Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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
makes it so difficult to second guess
but you at least avoid negative points if you don't send a user back to Google to run the search again
A set of low quality pages can poison the rest of the site - there's a kind of decaying negative factor that spreads through the sites internal linking.
10+ yrs old site, original content. No frequent updates in last few years.
What if a site noindexes its affiliate content or other "low quality pages" but still links to them from every indexed page of the site. Could that be poisoning a site?
So, if any analytic metric isn't accurate, how Google knows to decipher the best from the all?
A while before Panda, Matt Cutts did mention that webmasters will need to chase their visitors rather than the Google algorithm.
@Tedster That's the question we've all been asking since Febriuary. It's essentially the same question as "what does Panda measure", and we've got no solid answers.
Consider two identical sites both with the same content etc but one displays adsense. Google knows which one makes them money and has data on the conversion rate so which one would it put first.....
Absolutely no way. I have the de facto sites for my widgets yet my AdSense over night was slashed to 45%...unless, of course, Google's pocketing the difference?
1. Bounce rate vs other sites that rank for a search term and broad topic area.
2. % of new visits vs other sites that rank for a search term and broad topic area.
3. Number of pages visited vs other sites that rank for a search term and broad topic area.
4. Average time spent on the sites vs other sites that rank for a search term and broad topic area.
Exactly my thoughts, perhaps another site which is not as good but is 'good enough' but making more money for them will appear above yours.
[edited by: tedster at 12:00 am (utc) on Oct 5, 2011]
affiliation wrote:
Another demotion was a site that I had included in Twitter, minimal followers, so what I would take out of that is if you put a social aspect to your site and get little followers, G perhaps think site is not popular.
The same for +1 etc, not enough +1's and your site in G's eyes may be unpopular. Best bet is not to go down the +1 or social route, at least it's not letting G see how popular or unpopular you are
The sites I have that maintained or improved their positions are sites that I have did none of the above, but sites that I have delved in the above have all been demoted.
Google Panda Update: DaniWeb Recovers AGAIN - More Panda tweaking? Google Correcting Mistakes?
“The Google saga continues. We have just recovered. Google Analytics is very delayed, but it is already reporting that we have received as much traffic today as we received all day yesterday, and it is not even 2 pm yet,” she tells us. “Clearly Google admitted they screwed up with us.” [webpronews.com...]
I doubt if others with collateral damage that slipped under the radar would have received the same attention as Dani.
Amit Singhal, previously said:
“Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent…That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is
Many commentators are saying Dani's site should not have been dropped , but I'm not sure if the G team is picking up all false positives. Rather it may be listening to individual well publicised cases.
Do you know anyone who has come back from a false positive Panda drop, per Amit Singhal's comment that is not well known?[edited by: Whitey at 10:20 pm (utc) on Oct 4, 2011]
Let’s refer back to a quote from a Wired interview with Google’s Amit Singhal, who said, “Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent…That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is.”
