Google Updates and SERP Changes - Aug 2011

[zeus]

< continued from: [webmasterworld.com...] >

any news on Panda update, I know a lot of us are still stuck and haven't seen any real movement in serps even with changes made to sites.

Have we seen a roll back yet?
Is Panda update done?
Is it time to dump the sites and just let them flow on the net and make new once.?
will I shoot a goal at soccer today?

[edited by: tedster at 1:47 pm (utc) on Aug 2, 2011]

[freejung]

Maybe it's the use of the latest technology which helps a website escape the death grip of Panda.

In my niche I see a broad mix of winners, including some that are totally old-school. However, if this is true it could be because newer sites are using these technologies to create a better user experience, rather than being specifically due to the technologies themselves. Granted, that's a bit of an optimistic view of the use of AJAX and HTML5, but still...

Also, just a small technical quibble:

AJAX generally uses js onClick events where older technology use anchor tags.

Yeah, people often do it that way but that's not the best way to do it IMO. It is better to code a straight anchor and then use JS to modify the onclick behavior of the anchor so it runs the script instead of clicking through. That way your links work even with JS disabled. Colorbox does this, for example. If you do it right, you can use all kinds of JS and AJAX and still have the site function with JS off - and you can get some nice improvements in apparent performance, for example by loading content from other pages after the page loads so that it displays instantaneously on click.

If sites are getting a boost for being broken with JS turned off, that's a step in the wrong direction with respect to quality if you ask me.

Besides, I suspect Google has been following most common usages of JS links for some time anyway.

[suggy]

t is better to code a straight anchor and then use JS to modify the onclick

That's the way do it. There's always the option to 'fail gracefully' and I'm amazed at how many sites don't take it!

[storeowner]

any news on Panda update, I know a lot of us are still stuck and haven't seen any real movement in serps even with changes made to sites.

Have we seen a roll back yet?
Is Panda update done?
Is it time to dump the sites and just let them flow on the net and make new once.?
will I shoot a goal at soccer today?

You will shoot a soccer goal today. The other questions are harder to answer.

[suggy]

Seems there's three main camps in this thread.

1) I changed lots and haven't recovered

2) I changed lots and seem to have recovered somewhat

3) I didn't change anything and seem to have recovered somewhat.

All three scenarios are completely feasible and not in the least bit surprising if Panda is indeed based upon machine learning.

All those in 1) may still be changing the wrong things/ not done enough.

All those in 2) obviously improved their Panda score but still have some outstanding negative signals

All those in 3) are probably benefiting from the fact that Panda is trying to get better at discerning quality from crud. Therefore it must be evolving its scoring system, which has changed to these site's benefit.

Now some warnings:

If you're in camp 2 or 3 now, you could easily slide back into Panda hell as it continues to try to evolve. Likewise, you may improve further. And, likewise, more sites could yet fall prey to this disease-ridden (it's definitely sick) and dastardly Panda.

If you're in camp 1 (or haven't made any changes at all), you can try waiting it out, but there are NO guarantees. You should not take any comfort from hearing others recovered. Context is everything. Just about every aspect of your site and their site, your niche and theirs, could be different!

All you can do is keep playing 'spot the difference' in your niche and decide whether to act upon it or not.

[HuskyPup]

All you can do is keep playing 'spot the difference' in your niche and decide whether to act upon it or not.

And therein lies the problem.

One site I have has been targeted for the UK retail market for 11 years and suddenly 2 months ago it went to #1 for a keyword term I had considered buying, strange I thought, let's see what happens. Anyway after 2 months no extra traffic whatsoever and today it dropped to #5, #3 and #4 are fine, #1 and #2, even though associated to the trade, neither of them sell this specific product and the traffic levels still have not changed!

Conclusion, the machine sure as heck hasn't a clue what it's doing therefore it's most unlikely anyone could declare with confidence they know the answer 100%...I have to admit I thought I did, I'll just say 90+% for now :-)

NOTE - For my products only!

[suggy]

Panda's made us look more closely at our site than we have for a long time. It's amazing how many sub-optimal things I've discovered. A major opportunity for SEO in itself, if only we could shake this bloomin' Panda off!

If I look at our Pandalised product pages versus our clearly not really affected pages (cost they still rank top 5 despite being on a Pandalised site), all I notice is excessive creativity in the copy.

What I mean by that is that Pandalised pages tend to be witty, irreverent and off-beat sales pitches, where as unpandalised pages are generally the ones where we were lacking inspiration or inclination and just said wrote something plain, descriptive and unadventurous about the product. Structurally, everything else is the same.

[superclown2]

What I mean by that is that Pandalised pages tend to be witty, irreverent and off-beat sales pitches, where as unpandalised pages are generally the ones where we were lacking inspiration or inclination and just said wrote something plain, descriptive and unadventurous about the product. Structurally, everything else is the same.

I found the same thing with some new sites I launched a couple of months ago. The witty adventurous ones sank like stones, the boring factual ones did OK. The panda obviously hasn't got good taste or a sense of humour.

[zeus]

storeowner - goal was shot, but still stock in panda, its incredible that no one have a clue, only have a kind of aclue whats going on.

[zeus]

Pages that have notably poor performance on analytics. You should check your bounce rate, time on page, etc., to determine which pages are poor performers.

I have a lot of pages with a 100% bounce, BE CAUSE they find what they are looking for on that page, which in this example are a photo, will google now have that I write unnecessary text and then force the user to read this be fore they get access to a photo.

[suggy]

The panda obviously hasn't got good taste or a sense of humour.

Yep, it's going to be a very dry (dull) web out there if he/she doesn't develop either

[Robert Charlton]

...all I notice is excessive creativity in the copy.

What I mean by that is that Pandalised pages tend to be witty, irreverent and off-beat sales pitches, where as unpandalised pages are generally the ones where we were lacking inspiration or inclination and just said wrote something plain, descriptive and unadventurous about the product. Structurally, everything else is the same.

I'd made the same observation about a site that tanked some months before Panda. I felt that the writing was so off the wall that Google's phrase-based indexing wouldn't be able to correlate it with anything in the seed set of pages that it considered good.

I can see this kind of problem persisting or getting worse in Panda. Keep in mind that this thing's a machine that's guided by mathematical formulas... probably doesn't understanding things like irony, puns, tone, or associations that it might take years of being poisoned by pop-culture to understand. ;)

[superclown2]

I can see this kind of problem persisting or getting worse in Panda. Keep in mind that this thing's a machine that's guided by mathematical formulas... probably doesn't understanding things like irony, puns, tone, or associations that it might take years of being poisoned by pop-culture to understand. ;)

I suppose this is logical. The surfer is looking for facts about the search term that was typed in, not a ditty by Oscar Wilde. There's not much fun in writing cold facts, sadly.

[masood82]

Panda is getting very confusing my website <snip> got its traffic increased by 35 to 40 % in Feb when panda was released from 16 July site was hit by another panda update this time site lost traffic and ranking on its major keyword <snip> wat the hell is happening if the site doesnt deserve the traffic the why google increasd its traffic in Feb! this is very very disappointing...

[edited by: goodroi at 1:35 pm (utc) on Aug 5, 2011]
[edit reason] Please no personal urls [/edit]

[ohno]

Urrgghh, junk foreign traffic in our logs again. Rather than India though this time it is Vietnam!

[n00b1]

I've had a few Vietnamese visitors recently too. Unfortunately I can't really monetise this traffic as I only serve products to Europe and the US. All I could expect would be a few pennies (or perhaps even a fraction of one) from a click on Adsense - but they seem to have a nice time reading my site content anyway so I guess that's good.

[ohno]

This was far from a few, at one point they were the majority of visitors, so either everyone in Vietnam decided our site was worth a look at the same time or Google is up to something....again. It's a .co.uk site that sells to the UK ONLY, Geo targetting is ON in WMT's.

[chrisv1963]

I've had a few Vietnamese visitors recently too

but they seem to have a nice time reading my site content anyway so I guess that's good

I had some visitors form Vietnam too a few months ago and they copied a huge amount of pages from my website. Also, they were so friendly to make all my content available on their website in several languages, translated with machine translation.

My visitors from China are extremely interested in my content too and seem to love it in combination with "copy & paste".

I prefer not to have vistors from these countries and am actually looking into the possibilities of blocking them.

[santapaws]

has anyone been pandalised that hasnt been scraped?

[superclown2]

has anyone been pandalised that hasnt been scraped?

My main site was pandalised almost to destruction. Since it sits on it's own server I have been able to keep bots at bay very efficiently so scraping is almost non-existent but it still suffered.

[danijelzi]

I have both a scraped and non-scraped site, both are pandalized.

[ohno]

Anything happening? We had a great start to the week, traffic is down slightly on last week to more normal levels. However today we are dead :( Yesterday our main .co.uk site was dead yet our very small .com site was busy! The .com targets the UK too.

[petehall]

ohno the site which had some long tail search issues, both traffic and enquiries up over previous weeks.

Quite happy with how the dust has settled, although some of the competitor sites which are ranking are dubious to say the least!

[suggy]

There's flux across our terms again. Some up, some down, but always still just outside the real money! Doh!

Made big changes last week and the result of deleting lots of discontinued product pages and redundant sections means lots of new 404s in WMT. I'm for deleting over NOINDEX now as definitively statement that bad content does not exist (rather than just not indexed). Hoping to see some crumbs of reward when Panda next runs.

Praying to be more precise!

[Martin Ice Web]

Yepp. Absolutly down again.

If it continues like this, in one year there will be no need to search google for shopping results, because u can go right away to amazon. There will be no shopping sites left. Maybe this is the big plan. Make amazon big and then buy it.....instantly u will have the biggest shopping site in internet ( and redirect the traffic to it ) and u get a internet paypment solution right away.....

This canīt be right, when with every almost search amzon spots 1-3 ?

[emmab21]

Has anyone noticed that their US traffic has been hit but not their UK traffic? It's as if different changes have been rolled out between the two. I'm baffled :/

[ohno]

UK traffic has deffo been hit here.

[stricknine]

I also saw a change on my france-located, french-speaking e-commerce. But it's a positive one : yesterday (08/03) was the best day we ever had for google natural visitors from google.fr, and today seems to be starting good.

Maybe a new release of panda in europe ?

[ohno]

Today traffic is well up yet seems low quality, mostly single page views & not one sale :(

[Uber_SEO]

I'm seeing a big uplift in traffic yesterday on a Pandalized website. Early indicators suggest traffic is up by about 20%. Elsewhere on WebmasterWorld there are reports of a PR update yesterday, so I'm wondering if Google rolled out other changes too. Anyone else seeing big changes?