watched scidev.net only for 1 minute. They have html errors: not validated. The link at the bottom are like text: it could be a way to hide links. Personally I do not like it.
scidev.net
www.scidev.net
are 2 different pages, but I do not know if that is important cause I always redirect to the www.

[HuskyPup]

@ danny - I've also been following your thread.

My betting is that if you change the site you'll damage your serps even further.

I agree, there's nothing wrong with your site or your urls as suggested by someone, sit tight, don't mess with anything.

[brinked]

There is way too much speculating and theorizing going on in this thread. This thread is the perfect example about the effect panda has had on webmasters.

Matt Cutts has not said anything valuable here. They are fixing the issue where scrapers are outranking the original source and they will be releasing a new version of panda at an undetermined date. Googles latest algo class has some bugs to be worked out and they are working on fixing them and improving on them...this should be assumed in the first place.

I am interested to hear about when webmasters start recovering from panda (oh wait thats right its not a penalty, so how can we recover from it?) and what they did to improve there site in the eyes of google. This thread and these forums are becoming more of a support forum for panda victims.

[supercyberbob]

brinked has got a good point.

If Danny is reporting that scrapers are ranking above him, another way to look at this is, that in itself is an issue.

In other words, way too much emphasis on Danny's site, and not enough emphasis on the sites that have pushed him down in the serps.

Hopefully that makes some sense.

[Reno]

This thread is the perfect example about the effect panda has had on webmasters....Matt Cutts has not said anything valuable here.

I came to the conclusion years ago that Google's warped policy of "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt" (FUD) is a kind of corporate mental illness. The elites in the Googleplex apparently get a thrill watching all the efforts & time that the rest of the world must waste trying to make them happy. Otherwise, they would actually SAY something. So their mouths move but they say almost nothing. As much as anything they remind me of a sick kid dropping a frog into slowly boiling water ~ it must make these little people feel hugely important knowing that they have the power to trigger tens of thousands of slow deaths (metaphorically speaking). I picture them high-fiving each other over their sushi, anytime someone in the Googlelounge smugly relates to the "gang" how confused & frustrated the members are at Webmaster World and other such forums. I have nothing but distain for their useless babble, and it will remain that way until they understand that this is not a game ~ people's family incomes are at stake. Stop treating us like little toys ~ cut out the spin and speak clearly, or not at all.

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

[tedster]

I know it's fashionable in some circles to paint Google with that brush, but it's not at all how I see them. There's no such malicious intention.

What I do see is the result of relatively naive idealism - as well as an academic mindset. These fueled the company when it was small, and now that they are large, they're still in the overall mix.

Google made the decision, early on, to communicate with webmasters, and they communicate a LOT more than any other search engine. This immediately smacks up against another reality: Google can't afford to give away the secret sauce. In addition, they are a publicly held company and need to be mindful of public perception.

Another angle they need to watch is the fact that webmasters are a very diverse bunch. What one very savvy webmaster thinks Matt Cutts or Amit Singhal just said is a lot different from what another thinks was said. In other words, because there is so much communication, we webmasters can create a lot of our own FUD.

It's very easy to project our own mindset onto an other - easy but dangerous. It's very easy to think of "a company" as if it were "a person" - also dangerous, because companies are not people. Especially as they scale, companies show emergent phenomena that no individual person would ever display.

And most of all, it's tempting to constantly ask "friend or foe" - but sometimes the answer is "not either one." If we want to see Google as our enemy, then we make that our reality. I do not choose that approach, and I do not have that experience.

Question: how many times has an SEO viewed ranking at Google as "just a game", rather than as affecting real people working at a real business? I just recently read a webmaster comment that ethics don't enter into the picture with SEO, because it's just computer code talking to computer code. But it's not. It's people -- using to computer code to communicate with other people. Ethics are just as big an issue here as with any other human endeavor. On both sides.

[Shatner]

>>>It's very easy to project our own mindset onto an other - easy but dangerous. It's very easy to think of "a company" as if it were "a person" - also dangerous, because companies are not people.

I agree. People need to think of a company as a COMPANY. Not a force for good or evil or anything else.

Here's what's universally true about corporations: They are motivated by profit.

If it benefits Google to tell you the truth about what they're doing they will. If it does not, they won't.

In my experience working in the corporate world, corporations almost never tell the truth about what they're doing... because it almost never benefits them to do so.

They aren't good or evil, they are motivated purely by self-interest.

People can be altruistic. Corporations, at their root, cannot.

So I'm not sure why people just accept everything Google says as truth. Odds are it's not.

[danny]

Thanks for all the feedback, guys.


Londrum asks: i'm just interested to know if your site might be suffering a little bit because of those new preview images in the SERPs. did your traffic drop a little bit when that was brought in?

I didn't notice anything. But I doubt that would be a big enough effect to be noticeable in the regular noise.


AlyssaS: As to why G dropped you - I think it's to do with Amazon links on all your review pages.

That's possible. I doubt the Amazon links in themselves are a problem - every person and their dog has those - but possibly that's an issue when coupled with the fact that I have 1200 reviews in an "organised" structure.

I tried adding Book Depository links briefly but those had no traction, and I've tried B&N in the past, again without much success, so unfortunately Amazon is by far the best affiliate option for me. So I'm reluctant to remove them just on spec.


suggy: Do you have any stats on your bounce rate for (Google) search traffic?

I don't have systematic stats, but yes, there are a lot of people who come in off search engines and view one review and nothing else. I don't see that as a problem, though -- if someone does a search for "<author> <title> book review", then they're probably going through all the reviews they can find online and I don't expect them to hang around on my site. I don't think I'd improve their experience by aggressively pushing "subscribe" options at them. And I'm not convinced that a "shinier" looking page would make much of a difference here, either.


HuskyPup: there's nothing wrong with your site or your urls as suggested by someone, sit tight, don't mess with anything.

That's largely what I'm doing. So far all I've done, apart from trying to DMCA the highest profile duplicate site, is to remove a couple of insanely long "all title" and "all author" pages (with 1000+ links on them). They only existed as legacies from when the site had far fewer reviews, and were hardly useful any more.

[Edit: italicised quotes]

[edited by: danny at 9:57 am (utc) on Jun 13, 2011]

[danny]

steerpikegg: IMHO it won't make a blind bit of difference if you redesign the look of the site. People on the google forum don't have the first clue what they are talking about.

It does seem highly unlikely to me that Google's algorithm cares much about style, or that they could want all the web sites in the world to look the same. (Wordpress the World?)

In any event, my site looks the way it does because a) I like it that way and b) it seems to work for my users. (I get much more feedback praising the simple design than I do asking for discussion forums or other features.) I could add those forums, or do the whole Twitter/Facebook social promotion angle more aggressively, but surely there's still room for Web 0.5 (as I like to put it - Web 1.0 without the cruft).

[londrum]

danny: if its always worked in the past then its tempting to leave it the way it is. but maybe that is not a very good way of looking at it. all sites can be improved.

there are some things that you could easily add to "pretty" it up a bit. at the very least, why not add images of the book covers? that would not be a sop to panda -- because that would actually be useful to the readers.

you can pull the images straight from amazon using their developer tools. that way you wouldn't even have to host the images.

[indyank]

Danny, I think you might have been affected by the text that you quote from the books.Though you do add blockquotes around them, Panda has this problem of classifying documents as low quality or of low value when it finds even a few lines of text quoted from somewhere else. That has been my experience so far and it does look silly.

At the same time, I have also come across sites that continue to do well even if all they do is aggregation of content posted somewhere else.This might be because the algos are applied differently for different sites based on how the google engine understands and classifies them.

This algo is fine with certain things on certain sites but not on others.

[hannamyluv]

It does seem highly unlikely to me that Google's algorithm cares much about style

I truly think it does now. I have had a fascinating view through my niche of how Panda works. My niche is an interesting one in regards to Panda because of the mix of sites that are present. You had everything from scapers to content farms to true enthusiasts to .edu and .gov sites.

For a long time before Panda, the space was pretty much dominated by content farms and a few lucky (read fumbled into SEO) enthusiasts. The content farms were not so bad as they really did fill a very needed space in my niche, until there got to be SO MANY regurgitating content farms. Right before Panda, the top 10 listings would consist of:
- the top 3 would be from the same site, rewriting their own info for 3 different keywords
- 4- 5 others would be other content farms rewriting the info from the top 3 for their own sites
- 1-3 would be lucky enthusiasts
- 1-2 (maybe) (normally low ranking) complex and high reading level documents from .edu’s and .gov’s – which are difficult for the average consumer to understand

After Panda, the content farms were pretty much gone – but so were the lucky enthusiasts. The lucky enthusiasts really did have great info, but they also used comic sans font and animated or low resolution gifs. Ugly, ugly sites but really good info. The enthusiasts truly did it because they loved it. The info was solid and easy to read and understand, but because they were focused on the content rather than learning HTML, Photoshop and PHP, their sites were very 1995. Still, Google cleaned them out. One site like this, I know saw a 50% drop in traffic. All original content and not scraped (because let’s face it, scraping is harder on a site that is built by hand manually page by page rather than by a database).

I have no doubt because of this that looks do play a role in Panda.

[rlange]

hannamyluv wrote:
(because let’s face it, scraping is harder on a site that is built by hand manually page by page rather than by a database)

Let's consider that. What is it about manually coding each page on a site that would make it more difficult to scrape? I obviously don't know the specific sites you're referring to, but I'd say it could likely be a lack of consistent structure across the site.

That may be one way Google's determining overall "quality" of a site. That's something that would be independent of the actual content, though, so... *shrug*

--
Ryan

[maximillianos]

Unstructured content can also be a sign of scraped content... Which is often pieced together from various sources around the web with no set structure, particularly when they do a bad job of scraping and end up taking some of the formatting with it.

[indyank]

I have no doubt because of this that looks do play a role in Panda.

It isn't the looks in the direct sense.But the thing about this algo is it doesn't judge the quality of the content based on how good or bad it is, but based on other signals.

There are some superficial things that they look at. For example, if the images are really good, the content around it might be considered to be good. Add to this the social signals, mention of a few things that sends signals of value being added like user reviews, "pros and cons" and so on.

[walkman]

I thought I was immune to Google problems - 1200+ book reviews, been around forever (either 11 years or 17 depending how one counts it), simple clean design with Amazon links but not much else, unrequested backlinks from all over, nothing even slightly dodgy - but I've been hit now. Half my reviews have been pushed out of the index by random duplicates with no standing, the other half rank nowhere, and Google traffic is down by maybe 70% or more.

Heads up: You may not get much sympathy from many that assume that your site is 'bad' simply because Google's algo said so.

You have a choice to make, add a new template after all these years, wait maybe 6-12 months to find out, or do nothing and hope that Google backtracks. Matt Cutts has said that websites should be like Apple products, so you may want to look at an iPhone or iPad before changing the template. I would change the design since a 70% of traffic drop is devastating.

Deleting some of the index pages was a smart move IMO, but who knows if that will do. Not even Google engineers have a clue in Google support forums, they might just give general guidelines available on Google.com.

For all it's worth, many have made changes and seen no real and sustainable increase in traffic.

Edit: Just a did [google.com...] and some of your reviews have hundreds and hundreds of citations from scholar.google.com. Damn!

[edited by: walkman at 5:51 pm (utc) on Jun 13, 2011]

[Reno]

Not even Google engineers have a clue in Google support forums

I think that is a very important observation, one which we should keep in mind as we spend endless hours trying to fix a problem which we cannot even define.

The current version of Google is apparently the most complex ever, with many hundreds of variables that react depending on how the variables around them react. The possibilities could be close to infinite. Perhaps it does not equal the nuclear launch codes, but it may be getting close. With such complexity comes uncertainty, and therefore:

Even the chief algo engineers may in fact not know for sure how Panda will unfold; if you suffered a severe fall, they may not know specifically why that happened, or what you should do to restore your previous rankings; and they may not know when or even if a site can come back.

IF that's the case, then I wish they'd just come and out and say "we don't know". But of course because they thoroughly embrace FUD, they will not say anything so honest & clearcut. And so, as walkman said, "many have made changes and seen no real and sustainable increase in traffic." With such extraordinary complexity in the ranking calculations, IMO that will almost certainly be the status quo from now on.

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

[suggy]

Well, at the risk of a public stoning (and jinxing myself), I believe I have "fixed the problem". I believe I know precisely why Google support cannot be specific about what's wrong, which is also precisely why Matt Cutts' core advice couldn't be more apt.

My main search terms are on the rise... up page 1 of the SERPS, having been banished at the start of April (I'm in UK and seem to remember it was April 11th I lost 70% of my 200k visitors/ month).

Improvement started in mid May and has been consistent (not flipping backward and forward, like some report). Getting back in with a shot has entailed some major decisions (decimations!) and a lot of hardwork; getting back close to the money spot, even more.

From my experiences (across multiple sites, Pandalized and not) I can only conclude this is not a penalty and nobody is being held down (except possibly by their own denial). What it is, of course, is a new string to the algo that's of the simplest and also cleverest origin. Quite cunning really and the guys at the Googleplex must be wetting themselves watching webmasters discuss every possible variable, without seeing the bigger picture ;-)

[HuskyPup]

Not even Google engineers have a clue in Google support forums

I totally agree and also Reno's observations, I wrote something very similar in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago after some thought-provoking beer.

For those sites with basically nothing wrong with them it's very difficult not to do anything but trying anything for the sake of it could make things even worse.