Minor Panda update Oct 13 - per Matt Cutts

[sid786]

Matt Cutts responds on Twitter that they have applied a minor algorithmic update last late night.

Link: http://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/status/124905069748559872 [twitter.com]

Have your websites been affected with this update? My site's traffic is stable, but I was expecting a positive bump.

[Mod's note: Fixed link so it would display, as the WebmasterWorld link redirect script will break it in most browsers. Copy and paste url into your browser if hyperlink doesn't go to Matt's tweet.]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:54 pm (utc) on Oct 14, 2011]
[edit reason] fixed link display [/edit]

[walkman]

Bill_H, did the number of ads in Google SERPs change by any chance?
Top 3 links get about 80% of clicks anyway and ads probably get the same. Also ads with 10-18 links get 50% more clicks.

Google is getting more ad clicks (13% more last quarter compared to the 2nd one), that's not a conspiracy theory, it's the truth as stated by Google.

[besnette]

@menntarra - I'll rephrase my comment about scrapers - those who scrape content, without giving any recognition to the original author, pretending that it is their content is what my comment was about. And let's face it - google is going after scrapers because most of the time, it is not done with good intentions, in my experience, and I think most people would agree that it is a big problem. If you are able to do it ethically, and with proper intentions, then that is another story, one in which you would be in the minority, so if that is the case, my sincere apolgies to you.

those who have scraped MY site are obviously doing it to be lazy - and don't want to create their own stuff and are trying to game the system.

[falsepositive]

@menntarra,
Unless you are syndicating WITH permission, what you are doing is thievery, plain and simple. As a publisher who works on original content and material, I look upon scrapers who copy work with no original material of their own as parasites.

[Zivush]

Whitey
SEOers and webmasters were discussing the fact that some of them have removed huge amount of % of their content or are planning to, but still not so many have reported on full/partial recoveries.
please read this: [webmasterworld.com ]
please read potentialgeek comment.

Are you telling that you've just recovered, in a way?

[whatson]

Of my 2 sites that had survived all updates to date, one was hit really badly traffic dropped 66%, and all the positions are way down.
the other only suffered about 20% hit, and it still has some good positions, it is more the long tail keywords that suffered.

[chrisv1963]

My site which lost 60% of it's google traffic IS a scraper site, so MY scraper site is punished...
And by the way, a scraper can be GOOD. If you make a site with a lot of improvements, like summarizing useful topics about a specific problem etc... IT can be VERY VERY useful. So just to state that "a scraper is lazy, and unethical" is just not right.

Scrapers = Content thiefs = Always Bad

I always submit Google Search DMCAs when I find scrapers that copied my content.

It's good to hear that scrapers are being punished too.

[tristanperry]

@chrisv1963: Google, along with most/all search engines are 'scrapers' too - they run automated programs over websites, take some/all of their content (for the cache, description SERP snippit) and display it on their site for a profit.

However search engines do perform a good task (in general), and they aren't 'always bad'.

I remember seeing recently a company (who IIRC, Google bought) who monitored Twitter and seen what people were saying about films. Then they had sentiment analysers which judges whether each film-related Tweet was positive or negative for each film. Their website then shown a summation of people's thoughts (i.e. x people comment on this film; yy% given it a good review, zz% given it a bad review). This is also scraping. But it's a pretty useful/interesting idea.

I guess it's where you draw the line.

I also submit Google DMCAs when I find someone copying my content. But there is a difference between outright content theft and searching over (i.e. scraping) large amounts of content for some 'smart' purpose.

[Bill_H]

Walkman:
Our adwords ads are usually #1 or #2 in the list. We haven't noticed an increase or decrease in the number of ads in the list, perhaps it changed, but we didn't notice. I will go back and take another look.

We often run adwords on products that are already #1 in the serps and see an improvement in sales on that product. Many users appear to prefer to click the ad, which has more "copy" than the organic serp.

It sure feels like throttling. We are monitoring traffic today (Sunday), I will report back in the AM.

Cheers,
Bill

[Whitey]

Zivush - What exactly have you done to your sites , and/or what's worrying you?

PotentialGeek appears to know what to do, but is " caught between a rock and a hard place"
[en.wikipedia.org...]

Cut and/or block the content / site leads to definite drop in traffic and no guarantee of return - if the remedial steps are not robust enough. Also you loose what little traffic / revenue you have left which feeds the recovery steps. Do nothing, and a site will die eventually.

Dare i say these words, but i think Google is throwing a lifeline by not eliminating effected sites completely. You have to move very quickly.

Again, what improvements have you done, or are you hiding behind a rock ? ( You're not alone btw ).

[walkman]

Dare i say these words, but i think Google is throwing a lifeline by not eliminating effected sites completely. You have to move very quickly.

Move quickly to where or do what? I read your post 3 times but still don't understand it.

[Whitey]

What i mean is Google continues to downgrade sites which have done no remedial works. That's the sense in which I meant that Google had thrown a lifeline which requires quick action. It could have eliminated sites in one go.

I think a lot of folks are waiting, watching and not doing things quickly enough inside this shortening time window. Hope that's clearer.

[walkman]

What i mean is Google continues to downgrade sites which have done no remedial works. That's the sense in which I meant that Google had thrown a lifeline which requires quick action. It could have eliminated sites in one go.

I think a lot of folks are waiting, watching and not doing things quickly enough inside this shortening time window. Hope that's clearer.

Fine, but how do you know that they haven't done the "remedial work" and what things are they supposed to do quickly?

[Play_Bach]

> I think a lot of folks are waiting, watching and not doing things

Yup, that's me. I'm not about to tear apart my site on a whim. For all I know, that could make things even worse. Somebody wake me up when we get there.

[kidder]

What is Google telling me with this update? Chase the user? We've taken a lot of steps in that direction over the last 12 months and we've taken a hit anyway. I should have invested the money in a medium quality spam network as I'm sure we would be in a better place now. Eggs, basket and all that. This is a hard update to fathom, if you pull any of our recent page titles and run the search we are down the page on all of them, in the past we would have been number one for any of them. Page title weight change anyone? This is not restricted to our content, the home page is down on key terms about 4 - 5 places and one high traffic terms is now GONE. The more I look at it the more I think its going to correct, maybe that's just hope.

[Zivush]

Whitey,
We are in different time zones. I've just seen you last comment.
Let me try to address [[sorry for my awful English]] -

You've asked: What exactly have you done to your sites , and/or what's worrying you?
Also stated:
Google had thrown a lifeline which requires quick action

One of my high traffic sites has a weak section of 200 articles, out of ~1200 of the site in total. Since Panda 2 hit where it lost 40%, I'm hesitating whether to move these 200 to another site or not - I improved 60 of these 200.
The site "passed" 5 Panda iterations 2.1-2.5 without any substantial change.
However, I've added 200 good articles since Panda2, and it still in a steady state - a flat graph.
I assume that pre-panda these 200 new ones could have bring 10k organic readers a day, minimum. These days, I find them on positions 8-10 in Google searches..

Next action, maybe - The ~ 200 low performing can work good in a new site, but (only speculating) the move wouldn't help the alpha site.
These 200 aren't badly written. They are way off the main steam topic of the site and get a low traffic.

Also stated:
Google had thrown a lifeline which requires quick action

What action/s really?
I can guess the solution is branding, branding and again branding the site. Plus, think I must bring readers from other sources.
How to do that? I am still learning and might hire a service.

In next Pandas, if I brand it, I really don't think Google will continue to ignore a site at this scale.
Improvement? What else to improve on the site :-)

[Whitey]

I don't know your site, and i'm no Panda expert by a long stretch. But from what you say there are some holes in your conceptual approach:

-High proportion of low value pages - why keep non performing pages
-Off topic content - why would users / Google like that ?
-Why move pages, when fundamental questions have to be asked of what you are doing

Does your site have a strong enough reputation to be called a "brand" in a niche or something.

In what you have said there is nothing mentioned about what you will do for your user and how you will focus them better on what you do that's different from others. I'm just challenging your thinking.

Maybe be you can contribute some of your own thoughts which maybe useful. Many folks are likely in the same position as you.

[Zivush]

1.-High proportion of low value pages - why keep non performing pages
They are good for the readers providing useful information, still getting no real traffic since Panda2.
The Bounce rate is 2 while the site general BR is 2.6. That is why I call them low performing.

2. -Off topic content - why would users / Google like that ?
The site main topic is A and these 200 are in B.
B is very close to A but still it is off-topic. B is one of the top lucrative/competitive niches on the web.

3. -Why move pages, when fundamental questions have to be asked of what you are doing?
The site still gets hundreds of thousands of visits per month so I absolutely know what I am doing :-)
Some of the articles are masterpieces. Really. (I don't write my articles.) The writers are top ones. Some big brands wanted to acquire it not long ago, so it has a real value for readers.

My users: they are fully engaged with the site through facebook and twitter + consulting one each other + with my writers. They print materials, email etc etc .They also read my newsletter very often.

Branding: It is a 'brand' but a small one in the eyes of Google.. That is where I have to go and it is different than link building.
* I've never made link building. The links come nationally. Sites owners (and scrappers) link to the articles.

[Whitey]

Maybe you should get some eye's from other webmasters onto your site. These threads don't permit publishing URL's , but maybe it's time to go looking for external inputs to get some perspective.

[Danwebsol]

@menntarra 34 Why don't you do your own research and write articles yourself or pay someone to do it? What could be good about scraping?

[superclown2]

Results in the niches I am interested in are even more dominated by big brands which do not actually sell the products advertised. They are affiliates, and poor ones at that. Rarely do their sites add any value whatsoever to the visitor's experience and in most cases they appear above those they send their visitors to (after providing them with the minimum of boilerplate information); merchant sites that are, in contrast, packed with useful information and which should, by all the rules of common sense, appear at the top. This to me is the single biggest weakness of Panda and one that seems to be getting worse rather than better.

[Hissingsid]

Every site tries to cheat Google - some are allowed to more than others = Panda.

[dhaliwal]

@Hissingsid

My aim is not to cheat Google, but to make money. And, we try to do it in legitimate way.

Google should rank good pages higher, as we follow the guidelines.

But, when they do something, which doesn't go good with their own guidelines, i don't think most of the webmasters will be able to work with such a system.

Google should clearly define the rules of the game. Then, people can play it better.

Google has hidden most of its ranking factors over years.

And many webmasters or publishers play the game, without knowing the rules.

Most webmasters come here to know the rules. To get updates on the new trends and new rules, but most of the people are not very sure about the best practices.

[Rockzer]

Well google, its just looking for their bread and butter, They are not thinking for the rest of website, all gaints are doing good, they dont have fear about the google. Only a small publishers like are getting effect with this panda update all the time.

[DirigoDev]

Starting Friday one of my sites more than doubled in SEO session starts. We were hit by Panda 2 and lost around 60% of our traffic. This is the largest uptick since we were hit by Panda. The traffic held over the weekend and this morning. I'll post again when I have a better understanding of what happened.

[besnette]

@DirigoDev - can you share what you did (if anything) to your site after round 2 to address your traffic loss?
Thanks!

[Whitey]

@DirigoDev - good to hear. You've put a lot of effort into trying to break free and deserve the success. Good luck.

[tcsoftware]

I think google have shot themselves in the foot with this Panda update. There is some fundimental change to indexing / query processing that's too rigid.
When they adjust the parameters to correct results for one niche it tips the scales and someone somewhere else looses out.

I look after a few sites, some have been hit some escaped and others have benefited.
Like everyone else the owners of the websites have been racing to try and restore their positions in the search results for the sites that have been hit with varying success.

A few observations:
It seems that some types of changes to Google mean that changes to existing URLs are not shown in the index for a very long time (possibly until current cached pages are re-indexed?)

Lighter site wide themes appear to be prefered, less duplicated 'content' on each page

Older SEO methods, such as repeating keywords, appear to be counter productive.

At the moment domain age does not appear to matter

Content appears to be the single most important factor


Our current theory is that at some point Google switched to indexing pages and parsing queries using a natural language processor. Should a page get a hit via the natural language processor and you can completely forget about relative page authorities.

[Dan01]

Let's stop repeating all the same editorial commentary that we've been reading here for months - and get back to analyzing this update. That's why we're here and that's where the potential value lies.

We've got at least two new observations that would be good to hear more input about:

1. There's the observation about traffic throttling is intriguing. Are there any other reports here about sites that were seeing traffic throttling in 2010 and then got demoted by Panda this year? How about sites that got Pandalyzed but that never saw any throttling in the past?

2. There are a number of reports this time from sites who lost significant long-tail traffic but not their "head" terms. That's a new Panda behavior, as far as I know. So is it really new? Were there earlier Pandalyzed sites that didn't lose on their main terms? Are there other members here who only lost their long-tail traffic on Oct 13?

I agree Ted. We need to analyze this new update and figure out a solution.

I have a couple questions - I see people talking about throttling and I am not sure what that means.

Second, what was this new Panda update. From reading the posts above, it appears it was about scraper sites. If that is what it was about, we have seen that before in Panda. What is different about this one.

[Dan01]

My aim is not to cheat Google, but to make money. And, we try to do it in legitimate way.

Google should rank good pages higher, as we follow the guidelines.

But, when they do something, which doesn't go good with their own guidelines, i don't think most of the webmasters will be able to work with such a system.

Google should clearly define the rules of the game. Then, people can play it better.

Google has hidden most of its ranking factors over years.

I agree with that. I also agree with those posters who don't believe penalizing a whole site because of a few bad pages doesn't provide the best results.

I would love to know more about their ranking systems. Perhaps if they provided too much info they are worried we will game the system.

We are like the blind men trying to describe an elephant. But we can get an idea by working backwards.

Here is a suggestion:

If someone is going by site traffic or $$, they don't have the whole picture. They need to print their SERPS and compare them over time. Did their site move up or down the SERP ranks over time for SPECIFIC TERMS. That is the only way to determine if they were hit.

[c41lum]

I have been hit pretty hard by this last update, I don't mind, I have actually come to expect Google to mess there results up every 6/7 weeks. What I do mind about though is having my hard worked scrapped and rubbish no original content WP sites ranking above me for that content.

Since the 14th Oct update the majority of my pages are now out ranked by scrapers. My US site has completely disappeared and when I do a unique string search I get ranked last behind 8 scrapper sites.