Panda Questionnaire

[whatson]

I was thinking that if we could gather as much information from each other about what they think their site has done to warrant a pandalization then perhaps we could further assess what is going on here.
You need to be really honest and put all your ego aside and just think of all the possibilities and probabilities of practices your site was participating in that got them penalized.
I am thinking that you hear about sites with tens of thousands of pages, and they complain because their content was so good, but in reality could they have feasibly really created 10k of quality pages?

I will start off. About half my sites suffered in Panda, and here are the reasons I think for some of them:

Site 1 - scraped content - copied content from other sites to consolidate it in one place for my users.

Site 2 - thin directories - a directory of products with similar content, e.g. pages with a directory of - Los Angeles Widgets, New York Widgets, San Francisco Widgets.

Site 3 - purchased the site, so no idea, but can only assume content was not unique.

[Shatner]

Panda has been going for four months.

If you just search the archives of this forum you'll find at least 1000 posts from people who have already done this. :)

[whatson]

Sure, but after all these months we should have really gathered a good idea of what we believe to be the offending practices, and want people to be more honest.

[tangor]

I doubt that "truth" from the affected will be given, and I also doubt that anything we might "discover" will make a difference. Google has something in mind, we don't know what it is, but it will be to Google's benefit and bottom-line. THERE WILL BE NO RECOVERY.

The monopoly is complete. What comes next is Pay To Play, ie. you give the Gorg some bucks to be listed highly, and possibly a percentage, too, to stay in the game. That game being advertising...where YOUR SITE is your advertising and you are paying to put it into the electronic Media known as Google...

Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, I predict.

There is no rhyme or reason for what we've seen Panda do to a zillion websites (or Panda ignoring another zillion where no bucks are invested). It is that uncertainty after a good run of seven (7) years for the freebie webmaster offering freebie content to plan for a future then get cut off at the knees, then desperate when (and it will come) the g offers a Paid Rank in (wanna guess?) in Auction Style.

Maybe this will happen, maybe not... but I know that if I had put this thing together, and let it percolate for a few years, that would be my next move.

[chrisv1963]

Google has something in mind, we don't know what it is

My opinion is that Google created a monster with the Panda algo and lost control. There's a lot of collateral damage and Google doesn't know (yet) how to fix it. Pandalized sites will only recover when Google has a fix for the collateral damage.

[walkman]

Whatson,
we should be asking you. You praised Panda yesterday, I thought you had figured it out and came out of it. I have done many, many things and have only lost traffic and Y! and Bing increase it, and now some days both of them give more people that Google. But I stopped buying the content crap months ago, there's something else at play and I suspect Google manually controls it._{(It's heresy around here though)}

The monopoly is complete. What comes next is Pay To Play, ie. you give the Gorg some bucks to be listed highly, and possibly a percentage, too, to stay in the game. That game being advertising...where YOUR SITE is your advertising and you are paying to put it into the electronic Media known as Google...

It has started already with Google majorly favoring brands and Panda took it to a maximum level. To be a brand you have to essentially advertise on Google so the circle is complete. Share your riches or else..

My opinion is that Google created a monster with the Panda algo and lost control. There's a lot of collateral damage and Google doesn't know (yet) how to fix it. Pandalized sites will only recover when Google has a fix for the collateral damage.

Oh they can really fix it. Notice how each update they catch new 'offenders' ? They can very easily go the other way. Or not give panda so much power to ruin traffic.