Finding the Panda Zone - the best SERPs are at the end

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I recently had my site pandalized (confirmed by google not to have a penalty) and many pages that held top rankings for years fell to the bottom of the results. In going over all of my lost keywords to look for clues I noticed something interesting.

I set my results per page to be 100 and after performing a keyword search I click on the last available page from the serps returned by Google. Without fail my pandalized result for any given keyword will be somewhere between the middle and bottom of that last page. IE: a search that yields 3.2 million results will have pagination from 1-10 at the bottom, click on page 10 and Google may display only 8 or 9... my site is at the bottom of the last page. (weird that only 8 pages are returned out of 3.2 million results but that's another subject).

I found it odd that many of my pages, post last Panda iteration, are at the bottom in this manner but then it dawned on me, I can't be alone.

I proceeded to check many related keywords, and keywords I still rank well for, and found that there are many AWESOME pages ranked in that area of serps. Pages not having a penalty but heavily pandalized.

A quick roundup of the types of sites they are and most of the good pages are from very specific blogs, forums and fan sites with EXCELLENT information but little to no backlinks/brand/authority... the type of sites Google used to find/rank well.

Try it out for your favorite keywords, be sure to set the results per page to 100 first. Are we supposed to check the top results for what Google says is best and the bottom ones to see which Panda smacked but don't deserve penalties?

[tangor]

I am reminded of what an older feller (book collector like me) said back in 1970: "Too many bookstores, too much to find, too many places it might be..." That was a different era, of course, but the explosive growth of bookstores after WW2 until their owners began to wear out and die by the mid 1980s...about the same time the big box stores began to appear... is about the same thing as what we are experiencing right now.

Google, in particular, has lived up to a clarion cry to "index the web" and have... with the resulting pitiful results. In human endeavor, about 10% do the work (of value, use) and the rest either suck it down, scam, knock-off, or thieve for the easy buck... (MFA, SCAM, SCRAPERS, ET. AL.) And in all that there's that .01 percent that control things and (because they can) monetize the work of everyone else.

Best part, if you are the publisher (of serps) you get to publish the way you like! (Hint! Wink Wink Nudge Nudge!)

We live in a strange world where Google cannot exist without us (we are the content creators, including all the scum who rip us off) and we can't exist without search engines (Google being the largest).

Sad thing is that we could fix this... but can't. Why? If every creator website opted to Disallow: Google the gorg will still have all the scraper sites. Then google would eventually die a long and lingering death because the results would disappoint their users and they'd move on... and no one would see their artificially elevated properties at the top of the serps.

This will not happen. Humanity, as a whole, is as dumb as a box of rocks and any government intrusion can only make things worse (sole exception being a division between Search and Properties). Likely to happen any time soon? Doubt it.

/rant off

And apologies. Had to /vent

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

No appologies needed, lots of frustrated people (with Google) right now and from frustrations ideas are often born.

Your rant reminded me of an applecore rotting in the sun being a representation of what earth has become because of people. We continually use more resources and demand more from the earth and pollute it more (more, more, more) and yet each new president promises to reverse the trends and make the earth whole again.

Can you turn a rotten apple core into a pristine apple again? No, so I'd like this one to last a long while. To put that into webmaster perspective I'd like Google to SLOW DOWN with trying to become the web and continue working hard to rank it properly in a STABLE manner. We do not have stability right now and we certainly don't have a sense that even stable rankings are actually stable, it's like waiting for the earthquake you KNOW will happen but you can't move out of the quake zone in advance, ya know?

This thread is doomed, but I had an idea. A new search engine consisting of Panda victims(websites). The Pandalized pages are easy to find since they sit at the bottom of the last page before the "supplementals" begin... it might actually work. If nothing else it would remind Google that they need to do a better job of keeping things stable and to stop pandalizing sites that do not deserve it.

Say it with me - Google, please stop pandalizing sites that do not deserve it, it's happening too often right now.

[lucy24]

(weird that only 8 pages are returned out of 3.2 million results but that's another subject)

Not weird, just a combination of intentional policy and well-attested inability to count. "Showing 16-25 of 13 results", that kind of thing. How this fits in with the ability to produce fiendishly complicated algorithms... now that is another subject.

Hasn't everyone tried this? Do a search. Any search. Move to another page. Buried deep in the query string you will now find the "start=n" element. Change it manually to anything. Go too high-- any number that will bring the total past 1000-- and you get

Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from {number}.)

... followed by the "Your search did not match any documents" boilerplate.

Conversely, pick a number that will put your last item at 999, and the results will always peter out before reaching the bottom of the page. I am currently looking (with prefs at 30/page) at

Page 29 of about 4,040,000,000 results
...
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 839 already displayed.

The calculator confirms what my brain has already told me: 30x28>839. At 30 hits/page, there shouldn't be anything on this page.

Further jiggery-pokery similarly confirms that "more than 1000" means "=> 1000".

You can force them to cough up the full thousand-- or rather, the full 999-- by "repeating the search with omitted terms included".

But that gets senseless. If the only way to get to a thousand is to count results that are so similar, g### would prefer not even to show them, what's on those other 4,039,999,001 pages?

[aristotle]

This thread is doomed, but I had an idea. A new search engine consisting of Panda victims(websites). The Pandalized pages are easy to find since they sit at the bottom of the last page before the "supplementals" begin.

maybe somebody could create an app that will flip the SERPs upside-down to bring the Pandalized pages to the top

[FranticFish]

the type of sites Google used to find/rank well

@Sgt_Kickaxe: how do these sites do in Bing?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

< moved from another location >

The bottom results for many keywords right now are full of sites just hit with a Panda slap. Change your settings to 100 results per page and click on the last page google makes possible before the supplementals start (usually 8-10 pages are available even if there are 3 million results).

Example: the keyword webmaster now has a long series of blogspot sites taking up the "Panda Zone". Not important enough to stay well ranked but good enough not to be supplemental, they now lurk at the bottom.

I went over the lists of Pandalized sites for various keywords and found a lot of pages from these sites sitting down there too, check your keywords.

[edited by: tedster at 2:23 pm (utc) on Oct 15, 2011]

[ErnestHemingway]

@Sgt_Kickaxe very well said with your earthquake metaphor.

For our site that got hit nothing makes sense:

*Great educational video graphics and infographics created after months of research, 900-1200 words article written by experts on the topic.
*Great social media interaction we get tons of facebook likes, tweets, stumbleupons other mentions
*Great backlinks most of our work has been featured on Time magazine, Nytimes, Latimes, Forbes, educational institutes, government websites, TV shows etc.
*Domain registered in 1998 and been running since 1998.
*Registered till 2020
*Bounce rate is 25%
*We add new content whenever we can, it takes time to do research and design an infographic so we do at least 1 post a week.
*Every panda update does more bad than good.
*Site is not a content mill, we have had about 90 pages but I removed most of it now we have 25 pages.
*Since May we have spent days and nights reading forums, taking notes making adjustments and doing all sort of things but no luck. In fact for past 90 days we have gone through every tiny things again to find if there are any faults but nothing makes sense. At least not when we compare our site to the top 5 sites.
*We did reconsideration request as well but no luck, there is no manual penalty.


We were #3 for over 10 years but now we are stuck at #17 and the sites ranking top for out term, well what can I say they are not Adsense sites but honestly I believe they should have been pandalized as well.

I guess we just have to live with it and see how much more damage we will get. May be someone knows whats the solution to tackling panda but so far nothing makes sense.