One-on-one from Matt Cutts about Panda

[whatson]

So I had the good fortune to get some face time with Mr Cutts, and considering Panda is the main thing affecting me at the moment, it was oriented mainly around that.
I know some of it has already been discussed, speculated and thought before, but this is from the horses mouth:

- its just an algo, any site can get out of it.

- he would not confirm what the factors they are looking for, other than on page factors, or if there even are - my interpretation was that they are potentially monitoring bounce rates, time on site, pageviews per visitor, and social factors.

- it was targeted at content farmers but has gone much further than that.

Amit also said as rule to what a quality site is - is if you wanted your children to learn about something, this is the site that you would send them to.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Amit also said as rule to what a quality site is - is if you wanted your children to learn about something, this is the site that you would send them to.

Coppa integration in serps?

[linkbuildr]

anything new to report?

[ErnestHemingway]

Amit is smart guy for sure knows the IRS inside out and is one of the living giants in area of IRS.

My only issue is that at the end of the day it is an ALGO and not a HUMAN recommending a website to his/her kids.

I have seen great sites get nuked by Panda which I would not not only recommended to my KIDS but to my grand kids and their coming generation. I guess it will take time for Panda to get good at what it does.

One of my good sites never recovered even though it has all sort of great recommendation. Lets just wait for Panda to get better..

[GlobalMax]

- its just an algo, any site can get out of it.

What do you mean by "any site can get out of it"?

[tedster]

Any site can improve its "quality score" so that Panda no longer demotes its URLs. In other words, there's no permanent black mark against the site as there could be in the case of a spam penalty.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Good point, would you allow Google's algo to decide which site your kids see is a more appropriate answer.

I can find hundreds of examples that say no, I wouldn't, but that's statistically insignificant I'm sure.

[whatson]

They admitted that its not perfect and there are good sites that are suffering, MC even mentioned Danniweb, and how it came out, and then went back in. They don't care how much it screws with other sites.

Yes, you change your site accordingly, and then when the next panda update occurs you will be out of it. But it is on a sliding scale.

[Reno]

Any site can improve its "quality score" so that Panda no longer demotes its URLs.

This is the best news to come from MC for awhile, as it means there is no permanent demotion. However, like almost everything he says, the devil is in the details. My guess is, once you crash & burn, it takes MUCH more to get back into position again, as opposed to a newer site that has not fallen from grace.

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

[whatson]

Apparently not. But then again it depends on what data they are looking at. e.g. bounce rates, from how far back do they check the bounce rate of the site to determine it has a higher [panda] quality score?
Other issues like duplicate content are much easier to determine.

[MikeNoLastName]

Looks a lot to me like keyword stuffing is loved by Panda. In my niches, the top 10 sites' content averages about 11%-25% of the keyword(s) they rank for on their top ranking page. 1 in 10 to 1 in 4 of the words on that page match the keyword! Unbelievable!
"Site where you would send your kids?" (Did he say what age of kids? what if you don't have kids?) Should we start every page with "Hello Kids, I am your friend..." That'll only get you arrested in many places. So now Google wants us to illustrate our sites with action comics, colorful unicorns and puppies, huh? Uh-oh, come to notice, those same top 10 sites mentioned above ARE also almost all full of fancy schmancy graphics, flash and gifs and very little content otherwise. Looks like G is trying to put a lot of computer graphic artists to work and dumb-down the internet.

[whatson]

Hmm, funny you say that, when I showed MC my site he read through one page, it was about a theme park, and the description read "It is one of the.."
MC told me why do I have "it" I should replace it with the name of the theme park. I didn't think much of it at the time, but maybe he was giving me a huge clue?

[GlobalMax]

It's probably more a snippet suitability issue than a keyword frequency issue. Using the actual name rather than a pronoun is good form in a topic sentence, which I suspect also increases its usefulness as a snippet when the topic sentence separated from the referent.

[whatson]

Sure, but why would MC care enough to tell me what a 5th grade English teacher can? Am I reading into it too much?

[GlobalMax]

They "are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content" for snippets [1], so I'm pretty sure he had snippet quality in mind when he recommended that you use the referent rather than the pronoun.

[1] [insidesearch.blogspot.com ]

[tedster]

I think it's a big fat clue, whatson - and one that an English teacher might even DIS-agree with. To be highly effective, web writing needs a lot more redundancy than offline writing. Yes, the fact that snippets are extracted and taken out-of-context is part of it.

Also, visitors often scan a lot and then jump into reading a sentence. If the meaning requires them to back up, you may have just turned that visit into a "short click".

[edited by: tedster at 4:01 am (utc) on Nov 15, 2011]

[whatson]

Thanks Tedster, I agree with you, good points.

[whatson]

I am changing all my pronouns, it may look over-optimized, but I think that is ok.

[potentialgeek]

This is the best news to come from MC for awhile, as it means there is no permanent demotion. However, like almost everything he says, the devil is in the details. My guess is, once you crash & burn, it takes MUCH more to get back into position again, as opposed to a newer site that has not fallen from grace.

The conclusion after experiments done by Search Engine Watch [webmasterworld.com...] is that there's a higher bar to get out of Pandalization.

I've heard that Google is so pleased with the success of Panda they doubt there will ever be another major update. They only need to tweak Panda from now on. This could explain why they are under strict orders not to divulge the secrets of Panda. Cutts and others have been extremely tight-lipped about Panda - arguably more so than any other major update in the company's history.

[whatson]

Sure, but it could be a temporary thing, as soon as the secrets get out, it might something so simple that anyone can make the tweaks to their site and be out.