Minor Panda Update 19 Nov - Google announced on Twitter

[gyppo]

I haven't seen any change across any of the sites I monitor but saw this tweet earlier today:

[twitter.com...]

Official Google Twitter account announcing a small Panda update impacting 1% of queries on 19th Nov.

Anyone seeing anything?

[edited by: tedster at 5:18 am (utc) on Nov 21, 2011]
[edit reason] help the link resolve [/edit]

[Donna]

As I said earlier noindex is your best friend lately . Some of the top websites in my niche have no more then 150 pages indexed, which is just plain stupid for the amount of visitors for each given query and information provided on these sites. ! In fact a website ranking #1 for multiple terms each around 200-500k monthly has less then 200 pages indexed. All those terms very competitive and very well converting. Not to mention the links on the main page are 95% affiliate and ads, the rest are internal links. This is the trend for this niche and those are the type of sites dominating the serps there. And trust me there are many authority websites who can not come close to the junk ones. And one more thing , the majority of those sites are wordpress.

[wheel]

I just launched a few thousand pages of content. Should be interesting to see what happens. I launched the top tier page on my main website so that I can draw links to that page, but launched all the content on a subdomain.

[Web_speed]

Why is it after EVERY SINGLE ONE of these bloody updates do two of our sites get nothing but junk foreign traffic? Do Google WANT us out of business?

+1

The updates are weekly now ?!

[ken_b]

Here's a small recovery.

Feb 20: of 51 pages, 45 were on page 1, the overall average spot was 6.

Feb 25; of 51 pages, 18 were on page 1, the overall average spot was 18.

Jun 26 of 51 pages, 2 were on page 1, the overall average spot was 32.

Nov 26: of 51 pages, 17 were on page 1, the overall average spot was 13.

Still got a long way to go. But for these pages things are at least looking a little better.

It's hard to measure the imapact yet. These are event list pages, so the content changes often. On top of that, November and December are the low points for the year as far as new listings and traffic go. By February, when Panda hit, new listings (and traffic) are picking up quickly.

Time will tell what happens next.

[Content_ed]

My bigger Pandalized site is up 25% on Google since the little update, but it's still down 63% year-on-year. No new content, other than a few blog posts, but a lot of DMCAs filed.

[topstar]

I gained a little Nov 19 but it all went down again today.

I'm dropping like a rock, more and more every month. How can I fight with the big brands that buy links and crosslink between their multilingual sites?

[tedster]

How can I fight with the big brands that buy links and crosslink between their multilingual sites?

That's not really a Panda issue. It's at best a PageRank issue. Even if your site fell into a vat full of backlinks, it's not likely to be what you need to compete with the perceived quality of household brand name sites - or get you past the roadblock of a Panda demotion.

There is a complex pile of signals being mashed up these days, and in my experience, it's best to look beyond links.

[falsepositive]

Tedster is right. I haven't built links since Panda hit my site in February. All I did was focus on quality. So far, I am up 100% (G traffic) since the last November Panda iteration (where I was stuck forever). It was the first time since Feb. I saw any meaningful improvements. I've rewritten some content but there's so much more to do.

[Pjman]

@falsepositive

Any hints as to what you think helped the most?

I decided to focus on noindexing any thing seems thin.

Also focusing on fixing every single error reported in WMT.

Any others?

[falsepositive]

@Pjman, I have spent the last 9 months retooling my site completely. To be honest, it is a combination of so many things, but I *may* have noticed the most improvements after I rewrote material that was outdated or thin (by my new standards). I did a lot of "cleaning up". I believe now that unless you rework particular pages, they will probably stay in the dumps, and enough of those and your entire site is demoted, as has been the consensus about Panda for a while now. I am revisiting each page I have and making sure that there is nothing "embarrassing" about them today. I had found a lot of old articles in my site that I would be a little embarrassed to showcase today, and if I get that feeling, I rework them.

That said, I have to say that I was noticing slides in traffic each time Panda hit, which would recover to the same point in a week or so. Then in October, there was a little bit of a rise, but too little to matter. November is the first time in 9 months I've seen a pronounced increase, albeit nowhere near former traffic levels (last year). I am still 50% down Google (as opposed to 75% to 80%) But I am encouraged by the partial improvement. I am hoping it sticks and will only get better with subsequent Panda cycles. I am now noticing that scrapers don't usually rank above my articles (there are a few exceptions), which was not the case before. I continue to DMCA the annoying cases.

[Martin Ice Web]

@falsepositive cleaning up and rewrite content does not fit to the current serps. I see a lot of thin content pages, redirects .... pages in top positions.
Why do we have to do the work that the search engine was originaly written for? Google has n o way to figure out what is thin or good content ( How could a machine do that ? ). So, best way is to push brands, prise comparing sites ... you know content is quiet ok.
There was a time before panda ,when I was looking for some coding the first page was full off forums with excellent coding material. Now this forums are nowhere to be found. I see thin pages, I have to rewrite my quer more then one times until i hit a good site with required information.
Bing is not better at all but good was better, now they are allmost serve the same results.

It is not the fact that your site or my site has been downgrade several times. Itīs the fact that now silly pages are showing up in serps.
I think it is a great job to filter x-pages out of billion from pages in less than a second. But if webmasters now have to decide if the site was thin or not then there is something wrong. Webmasters do not create sites with no information, we create sites because we want users to anticipate from our know how, products ...
Create sites for users, we shall do it, not for google. Google has to fix their algo.

[swampdeer]

@MartinIceWeb Thanks, I was beginning to think I was going mad, I'm seeing exactly the same, thin content, spammy domain names, spammy titles and spammy page names.

And I agree, until Google fixes this I will carry on building content for users not this current algorithm.

[Pjman]

@falsepositive

Thanks for the help.

I'm waiting for every new Panda tweak. I deindexed thousands of thin pages this time through. I only have meat left in the index, so I'm not sure what they want, if I don't see an improvement over the next two tweaks.