New Panda Update - September 27

[BrodyDodes]

Google rolled out its most recent iteration of the Panda algorithm on Wednesday 9/28/11 (or Tuesday according to who you ask). Saw the first recovery of one of my punished sites since the first iteration back in February. Anyone else see recoveries?


[webpronews.com...]

When asked if an iteration of Panda was implemented this week, a Google spokesperson told us, “yes.” She also provided the following statement:

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

If you’ve followed the Google Panda update saga throughout the year, you may recall Dani Horowitz’s story. She runs an IT discussion community called Daniweb, and it was hit hard by the Panda update, but she made a lot of changes, and gradually started to build back some Google cred

[indigojo]

Dave_Hybrid if they happen to have invited you to 'Adsense Partner' days in the past then it begs the question about the term Partner. In some countries, the UK and Australia as examples, using the word partner has certain legal implications/ramifications for both parties. You may want to get some legal advice on that as I'd imagine Google is stepping on some very dangerous ground with Panda and it's so called partners. Hate to cite Wikipedia but hey Google put's it at number one "Partnership Definition in civil law"

[Hissingsid]

Has anyone else in the UK noticed small changes over night?

Flux in SERPS, +1 buttons gone etc.

Also a couple of days ago Titles started to be truncated so that they fit the layout on one line.

Cheers

Sid

[zerillos]

from my point of view, there's been another medium/large update last night. it started around Wednesday afternoon.

[buddhu]

Not actually a new user, I just don't talk much...

I've seen flux most days since 2.5 hit. We had been Panda-free until 2.5.

We dropped from #1 for our main, high volume, trophy keyword. We stayed page 1, but have wobbled between positions #2 and #9 over the last few days.

Some gains and some losses for other key phrases, but the boss obsesses over the trophy term, so life is frustrating just now. So much flux that it will be difficult to make judgements and decisions until it settles more. A particularly notable shuffle over last night saw us drop again to #8 for the top phrase. The sites outranking us are thinner and in Internet and real world terms are less substantial businesses.

Ours is a specialist niche, but so far as there is a top brand, we're it.

In common with some others, we have seen a neglected second site (few updates and no link building for the last 18 months) gain and in some cases outrank the main site.

I used to think pandas were cute and cuddly. If I met one now I'd punch the sucker.

[nomis5]

I used to think pandas were cute and cuddly. If I met one now I'd punch the sucker.

Brilliant - really made me laugh!

But then again, I detect a more serious side to that remark .......

[rhornsby]

I maintain my local professional services website and have been consistently been number one for my primary service keywords for a few years.

This morning my website ranks between 2 and 5 on most phrases I have previously ranked first for.

Hopefully it settles down.

[zeus]

I have mostly lost visits from Google.com the other countries its ok, but whats the difference, what have changed on .com and not on the other versions and yes the site in question is a .com, on us server.

[Hissingsid]

but whats the difference, what have changed on .com and not on the other versions

Semantics!

[ErnestHemingway]

October 12-13th some mid-tier update was done and once again domination of Adsense sites is evident.

Thank you Google I am happy I have 3 leaderboards on top, you just pushed us on top for tons of terms.

Way to go..

[dunivan]

October 12-13th some mid-tier update was done and once again domination of Adsense sites is evident.

If this is true, i am seeing no difference.

[ziajunu]

Yes that is definitely true, I am seeing 20% lower traffic in many sites.

[ErnestHemingway]

Well something certainly happened late last night.. morning 13th Oct.

[affiliation]

I agree, lowest traffic for some time. Had a little increase in traffic and long tail position yesterday, but dropped back today. Seems in the past few hours some keywords to be comming back to usual positions, but I suppose it is a wait and see game.

[walkman]

Very odd. For as long as I can remember, I have never gotten a better bounce rate from Google than today.

I think Google does one mini-update between Pandas and the 10-13 of the month are as far as I can tell.

[tabish]

Yes.. something changed..

[indias next no1]

from yesterday , again the traffic is down.

[chrism]

Again a fairly significant change overnight in the UK SERPS for our niche.

[Monty11]

After a gradual increase in traffic since Panda 2.5, I had a 20 percent drop in traffic from the 10th-13th. Now the interesting thing is that the keywords that I lost the majority of my traffic for were keys that I have been doing very heavy SEO for lately.

Usually I use a very diverse hypertext link building strategy - fore instance - if I am going for "blue widgets" I will build:
cool blue widgets
best blue widgets
blue widgets are awesome

But for the last month I have ONLY been building links using "blue widgets"

I wonder if part of the new Panda Tweak has to do with some sort of Over Optimization filter.

Also, several days ago I optimized many of my pages, changing the alt tags on the images, then changing the page title to reflect a similar keyword.

[courier]

Definately a change, and still ongoing. Competitive keywords seem to be at the forefront. One site that has been sitting #1 for a long time down to #7 within the last hour, perhaps going to bounce back.

How can this be a good user experience from Google, if on a search yesterday a user finds this site and today he cannot? Surely this stinks of double standards.

[buddhu]

Our positions this morning broadly the same as when I posted yesterday. No appreciable change overnight between 13/10/2011 and 14/10/2011.

UK site. UK Google SERPs.

* All sites currently outranking us have fewer pages than us.
* All have less and thinner content. Fewer inbound links.
* Several are equally or more heavily optimised (traditional on-page elements and internal linking) compared to our site.
* Some less optimised (traditional on-page elements and internal linking).
* One competitor now outranking us uses Wordpress as CMS for large section of his site (news/articles section).

Apart from more meticulous housekeeping than usual and some basic tweaks, I am pretty baffled about what substantial steps I can take to fix this.

I'm combining and concatenating the content of text-light pages resulting in fewer, but more substantial pages (301 the pages from which I'm taking the text to the expanded pages). Also revisiting titles and descriptions to make sure they are the best they can be. Removing many pages from robots.txt and blocking with robots meta instead (or simply allowing access. Also revisiting rel canonical which could be a better approach for some of our pages than noindex.

Just routine, ongoing improvement. Until things settle for more than a couple of days I'm still wary of jumping to conclusions and taking action based on observations of a situation in flux.

The experiences of people here are very informative, but just go to show that experiences vary so much that I really need to be able to judge from what I see affecting my own sites rather than assuming that other people's fixes, such as they are, will have the same effect for me.

Still not enjoying myself yet...

[c41lum]

BIG update in the UK.

[Hissingsid]

I've just been playing around with my theory that Panda has at its core LSI/Semantic Vectors.

The biggest $ 2 word term in my niche is like <<widget service>>. Since mid August an unexpected page went in at #1, the page that had previously been in at #3 went to #2 and the long time #1 went to #3.

If I search for <<widgets service>> or <<widget services>> or <<widgets services>> ie with one or two words in their plural form the unexpected #1 drops down between 6 and 14 places and the SERPS return to almost exactly the state they were in pre mid August.

[affiliation]

2 sites down in UK results, brands seem to have had a leg up again. In my industry the results are getting to be a joke, same brands no matter what type of widgets I search for. surely if I want cheap widgets it should be diferent from pink widgets, but in G's eyes pink widgets and cheap widgets must be the same.

Come on Google give your user's a bit of variety. I know now why your Google Instant claims to be so quick, giving the same results for all my industry keywords is easy, and not what I would call a search engine!

[tigger]

yep seeing a massive change at .co.uk - I've lost some and gained some but a site I've been putting a lot of development into has moved well. Only thing I'm not sure about is whether I've lost total traffic or gained over my network of sites, I'll have to wait for a full days traffic

[chalkywhite]

Bah, had my best week ever so far now an overnight change. Looking poor so far, seem to have lost my uk traffic.

[c41lum]

BIG losers seem to be Affiliate websites... from what I can see.

[tigger]

theres Affiliate websites & Affiliate websites !

all my sites are and my main site has taking rankings from the main sponsor site. You just need to make sure if your hitting the affiliate game you have enough unique contact to make it stand out

[HuskyPup]

Big mess for my UK widgets, many very, very thin pages have come to the top along with a lot of Chinese and Indian directory sites...what happened to the so-called Panda quality?

[murgatroid]

But for the last month I have ONLY been building links using "blue widgets"

In addition, to the various hypothetical modifiers, like cool, best, awesome blue widgets, you really should mix in some branded anchor text links (like "YOURBRAND blue widgets" and even just "YOURBRAND") to deep pages and the home page. Lots more weight being placed on branding and ratio of branded links/citations to other anchor text on sites (IMO), and trusted, quality sites tend to have a higher ratio of branded anchor links in their link profiles.

My 2 cents.

[wingslevel]

interesting about the 13th changes. i am seeing big changes not in the number of overall referrals from google, but in the quality. started on the 12th. conversion rates on my main ecomm site are off 25%. i have seen this before after an algo change - hopefully they are reindexing - the longtails always seem to fill in the result set last. for me, they are the highest converting traffic.