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]

[viggen]

I noticed that one of my clients site rebounded from Panda the moment the site that gave pre-Panda the most referals. While the demotion was only in the 10% range the recovery was noticable and happend the moment that other site was back...

so are we underestimating the link power from trusted sites that are affected and indirectly affect your site?

[Whitey]

This means that my recovery came entirely from less trafficked single words.

I'm seeing this too.

[DirigoDev]

@viggen

What about the link power from trusted sites?

My site had ~300K inbound links. As a practice, we’ve never spammed blogs or done linking campaigns. This is natural linking that has happened over 10 years. We had 4 domains that accounted for 150K of these links. These four domains all linked to our home page. All 4 are super low quality junk sites that included us in their right or left-hand-navigations. I gather that they thought they were doing us a favor by linking to our page. Or they thought they would pick-up some value from linking to us. I’m not sure why they linked to us. I only know that they were bad players.

As part of our Panda fix we sent registered letters to these 4 domains asking them to cease linking to our domain. Three of the 4 domains stopped linking. One did not. The one domain has 80K pages linking to my home page. Wordpress accounts for ~20K, Blogspot 8K, Facebook 3.5K, etc. We now have just about 200K inbound links with 88K still bad.

I don’t believe that these 4 sites had anything to do with Panda. Nonetheless, we didn’t like the association. Our recovery came shortly after three of our largest liking domains stopped linking to us. I think, coincidence.

I’ve always wondered about the negative impact of bad players linking to me. It seems to me that Google would not penalize a site because of a few bad actors. Likewise, I doubt a single site like the one @viggen speaks about could produce a recovery.

[Reno]

I’ve always wondered about the negative impact of bad players linking to me. It seems to me that Google would not penalize a site because of a few bad actors.

Matt Cutts has said that there was "almost" no way that a competitor could bring down a person's Google ranking. But stories like yours makes me wonder if a concerted effort by a competitor that knew what they were doing and had no scrupples about doing it could in fact fit into the "almost" zone, no matter how narrow that zone may be.

......................

[menntarra 34]

Welcome to the forums, menntarra_34. I think your instincts are correct here. Handling pagination in a savvy way has become more important. And if the "search" URL is a site search result (result of user typing in search terms), then I'd keep it out of indexing altogether. It gives googlebot essentially and infinite URL space and that can lead to trouble.

So if i do not have results for example for the word "book", then i should disallow it to get into google index, while if i have results for eg. "train" with multiple pages, shall i keep all of these pages "allowed" to google to index, or only the first page?

[Leosghost]

As I said in another thread about SSL..if you didn't think that bad links could hurt you , and don't think that how you fare depends on who links to you ..just what did you think pagerank was all about ?

Listening to what Google says can get you hurt..

Blackhat SEO has been selling mass link attacks/ campaigns to "drop competitors" for years..There is software especially made to do it..just a variant on the link spammer software..

You rise or fall in Panda without doing anything much.. down to what happened to those around you ..and what happened to those who link to you..and what happened to those who link to those who are around you..

And if you did change stuff ..the foregoing still applies ..it isn't rocket surgery..

[coosblues]

my site, which has been around for 10+ years, has killer content, and authoritative one-way links got whacked yesterday...hard. replaced by large corporate owned websites or spammy sites.


I have almost the same identical set of conditions you mentioned. Traffic dropped by nearly 50%; adsense earnings tanked (no surprise). Should I wait this one out as in past updates or try and get proactive. Seems to me my only choice is to wait because I have no idea what "Panda" found wrong with my site.

It appears to me that the datacenters are still jumping around. Right now I'm seeing two distinctive sets. One from Panda's update a few days ago as mentioned by Matt Cutt's and either another new set or a set from an earlier Panda update. (I had quit following G's updates a few years ago largely because my site was stable. I only found out about Panda when my site first tanked.) Currently my site is back. I did a few things: I went through the entire site checking each outgoing link and found a few that were not valid. I also ran a spell-check on my pages. Found a good number of misspellings and fixed them. I also had an outgoing link from "this website" to one of my other websites. I removed that link so that there is no relationship between each site. I very slightly changed the title of the page (just two words) and changed my H1 tag on my index page to better reflect the title. I also picked up two new incoming links. Hope that helps!

[DirigoDev]

@Leosghost

I understand PageRank. What is happening right now with Panda, +1, and all the alog changes has everything to do with Google replacing the old PageRank system. That system was too easily manipulated by many of the folks here in WebmasterWorld. Hey, if you understand the system and exploit it - good for you. The patent is turning non-exclusive and Google is hellbent on replacing it with something so complicated that we can't understand it or exploit it as easily. And they also want to be Facebook?

If they keep screwing with us all they'll end up like Albert Bierstadt's painting depicts - the prediction that directly or indirectly caused them to sink in rough surf.

I agree that links are still very important and that the relationships are super important. That era is about done. A new era is upon us and Panda is but the first wave of change.

[CovertSEO]

<Quote>feel zero responsibility for the lives they are ruining</> I don't get your argument; it appears like it is some kind of entitlement. Google is a business model not a charity but rather an entity fueled by corporate greed and nothing else. Perhaps Darwins theory of evolution has began to set in and only the fittest among us shall survive.

[snickles121]

Heres a weird thing with my site right now and cant make sense of it. Last saturday and Sunday I checked my cache with Google and it said the last time indexed or cached was Oct 13, like all my competition was after the new Panda update. Yesterday and today it says last cached Oct 12 while all my competition has Oct 15-16 now.

Why would they go back on me? Dont know if thats a good or bad thing. Never seen that happen before.

[rlange]

CovertSEO wrote:
I don't get your argument; it appears like it is some kind of entitlement.

There seems to be this belief among some here that webmasters made Google what it is today by simply having websites. It's a bit like claiming that phone books wouldn't be what they are today without all those people with landline phones. It's not technically untrue, but it's still an extremely bizarre attitude.

*huff*

--
Ryan

[Leosghost]

@DirigoDev

I understand PageRank. What is happening right now with Panda, +1, and all the alog changes has everything to do with Google replacing the old PageRank system

My apologies :) ..I realise that you get it( from your subsequent and rapidly following post ;-) ..but many here seem to have forgotten what it means and just think of it as numbers like PR3 or PR8
.

That system was too easily manipulated by many of the folks here in WebmasterWorld.

"Never a truer* word" etc ..

Hey, if you understand the system and exploit it - good for you.

I was working on some stuff when they began testing it ..was intrigued and watched the build up and the rollout and subsequent iterations ..it went as I anticipated..is still doing so ..and as Swanson and I were talking about in another thread ( SSL ) when your data is very wide ranging ..and you can afford to experiment and let stuff "hang in the wind" to watch the eddies ..you get a better picture of what they are trying to do ..and especially making many hundreds of searches daily and repeating them at half daily intervals you get to be able to watch the flows and the A,B,C,D,E etc type testing going on ..and spot the effects of one part on another..( I get fascinated by the most unlikely things sometimes ..but it does help to see where people and things are going ..and to do that one needs to know accurately where they have been and where they are coming from ) ..threads here just confirm it..and many other things about Google and the trends on the web in general..I read daily almost every thread here ( I read so very very much faster than I can type )..whether I post in it or not ..and my recall is very good ..plus many many terra of archives of here and elsewhere ..


I digressed ..as usual ..happens..:)

The patent is turning non-exclusive and Google is hellbent on replacing it with something so complicated that we can't understand it or exploit it as easily. And they also want to be Facebook?

yep but I don't think that they are throwing PR away ..just morphing it and including it in a different mix..kind of like happens with patented medicines and pharma compounds..**

If they keep screwing with us all they'll end up like Albert Bierstadt's painting depicts - the prediction that directly or indirectly caused them to sink in rough surf.

As an artist, I like the reference, even the fact that you made it, even if it doesn't go that way, occasionally threads and conversations here have unrelated to "web" gems for me to stop and enjoy :)) can be some of the best conversations on the web are going on here ..sometimes..

**

I agree that links are still very important and that the relationships are super important. That era is about done. A new era is upon us and Panda is but the first wave of change.

Definitely ..interesting eh ? ;-))


* yeah awful grammar in modern terms ..but that is the way the saying is written..it is old ..lucy24 will be along to explain ..keep up ..there will be a test ;-)

edit - speeling

[edited by: Leosghost at 4:00 pm (utc) on Oct 21, 2011]

[azn romeo 4u]

Did google just unlease the international searchers? Because I just got a huge traffic spike from non-us countries. Looking like a 3x increase.

[Bill_H]

After recovering from the Oct 13 crash, rebounding to almost normal levels by Monday, we are starting to see traffic drop in almost exactly the same metrics as after the 13th roll out. Anyone else starting to see a drop off after the 19th or 20th?
Cheers,
Bill

[Donna]

I am dropping like a canon ball as of 19th. The serps in the dating niche are pure crazy just do a basic search on anything related you will be amazed by the php directories and crap that's ranking. It's all EMDs with extremely poor quality or dupe content with no quality at all. It is like the serps are reversed you should start from 1000 down :)

[chalkywhite]

Anyone noticing googlebot crawling ramping up again?

[Taqwaconsulting]

I lost another 50% traffic after this update :-(

Already my sites had lost nearly 70% of the traffic since the panda update.

I did everything that Google advised to do after panda roll out, then why the penalty? I followed every single bit of points given by matt cutts or other experts out there, but still got penalized! doesn't really make sense!

[Bill_H]

Hi All:
Prior to the Oct. 13th update we had been gaining traffic quite well under the various Panda algos. However we saw a significant decline in traffic after the Oct 13th update, then we saw a return to normalcy after that weekend, and then, a similar, but not as deep, decline in traffic heading starting on the 20th. Our traffic historically goes up on the weekends as we are an online [food] retailer.It almost feels as if the Oct 13th update was rolled back, slightly changed and started to roll out again around the 20th. Is anyone else seeing the same flux?

Thanks in advance,
Bill

[edited by: tedster at 7:30 pm (utc) on Oct 22, 2011]

[Bill_H]

Chalkywhite:
Googlebot has been hitting us unusually heavy since the 19th.

Cheers,
Bill

[buddhu]

@Bill_H

Is anyone else seeing the same flux?

Yup.

For a few days it looked settled. Over the weekend and this morning G seems to have rolled back to something that looks very much like a ridiculous set of results it was showing a couple of weeks back. This set was short-lived then... I hope it will prove to be transient this time as well. Pure junk.

[DirigoDev]

I've been holding back for the last 10 days and thought that I would open up. My Panda 2 recovery by the Panda 2.5.2 update continues to hold in that I have about the same traffic as prior to Panda 2. As previously stated, my traffic is different. And not in a healthy way.

I had some shifting but no real recovery in my core terms. Almost 100% of the traffic is coming from new long KW phrases with extremely low volume. We're talking 30,000 rows of data. All terms that we had zero traffic from prior to Panda 2.5.2. It is like they took the junk from ehow and gave it to us. This is not the sort of traffic that we want or know what to do with.

I guess we'll figure it out. Some traffic is better than none. Here is a sample of the queries. I've replaced the KW's as to not disclose the category.

what is XYZ ABC
what is TTT about XYZ ABC
what is 123 ZYZ
what is 456 supposed to feel like
what is A 888 test
what is ZYX 888 YYY test
what is XYZ D got to do with ABC
what is XYZ deficiency ABC
what is woman ABC
ZZZ and YYY
ZZZ good for YYY
ZZZ 123 for YYY
what are methods used to reset your 123456
what are ABC 123 what are thera 123
what are ABC EFG%3F
what are issues with ZZZ
what are ZZZ and YYY #*$! due to during UUU
what are AAA from BBB or CCC
what are JJJ KKK

Anyone else seeing this sort of thing? Honestly, we had zero of this junk traffic before Panda 2.

And finally, we lost ~5% of our new traffic from the 20th update.

[tedster]

DirigoDev, a similar pattern is being reported in this thread: Low Quality Traffic After The October 14 Panda Tweak? [webmasterworld.com]

[menntarra 34]

I was waiting to post this , cause i wanted to make sure this really persists:
As i already stated, my site traffic is down by 50% since the last Panda update, and at the same time strange thing is happening: google is crawling my site very hard, and my google indexed links have risen to an ever high number, basicly the links in google have trippled. I'm sure it is because of the Panda update.

[asusplay]

my main site which was hit on the 27th sept, came back on the 4th october and was hit again on the 14th october came back yesterday 26th october. I wonder how long for....i am not confident that any recovery will last long.

[bumpski]

Wow

What a surprise Oct 14th! Traffic down 66% on one site that's performed well and consistently for 8 years. Never really had a problem with any Google update, even Panda. Perhaps there was a very slight boost from Panda. But now this minor tweak! Many pages ranking top five now down to 10-15.
Small, multi-topic, mom & pop style site.
I suspect Google has de-rated a "time on page" factor, perhaps only for smaller sites. Perhaps sites with a lot of content presented on one very long page, versus paginated sites. It does appear more commercial sites are winners over small sites after the 13th.

I'm throwing the kitchen sink at it since there were some things to do anyway.

The domain ownership had slipped below 5 years, I like to keep it at 8 or above, shows commitment. Probably is another one of those 100 factors Google keeps tweaking!

Adsense: Adsense performance is terrible and it just keeps getting worse. So for now I'm dropping some ads. Image ads are incredibly poor performers! They load so many javascripts; it's incredibly inefficient! Little images like shopping carts, arrows, the number of requests is ridiculous. (They do pay reasonably well, but they did in the past too, when the ads performed much better)

Webmaster tools page load time, Adsense kills it. Turn off javascript (My adsense on off switch) the site screams even with Amazon ads (Amazon ads still render with no javascript and they render very quickly, server side rendering, properly in an IFrame (Asynchronous!).

Just before Oct 14th, there is this idiot generating 75 inbound links to one of this sites pages, so for a while I had thought this was a linking penalty until this thread. (I requested this MFA site remove the links! I know; good luck with that!)

Google itself is parsing text and creating very bad inbound crawl links, generating crawling errors just before this "minor" update. Googlebot is generating very bad requests! How do you fix that?

To date these changes have had no effect, but it's only been a few days. As always, with Google, you have to give it a month or two.

[brinked]

the biggest issue I have with panda is consistency. One of the fields I watch has been all over the place since panda. The SERpP's change every day and gogle keeps bringing in results from pages 4+ to test and then dropping them back.

One website saw a really big boost to the #3 position and every back link that I can see for it has the exact same anchor text which tells me it looks like google is starting to look more at on site factors and not putting everything into back links. That I can accept, but they have a long way to perfecting this method.

[sahm]

To date these changes have had no effect, but it's only been a few days. As always, with Google, you have to give it a month or two.

Good luck...I got hit with the first round of Panda, and there has been no change since February. I have since made many positive changes to my site, and they have had no effect whatsoever. Fortunately, I have other sources of traffic.

Removed thousands of pages of low quality content (old message forum), no change.

Lots of new original content, no change.

New links, no change.

Lots of interaction on Facebook and Twitter, no change.

My site has been around for 13 years. It has had its minor ups and downs with Google in the past, but it has always come back in a month or two. It's never been pushed down for this long before. I'm not getting my hopes up about it changing any time soon.

[Reno]

I'm not getting my hopes up about it changing any time soon.

That's the only attitude you can have, as there are precious few reporting a TRUE recovery from the Panda attack. Yes, some come back for a brief period, only to be knocked back down again. It appears that some have dodged the bullet entirely (for now at least), but for those of us that have been hit by this malignant adversary, it's like a contamination that we cannot cleanse. Up & down, down & up, like a yo-yo. Very exhausting, very frustrating, very disappointing, very perplexing. I and others are proceeding as though Google does not exist, and to be honest, if you want to keep your sanity, I think it's the only way forward ~ otherwise, the daily stress is too much.

......................

[tedster]

It appears that some have dodged the bullet entirely (for now at least)

I'd estimate about 85% are not affected at all - with another 5% showing losses that are at least "not drastic." But it sure does seem to be a major burden for those who did take a big hit.

[brinked]

I got an email on the 15th from someone an old friend referred to me. It was a guy who has a Halloween site and gets the site ready for halloween every year. He does not know much about SEO so he contacted me. He has a very high quality halloween site which he sells products he hand makes himself. He used to work for movies doing special effects makeup so now he sells really cool halloween stuff (high end stuff that really makes people stand out on halloween).

Anyway, he looks forward to Halloween season every year because he offers something very unique and he usually gets a lot of search traffic this time of year looking for this very type of product which very few offer. Anyway on oct 13 his site was knocked out eliminating all of his google traffic. I told him there was really nothing I can do and just keep working on his site and gulp...buy some adwords since his site really is that good that people will be willing to click and convert into actual sales. I hope it goes well for him but my heart really went out to him when I read his full story.

This is not a total loss for him because he was doing very well the weeks leading up to the 14th but he is now concerned about the upcoming years. It is just really sad because his site offers exactly what it showed up for in searches and now people are getting how to articles on about and youtube.