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?

[supercyberbob]

freejung

That Live version is the best EVER. :) I was about to hit play on the track (I play is daily), and read your post and laughed.

Anyway, sorry to get off topic. I haven't seen any significant changes with my rankings in the past week on sites that were hit by Panda 1 and 2. (US based sites)

[happyfuntime]

Google's Panda Update has hit me hard...
I think Panda 2.2 is out and I think it started on Thursday 6/16/11 late night...

I got up Friday morning to find a complete recovery from the previous Panda release and I had heard that the new Panda 2.2 was going to correct some mistakes in previous Panda deployments.. so I was very happy that I had recovered and the "mistake" was taken care of... Only to find out that by Sunday night 6/19/11 I was no where to be found again... (OK page two but might as well be page 200).

Basically I think Google is trying to weed out all affiliates from it's top SERPs... even though Google owns it's own affiliate network Google hates affiliates no matter what they say.. with the introduction of no "bridge pages" in Google adwords to the new Panda update... it's all targeted at affiliates and stopping them from showing up any where online for any search. They want to put affiliates out of business period. Meanwhile what I see showing up more and more are Counterfeit Sites selling every big brand name products at rock bottom "counterfeit pricing".. I think Google should concentrate on the REAL BAD players and not just the stay at home single mom trying to make an extra dollar to feed her children and pay the bills in this crappy economy...

Thanks Google!

(Sorry to rant a little... I have been watching this go on since February and this is my first post about it any where.. =)

On a good note...
What I also see is Google trailing along behind BING... Trying to compete with BING on the "Like" button and the social tags etc... I think Google shot itself in the foot by snubbing Facebook and letting BING get that "LIKE" button from the originating website.. What I see is a "Like" button on Google that no one cares about and no one uses... I have only seen a couple of buttons with any amount of "likes" in Google... I see all kinds of Likes and Friends in BINGs results... So I am glad Google isn't winning EVERYTHING...

Wishful thinking I know...

=)

On A Side Note...
I think that two of the indicators of a "GOOD" site in the new Google Panda Update is a Shopping Cart and very few links to other sites. Everything I have tried with my on page SEO like keywords and percentage of keyword use... does NOTHING... I think it is links in... and shopping carts... because the top ten in searches I have done either come from popular sites (lots of links in) or have shopping carts with very few links to other sites... but that is just my opinion.

For example Shopping Carts and a lot of "Links In" get the counterfeit sites I am seeing top rankings even though if you read the text it makes no sense to the human brain... Google ranks them HIGH because of their CARTs and Numerous Spammed "Links In".... IMHO... =)

[freejung]

That Live version is the best EVER.

Fully agree, particularly the guitar solo before the last verse, the live version is far superior to the album version. The occasional clarifying comments like "I hope so" are interesting too.

One of the many wonderful things about Stairway is that its metaphors are flexible enough to provide insight into a wide variety of situations. I wrote a paper about that in high school.

OK, sorry, this is rambling (and that's a different song)...

What I'm trying to say is that it is to be hoped that in this situation it is still possible to change course, re-focus on user satisfaction, and ultimately achieve redemption with Google by following the right path, rather than trying to buy your way in with the "all that glitters is gold" approach of content spam. I think that "tune" has been in the wind for a while, if you were listening hard enough.

I'm also saying it may be non-trivial or even impossible to gain any coherent information by following the Panda update cycle. Is this a Panda update? How can we possibly know? And ultimately, does it matter? We may be looking in the wrong direction...

[supercyberbob]

Yup, I'm sticking to a "to be a rock and not to roll" approach, mostly.

Waaay too much happening at Gooble at this point.

Trying to think long term as opposed to Panda 2.2.0.21

[walkman]

Don't lose hope yet. Matt Cutts some could recover.

[Whitey]

Let's try and keep this close to on topic with as much analysis as possible. We all badly need the panacea. Was this really a Panda 2.2?

It's really muddy and unclear, because other algo factors might be running at the same time. Can we get some clear consensus on this.

-The key characteristic of Panda is that a site looses 50-60% of it's traffic? Y/N? ( Why throttle the traffic to a threshold .... time for another thread )
-It's application to certain pages or an entire site is not yet clear or consistant Y/N?
-Only site's with aggregated, shared or poor quality content are effected? Y/N? If not , let's see or hear of examples.

Just an update to the recent "claimed" Panda drop I have seen :

-Pages that were light on content, weakly linked to on relatively non competitive terms held up better.
-Pages, heavily linked to, with a lot of aggregated content snippets from the product level appearing on category pages seem to have been especially hard hit.

@ Nippi's recovery experience is busily ringing in my ears as a positive.

@ DirigoDev "First [webmasterworld.com...] move was last Monday 5/16. Moved up 15% after many changes" - says to me different things

Something's not consistant at Google, with these limited reports coming out.

Let's stick with the analysis - it's the best chance siteowners and dependents have got to get out of this stress.

[Crystal Pegasus]

Ok. Our Pandalised site:

We got hit in April as we are an Aussie site.

Drop was probably around 70% for much of the site and probably well deserved, or at least some deserving of drop. All original content but much of it not good enough for Panda without a doubt. Most of it- though not all- created with earning in mind. We had, pre-Panda, ranked well for a lot of it, though certainly not all, and drop on most pages seems inline % wise on it's previous level. A few individual pages seem to have held ground or not lost much.

However... one section of our site (not created for earning, and nor does it earn much at all) has remained and even increased on pre-panda levels, and also an increase on last year of same time period, with nothing huge done to it... just normal slow adding of content. It certainly has much better backlinks and lower bounce rate, is useful to users and has some pretty unique content. It ranks number 1 for some terms, and highly for others, and has done for a long time.

So, in our case the Panda effect is NOT site-wide... or so it appears to us who are lesser in knowing of the Grand Plan than Google. :)

We don't seem to have seen any great change one way or another on the rest of the site (our main earning section)over this past couple of months... slightly down maybe, but not enough to think we have been hugely affected again.

We are currently trying to bring the whole site much more into tight focus, moving or getting rid of pages that are probably bringing it down. Rewriting a lot of stuff. Adding new FOCUSED QUALITY ORIGINAL CONTENT. And also changing the whole look of the site, which was rather a hodge podge and not very appealing or user friendly. It kind of grew in an awkward way, like a gangly ugly duckling hehe and is now (hopefully) turning into more of a graceful swan. And earn us a higher rung on the Stairway to Google Heaven. :)

We haven't seen any comeback from all we are doing yet... but.. there's still a lot to do, and if I was Panda I wouldn't consider it ready to give much of a boost, so didn't really expect much as yet.

That's about all I have to report right now. Don't know if it's of much use... but there it is. :)

[edited by: Crystal_Pegasus at 3:01 am (utc) on Jun 21, 2011]

[elsewhen]

@CrystalPegasus was the non-pandalized section of your site separated from the rest of your site in any way... ie, was it hosted on a different subdomain... or a different subdirectory - if it was just in a different subdir, was the content different enough to be classified differently (ie a forum vs articles etc)... was it heavily or not-heavily linked with the rest of the site?

my hunch is that panda applies sitewide, unless different sections are clearly differentiated from eachother.

[Whitey]

my hunch is that panda applies sitewide, unless different sections are clearly differentiated from eachother.

That's not clear yet, but i share your hunch.

@ Nippi's example shows a clear site wide threshold can be broken through with enough unique content and reorganisation.

Back to the analysis though ... was this 2.2?

[Crystal Pegasus]

The section is in a different subdirectory (not a different subdomain), as are each of the different sections of our site. It is actually more heavily linked to the rest of the site than any other part is.

The whole site content is articles pretty well, so the only difference is probably that these are higher quality, more useful (and appreciated by) users. They are not necessarily any longer- some are, some aren't.

This section has higher quality, and more, backlinks (all backlinks for site are naturally given, except for a rare posting on a blog or something- mostly for the unaffected section- which we made and left a link.)

Also of difference to most of the rest of the site, it has lower bounce rate, more time on site, more return visitors and those who have bookmarked it etc because of the value they see in it.

[Gorgwatcher]

wow....Now I am praying that the rankings on localized Google Versions just get replicate on .com :)

[AG4Life]

@Gorgwatcher: Me too, but I suspect it might be the other way around :(

[elguiri]

They regard this as a very frustrating problem. They've stated many times that they wish we would all just ignore them. Google wants to be the silent eavesdropper and listen in on the conversation in the room, but that's very difficult because the echo of their own voice is so loud.

It's difficult to carry a conversation and ignore them when they have the habit of punching you in face, treading on your toes, breaking your glasses, and then stealing your wallet.

A lot of jobs have been lost with this last change. One has to ask the question: would it not be better to do this in increments? So instead of some old established businesses seeing their livelihoods knocked out from one day to the next, they would become aware that week on week their poor user experience/thin content/ugly design/MFA articles is taking them backwards. They can then decide to evolve, or do nothing and wilt.

Google's behaviour in the Internet ecosystem is like a bull in a china shop. It's time they realised that with so much power comes responsibility. I can already hear the stuck record that is Matt Cutts saying that their responsibility is to their users. Of course it is (although if he were honest, he'd admit the shareholders have a good shout too). That does not however excuse them from ignoring the publishers that bring those users to their search engine in the first place.

I read a good post from Netmeg, reminding us of the nature of the industry in which we work, and that there is no point in complaining. Absolutely right. We'll analyse, evaluate, evolve, and improve, and probably end up better. This is where we choose to be. I just couldn't give a stuff about Google's frustrations, and I'll ignore them when Facebook or AN Other eats their lunch.

(For the record, I hope this happens incrementally, rather than a 60% drop in their revenues from one day to the next. That'd be ugly, right?)

[browsee]

Panda 2.2 is official now.

[searchengineland.com...]

[walkman]

So at least another 4-7 weeks of Panda hell unless you came back this time. Danny has an interesting article [searchengineland.com...]

[supercyberbob]

Very interesting that someone had to ask Google about Panda 2.2 before they even said anything about it.

Very. Interesting.

[netmeg]

This article from Danny is worth reading.

Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update [searchengineland.com]

[Shaddows]

Panda 2.2 is official now

New thread?

< Note: now that we have confirmation that Panda 2.2 has been rolled out, it's time to close this thread and take the discussion to the announcement thread: Panda Update - Confirmed by Google [webmasterworld.com] >

[edited by: tedster at 5:31 pm (utc) on Jun 21, 2011]

[Shaddows]

This article from Danny is worth reading.

Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update

On the subject of ranking factors, I posted the following back in the febrile atmosphere of April.

Panda is not a penalty, it is a new scoring strand- like PR is a scoring strand, or TrustRank...

In order to maybe see this issue from another perspective, consider PageRank.

Imagine PageRank became a factor today. Yesterday, everything was onpage factors, with maybe some seed sites giving some weighting, and some semantic relationships being analysed. Actually, many important factors use PR methodology, but try to ignore that for this thought experiment

Suddenly, new sites shoot to the top of SERPs. Studying them for commonalities doesn't seem to lead anywhere.

Some perfectly good content suddenly drops out the top 10. No one knows why. None of the old tricks work- semantic siloing, changing page titles, even Hx schemes.

Funnily enough, sites with a lot of traffic pop to the top. Google must be punishing the little guy. Google only wants people with high traffic. It's all about brands. It's so unfair.

Reports start coming in. Some sites with low-ish traffic have been rewarded. It seems like links are giving value in themselves. There are sceptics:
"Why would just getting someone to link to you give you benefit? My site is MUCH better looking, and uses funky markup. I never needed links before."

Counter examples start being put forward
"No, I comment on lots of blogs and have a link to my pet site, and that has no effect"
"Yeah, and I have a personal blog, with links to all my sites on every page, and that doesn't help"

Eventually, consensus emerges. It takes months. It turns out that links are the key. Positioning, repetition, PR of linking page, quantity of links on the page, templates- so many factors. Strategies change, the world moves on.

Years later, people say: "Remember the Larry update. Before then, you just needed some good directory listings and onpage optimisation. I can't believe people think those things still work- I can get a site ranking with just a few high-PR links"

My point? PR emerges from the system, it's not a tick-list of factors. Losing out to sites is not a penalty either. And while we might not yet have a methodology to exploit the new system, it doesn't mean its random, or unfair. New techniques might be needed, and it might take a LONG TIME to overcome the differentials inherent when the new score came into play- getting 1,000 scoring links isn't easy.

[c41lum]

2 very good articles from searchengineland.com.

What I dont understand is, if the fix for panda is to simply delete or noindex thin pages then we would be seeing far more recoveries than are currently being reported. I know sites that have taken a axe to their pages, cutting out whole sections yet still have not budged a inch.

Is it a case that the people who have recovered are not sharing their secrets?

[1script]

None of the old tricks work- semantic siloing, changing page titles, even Hx schemes (emphasis mine)

What on Earth is he talking about?! Hx schemes?

[Shaddows]

What on Earth is he talking about?! Hx schemes?

Shorthand for "H1-H6 Header tags", posited as a ranking factor in the fictional world where PR had not previously been invented.

Surprised that was not clear.

[1script]

Shorthand for "H1-H6 Header tags", posited as a ranking factor in the fictional world where PR had not previously been invented.

Ah, I see. Some terms take years to universal recognition. Could be my fault, too: never seen it referred to like that. Sounds like "H1-6 Header Scheme" would have been easier to grasp the meaning of than "Hx Scheme".

In any case, I wouldn't say that at least H1 is not still an important factor. Not sure about the rest of the headers but I would make sure my pages have a good first header tag, Panda or not.

[danijelzi]

If a better scraper detection was one of Panda 2.2 goals (as SearchEngineLand claims), they failed. Scrapers are all over the first page, at least those with my content. No change at all there since Feb. Anyone experiencing any improvements regarding scrapers' de-rankings?

I do remember that Matt C. said they now have a dedicated member of the team to take care of the scrapers problem, but not that it will be addressed in Panda 2.2.

[indyank]

But didn't Matt cutts say there will be some kind of pull back which will bring back several sites? I think it would be a good time to have another round of polls to find out how many have recovered and how many have been pandalized.

Is there a way for having a poll here?

[indyank]

It is funny that I just started a thread with an example where the copied content ranked higher than the original, despite a link back to the original and Google confirms that panda 2.2 had already been released! ("Shakes my head in disbelief")

[supercyberbob]

Dear Google,

You release Panda 2.2 and you can't make an announcement about it? Search Engine Land has to do it for you?

What's up with that?

[diberry]

Unsubbing from thread. Sorry, can't find any other way to do it, as it won't let me edit the post where I signed on for email notification.

[indyank]

Search Engine land had functioned as the PR for anything related to Google search for the past 1 or 2 years and they continue to do so.


< Note: now that we have confirmation that Panda 2.2 has been rolled out, it's time to close this thread and take the discussion to the announcement thread: Panda Update - Confirmed by Google [webmasterworld.com] >

[edited by: tedster at 5:30 pm (utc) on Jun 21, 2011]

[freejung]

This is what I'm talking about. ~200 posts and we were unable to reach a consensus on whether Panda 2.2 was in fact taking place, let alone trying to figure out what it did or what it means. Too much noise.

Continued here:
[webmasterworld.com...]