Has Google Started Rolling Out Panda 2.2 ?

[Gorgwatcher]

Has anyone noticed abnormal activity of Google Crawler?

It has started deep crawling again just like it did before Panda 1.0

I had a sharp spike in my crawling since last 2 days.

Traffic has also started to decrease with abnormal behavior. Means there is a sudden decline and spike situation.

This is exactly what happened before Panda. Deep crazy crawling and sharp decline in traffic.

Anyone else noticed this behavior?

[walkman]

:) at indyrank. We're on the same boat so there's a lot of wishful think on our part.

The only reason Google would run it at 4 months is to punish us. Panda, looking at the patent, does take a lot of resources. So much that they had to devise a system to continue where it crashed, but this is Google in 2011: they are translating everything for free, hosting code, giving access to unis to test stuff and so on. So they have resources, IMO. Probably not to run it live but at least every 1/2 weeks.

My theory: US sites hit on Feb 24th will suffer for being in the same boat as eHow, Mahalo etc. Imagine if Mahalo or ezinearticles were back at #1? There's public relations at stake as well, it's not engineering...just as it was when the press bashed Google pre-February. Hopefully they are gentler with smaller sites, that are small enough to be fixed manually. Even a /cat&3?prod=4 mess with dozens of empty URLs and some bad luck would have probably been enough to trap a site in Panda, IMO. All you need to do is send signals of spam, not be spammy.

[indyank]

The resources are used in evaluating all the signals.But I don't know whether it has been done to punish sites or for some other reasons.

Even their adwords quality score isn't reflected immediately but the effect is seen in the subsequent months.There, they evaluate the ads content but here they are evaluating entire pages and websites.

But people were always complaining about the adwords quality score and the methods used to arrive at it. Google was never bothered and they seem to have extended it to SERPS.

[indyank]

nippi says that pages return better in SERPS within a time frame of 7 days or so and that has not been experienced by anyone else.

[nippi]

indyrank, I’m not sure you are right. Who else has recovered? What was their time frame? Since Panda is a sitewide quality filter I always expected that it would be an overnight recovery when it happened. Has no one else seen a major jump?

Of course... my site is comparatively small. 650 articles, not 650,000 articles so I could make major changes, comparatively fast

Do understand, had reworked my site a lot, but then did a major fix. 50 of my worst articles redone. Newspaper journalist quality writing. At the same time, I ran a spell and grammar check over my other 600 articles and fixed them as well.

Panda, seems to be a threshold filter. Just like the -30 filter. Just like mayday. it was not that I just fixed 50 articles, this was just the final thing that tipped my site over the edge into panda free land.

I am not safe of course, I may have not gone over by far and if I'm not vigilant, will soon be back in panda land I intend to have the aritcles all redone quickly.

So far, $4000 spent on rewriting articles so its painful, but necessary,

[AlexB77]

@Sgt_Kickaxe

Yep, as I said it is a bit unfortunate, but I do not want to compromise my only source.

I see the same picture as you do in my GWT, all pages starting from 2005 that was 301 redirected are coming back as 404. Many folks here has already mentioned that Panda is a side-wide update, but at the same time it is in fact about each and every individual page instead in my opinion, since a) unless we have fixed all or at least majority of pages that we can only think are causing the problem and b) even if we fixed majority it is still not where we think we should be.
Well b) is little more understandable since we may have to reduce a number of pages or merge them in fewer, but when it comes to a) some of us are still feeling like we are in the dark room without any light and no way out.

I have been ranked high for majority of my main key words before the 24th, but even after I,ve made some major redesign and completely removed my thin pages (at least I think they were) I still see no sign of me coming back to any level whatsoever.

[scooterdude]

@nippi

if it wouldn't be too intrusive could you give a hint of what traffic levels a good day for you site would be ?

[nippi]

5500 UV per day average pre panda
1000 average 1 week ago

10 hours into today, i am sitting at 1700, but as an aussie site, most of my traffic will come tomorrow during the daytime of Monday here so i expect to hit or beat my average

[tedster]

This frequently offered idea - that Google is "punishing" site owners by not removing Panda demotions in a timely manner - doesn't sit well with me. What would Google possibly gain by such an approach?

[walkman]

This frequently offered idea - that Google is "punishing" site owners by not removing Panda demotions in a timely manner - doesn't sit well with me. What would Google possibly gain by such an approach?

Deterrence.

[tedster]

Do you think Google assumes that all "shallow" content was created in an attempt to game their algorithm, then?

[aristotle]

I just read through this thread for the first time, and there doesn't appear to be a consistent pattern in what people are reporting. Also the discussion is somewhat rambling and hard to follow. Could someone please give me a brief summary of the main conclusions.

[supercyberbob]

aristotle

It's because everyone is in the dark.

Has Google Started Rolling Out Panda 2.2?
Why Haven't Sites Come Back from Panda?
How do I recover from Panda?
Why did I get hit by Panda?

So many questions, so little time. I don't think there are any "main conclusions" for now.

[tedster]

Right - no main conclusions. We have some reports of partial or nearly complete traffic recovery, but they each took different approaches to their "fix". Given what Panda is all about, this is to be expected, I think.

Panda on its own may be nearly as complex as the entire "relevance" section of the algorithm. We can't expect to come up with a quick cookbook.

[AlyssaS]

Do you think Google assumes that all "shallow" content was created in an attempt to game their algorithm, then?

No.

But if you'd said, "Do you think Google assumes that all "shallow" content, combined with aggressive internal linking to rank that content is an attempt to game their algorithm?" , I'd have said, Yes.

That was how Ezine Articles operated - very aggressive internal linking. For example, every single category page had three versions, "most popular", "most republished" and "new".

There was no value for the user in this - it was simply so they could leverage their pagerank to get as many pages linked to on one of the versions of the category pages, each version of which used to have pagerank on their own.

Perhaps G just got fed-up of it.

BTW, hubpages have a similar system, where each category has a "hot", "new" and "best" version (i.e. the category url ends with hot, latest or best).

I just checked on Ezine - and they've eliminated the multiple versions of each category page and just have one version.

We'll have to watch and see whether that helps them.

Hubpages still has their old structure though.

[browsee]

BTW, hubpages have a similar system, where each category has a "hot", "new" and "best" version (i.e. the category url ends with hot, latest or best).

Just saw Hub Pages blog, they are making several changes. One interesting change is sub domain.

We are now going to start testing moving individual authors to subdomains (e.g. pauledmondson.hubpages.com). This is a major development effort that is underway. Putting authors on a subdomain clearly delineates between sets of Hubs by author, so one author’s Hubs won’t negatively impact another.

We considered subdomains by topic and authors, and folders by both as well, but the feedback from Google was subdomains by author.

We talked with many sites that are structured this way and all the data we got back suggested that after a site got hit by panda, it brought traffic down in all subdomains when organized by topic.

[blog.hubpages.com...]

[edited by: browsee at 8:33 pm (utc) on Jun 19, 2011]

[nomis5]

I have one main site, approx 20,000 UV per day. That has sailed through all this Panda stuff with no detectable, unforseen consequences.

I have six lesser sites, each averaging 400 UV per day. They sailed through Panda, as far as I could see with such low traffic.

But around the 15th all the lesser sites have been seriously hit. The problem with such low traffic volumes is that it's only really sensible to judge what's happening on a month by month basis. But it's not looking good at the moment.

As an aside, all the six low volume sites I refer to are on one Google account, the larger volume site (plus a further two low volume sites) are on another account.

[AlyssaS]

browsee - looks like they have both responded to Matt Cutts hint about link structure.

It'll be very interesting to see how it works out. It might lift the Panda penalty, but the loss of those extra internal links may hurt them with the underlying algo. I'd be very surprised if they got all their old traffic back.

[tedster]

I'd like to see this thread stay on-topic "Has Google Started Rolling Out Panda 2.2?"

I certainly understand that some side diversions may be helpful, but let's not degenerate into yet another "what is Panda all about" discussion. We have scores of those already!

Along those lines, I thought the earlier statement from AlexB was worth more consideration:

What we all seeing at the moment (and I am only talking about GWT) is not panda 2.2 is in fact a pre panda 2.2 check (Little unfortunate but I am not able to mention the name of the Google employee, who has provided me with this info)

This makes sense to me - and we certainly are seeing some GWT information that shows something is going on. All the strange crawling patterns and on-again off-again new rankings seem aligned with that.

And so the question is - has this process now come to an end? Are we now looking at full blown Panda 2.2 results... or are those still waiting in the wings?

[olmcdonald]

Exactly tedster...my question is exactly that.

Yes we have seen some crazy wild fluctuations the past week or so.

I feel that we are still in Pandatory in the United States.

Has any US based sites seen back to pre panda results this week?

Our sites have all unique content, all written by our staff and we have not seen a recovery....down almost 80% in G-town.

So....is anything happening here our is the all algo-no panda?

[AlexB77]

right here it is:

My server is in fact located in US and what I have just noticed is that GWT showed 18% of increase on one of the pages comparing to last 2 weeks data and what is most interesting is that this page was hit on 24th then later again on 7th of March and I have not even touched this page at all.
Moreover Other pages that I have redesigned (in fact in the very same directory and with same links) have no change whatsoever. According to GA data traffic on that page has no changes yet, but it is back in US and ranking well as it was before Panda with 8000 UV monthly.

[Whitey]

I expected to return 24 hours later to find the threads full of confirmations of Panda 2.2. This is really strange.

24 hours on from one recovery ( Nippi ) and one fall ( Whitey ) you can hardly say that Panda 2.2 is a full update. Something doesn't sit right with me.

[Whitey]

@ Nippi - is your improved site an AU domain like the one that i reported ? If so, i think this may be a restricted roll out, to the power of 2, which still makes me dubious.

( btw - i don't doubt your success - it's just that this defies the title of a Panda 2.2 roll out )

[scooterdude]

lookit tedsters post above

[walkman]

Do you think Google assumes that all "shallow" content was created in an attempt to game their algorithm, then?

How do they sleep at night? Easy:
tough job
we're doing our best
Innocent sites will come stronger and make up for it
No site is 100% innocent
in the end the web will be better (utilitarian argument) etc etc.

I am with Alyssa that this is geeks striking back, revenge for 2007-2008-2009-2010. We can theorize all we want but I find it odd that an avalanche of sites have not come back in 4 months. let me repeat it, FOUR months of continuously losing ranking while no-indexing pages and fixing the site. Of course they are caveats (most sites truly sucked, some sites still suck, people might not talk etc) and everyone is at least a bit biased but a lot and lot of sites got pummeled on 2/24. So we can choose to believe what we want.

The 'content' card is also being misused a lot IMO. Just because there's another site or 10 'like yours' doesn't mean that you're rehashing, you're useless or whatever. The web is huge and they are more than 10 ranks. We can also pick any on pandalized site and find 100 things or more wrong with them, but look at what's ranking for example and compare.

So something is up here.

Now on topic: is this Panda 2.2 in USA? I doubt it, something changed on June 14-15th but all this month we've seen sites go up and down while changing nothing. I've seen another phenomenon this week, Google banning or 50- many single product affiliate sites, made for the simple purpose of pushing that product. Usually they have the same cheap-product.tld, many mass obtained links and useless, if you landed at their site via typing it. Probably super-spammy backlinks and the WebmasterCentral sister sites lead to their downfall.

[Nuttakorn]

Anyone notice on drop off those scrapper sites which overrank original content? I am quite sure that Panda 2.2 will kill those pages.

[nippi]

I don't have any data on whether it's a au only change- but to me - there has been no change other than a bad one

My other landslides sites I have done nothing to fix are alldiwn in traffic in the last 2 days. Only the site I have rebuilt is up.

Whitey, Ive been on this forum 8 years. I hav bled with every one else. I've Bren banned from adsense and got back in. There will be no false claims from me.

[Whitey]

There will be no false claims from me.

No doubts or issues from me, or likely others on your return and how you did it, and your courtesy in sharing it. I/we believe and congrats are still with you . It's just this Panda beast isn't letting a whole lot of other sites loose at the same time which have likely done similar things to you. So I'm wondering if you are part of a "test release" and likewise the site i watched drop, might be part of a "test drop".

Surely we can't be the only 2 - but we do appear to be in AU which makes me think it's a restricted test.

Nippi @ Can you clarify :

- you have a site that you worked on and it is more or less returned and stable for 48 hours or so. Just checking the stability has continued and you are not seeing flux.
- you have other sites that you did nothing to, and they slid into Panda in the last 48 hours or so?
- are these sites AU domains or a mix?

[indyank]

This makes sense to me - and we certainly are seeing some GWT information that shows something is going on. All the strange crawling patterns and on-again off-again new rankings seem aligned with that.

But I have been seeing this ever since this was rolled out and it isn't something happening only now.Is it that a few people are seeing activity in GWT only now?

On one of my wordpress sites, I did add a plugin to track and automatically hide broken links until I fix them.This plugin will log all broken links when a page is visited by any user or bot.After adding this I discovered that the plugin is logging information for several pages to which I added noindex meta tag.I had even isolated such pages by not linking to them internally. But I am still finding a few pages in google index, though it is 2 months since I added noindex to those pages!

My server is in fact located in US and what I have just noticed is that GWT showed 18% of increase on one of the pages comparing to last 2 weeks data and what is most interesting is that this page was hit on 24th then later again on 7th of March and I have not even touched this page at all.
Moreover Other pages that I have redesigned (in fact in the very same directory and with same links) have no change whatsoever. According to GA data traffic on that page has no changes yet, but it is back in US and ranking well as it was before Panda with 8000 UV monthly.

Alex, I don't know whether the ranking positions in GWT will make any sense as it is an average rank and I never found it to be useful as it didn't convert into traffic for me.It is only changes in real traffic to those pages which could signal recovery and a panda 2.2 roll out.

[indyank]

nippi, you have been very kind in replying to every question that we ask and I am sure that no one here would have any doubts on your claims. Thanks for your honest responses. It is just that people are trying to understand what you exactly did to recover.

Pre-panda, you had 5K UVs per day and this week it will be clear whether you had got back all those traffic or went beyond them, as you did say that Mondays are when you see the best traffic to your site.

[nippi]

whitey - yes, stable. same sort of rankings and traffic as january this year.

yes, other sites are DOWN this week, about 15%

All sites i run are Australian based.

indyrank, my best day is generally Tuesday, not Monday as I get US traffic on their Monday, but not so much on their Sunday, whilst AU traffic on Monday/tuesday is about the same.

Regardless, today is already close ot my best day for the year with a few hurs togo