Does Your Google adwords history play a role in Panda?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My kneejerk reaction is to think no, it doesn't, but given the events of the past 2-3 weeks I'm not so sure. In fact, my results suggest it might. To recap...

My site saw a small spike in traffic followed by a sudden loss of 50% of my traffic from Google recently (90% of that was from transactional pages). I detailed my findings here - [webmasterworld.com...]

Recap of my site - 50% transactional pages (affiliate and my own product), 50% informational pages (guides, how to's and news). Established 7+ years ago, solid rankings for years and never any traffic loss from previous Panda iterations.

Applied for reconsideration - was told there are no penalties (I had assumed it was a penalty since it targeted my transactional pages only).

Now for the one thing I overlooked early on, ADWORDS! I detailed trouble I was having with my Adwords account here - [webmasterworld.com...] and I ultimately closed the account, several days before losing rankings.

- Does your adwords history, or a history of paying for visitors, play a role in brand authority?
- Does losing that history, such as by closing your account, upset your rankings?
- or is it just coincidence that I closed my account and was promptly pandalized a few days later?

[tedster]

The main reason I lean toward coincidence IS the timing. Panda runs on a schedule - period. you don't get pandalyzed any old time, it happens on certain dates. And those dates are when the latest Panda number crunching get pushed live. The algo is so complex (they tell us) that it takes a tremednous amount of processing to run on the back end, followed quality testing on the back end.

When they know the scoring meets certain standards (not the least of which would be no partial data polling from the various servers and things like that) then it gets pushed live.

[tedster]

This thread did stimulate another thought for me about Panda and advertising (non-Adsense).

In recent years, I've read in various Google patents about trust that one potential signal could be advertising - what kinds of ads a given site runs and whether they are they for quality sites, in particular.

In addition, a site being willing to advertise itself on other quality sites might be a signal. Now these signals originally were for trust, but I wonder if they might be one of the Panda factors, too? Not the single magic golden key to Panda - I don't think that exists - but part of the picture.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

It's part of my picture, there's no way around it. I realize the timing is about a week between closing adwords account and the Panda update which cost me my transactional rankings but the spike in traffic, and crawling, occurred within 48 hours of the account closure. It might have been unlucky timing on my part.

Easy test, since Google does not forget any data, is to re-open my adwords account and wait until the next iteration. Wether it helps or not I don't know but I don't see any way it could hurt.

What makes me more unsure than the timing is the sites which replaced me on those transactional rankings, they weren't immediately behind me to take my spot, in most cases they weren't even top 50 on those keywords.

I suppose I'll have to compile a list of all possible quality ranking metrics and work on the most obvious avenues for advancement. Thing is I'd rather just work on creating content, ya know?

[Pjman]

@Tedster

I think you guys are on to something.

I have a solid mega authority site in my niche for over 12 years. Ask anyone who is a member of my niche and this site is the standard. A bagillion backlinks and always play by the rules.

About 3 months ago I decided to go with an agency to specifically focus quality ads in place of Adsense. Adsense ads were Ok, but they lacked focus away from my content ad user experience.

I switched the ad code over to the new network on half the pages of the site (about 12,000 pages). Instantly the rankings just for those pages dropped 10-20 places.

I thought it was:

1. a link trust thing, but here I sit 3 months later and no change at all on those rankings.

2. Maybe a speed thing. But the network actually serves the code a little faster than Adsense ads.

I don't really depend on G, so I never switched back. Usually links from solid networks are accepted and trusted by G in 6 weeks, so I'm at a lose. The pages that I did not change the ad code, is same as before.