A Panda Update for Christmas? Is this the longest between updates?

[acee]

I doubt if Google will want to run Panda before Christmas, but I most certainly do! Now that would be a nice Christmas present - even if the results showed no improvement, at least you can try something else - I'm thinking pig farming!

My site was hit hard on October 14th on the back of increased traffic, dramatically reduced bounce rate, increased views per visitor and a tidy improvement in conversion rate. So why punish a site visitors like to use?

I've done some serious housekeeping so the next Panda update will be the acid test for my conspiracy theory: positive visitor metrics = mauling by Panda!

In the event that there is no Panda update I think an appropriate graphic theme for the Google Christmas logo will be Scrooge!

The frequency of these updates is such that it is destroying businesses. I'd like to turn their traffic off for a couple of months for no good reason, see how they feel about it. Perhaps the European Commission could impose limitations on their access to the internet in Europe instead of a massive fine over the Anti-Trust case.

[AlyssaS]

'new business model which is buy a Pandalised website for a knock-down price' - great phrase for people on this thread - I'm sure that will be appreciated!

Perhaps you could point us in the direction of these refurbished sites with big earnings, so that in the true spirit of webmastership, we can learn from our peers.

Check out this thread by Brinked:

[webmasterworld.com...]

There's plenty of other stuff on here from people who have got out of Panda (including from me back in July).

The search function is your friend...

[netmeg]

Umm, anti-trust isn't the same as trust (as in whether or not you trust Google) - look it up.

Even without all the other stuff that Google has added, there have never been more than ten links on the first page. When someone falls, someone rises. It has always been this way.

As I mentioned in the e-commerce forum, you need to have the same adaptability online as you would need to have offline. Google stops sending you traffic - you need a plan B. Or the city rips up the street in front of your brick and mortar store for a year and you get no foot traffic - you still need a plan B.

Point to other search engines? They're not lily white either. Did you read about how Bing deindexed a bunch of Black Friday and Cyber Monday related sites a couple days before Thanksgiving, promoted its own BF and CM results, and then quietly restored the sites well after the shopping surge was over? If Google had done that, there would at very least be a NY Times article written by now. That sure *looks* pretty evil.

It's been almost a year since the first Panda, and it's time to get real. The government is not going to step in and run Google; people don't think the government can run health care, they're not going to want it to essentially run the internet. Moreover, it's international, so one government *can't* make these kinds of changes. Google isn't going to care about any one of us individually. Microsoft has all the money in the world and still can't seriously dent Google's hold on search, nor is Bing proving to be any kind of white knight either. And you can't *make* people not use Google if that's what they want to use.

You need to focus on what you can control. First look at your business model - even if it's been a good one, are a million other people doing exactly the same thing? Can you do it significantly (and visibly) better? If not, then find a better model, because you will be winnowed out.

And if you can't keep up, if you can't learn to adapt quickly, then you really have to question whether or not you're in the right business at all.

Yea, I said it.

[acee]

@AlyssaS - Thanks for the link - it would be nice to think that there was hope - but the thread was hardly conclusive. The original poster didn't indicate if he'd kept the content on the original domain or a new one. Any idea?

You guys still seem to be looking at Google and/or SN, while the Anti-Trust investigations may be the only opportunity there is to undermine public trust in Google and allow a proportion of searchers to use alternative engines.

Eric Schmidt wants to bring these investigations to a rapid close. Too right he does. The anti trust case could cause massive damage to Google, not just in terms of the fine, but it could be a tremendous boon to the internet as a whole.

[Planet13]

..while the Anti-Trust investigations may be the only opportunity there is to undermine public trust in Google and allow a proportion of searchers to use alternative engines.

Well, if it is hard to rank at the top of a single search engine (i.e., google), think how hard it will be to rank at the top of SEVERAL search engines.

If google's share of search were somehow split up amongst, say, four search engines, wouldn't that make it four times harder to rank at the top since you would have to master four different algorithims?

Personally, I rank much better in google than in bing or yahoo, or duck duck go, or any of the other search engines. Splitting up google's share of the search market amongst other search engines would have just as many losers as there were winners, IMHO.

[Frost_Angel]

I read this entire thread and I'm glad I did. Because out of all the posts - what I am taking away is to just keep improving my site. Granted - I dismantled it, tore it apart, removed 100's of pages.... and I was angry about it at first - because it had ranked in the top three for 11 years - but now I feel like it was a long time coming - I needed to make some changes and make the site more about my visitors and less about profit which was why I started the site in the first place. The money muddies everything.
Of course money is great - I'm not stupid or naive - but I feel like this was a call to get back to basics.
Has it helped since my site got Pancer on April 12th? No. But I do try and not let my entire day be focused on Google. I switched to Bing months ago - and happier for it just from a sanity point of view. LOL

[Web_speed]

@ AlyssaS

acee - there is no anti-trust issue because for every website that sinks, another rises.

This used to be the case but not anymore. Nowdays, "for almost every website that sinks, a big brand or Google proprty rises"...

[Andem]

@AlyssaS

My advice would be to stop wasting your time tilting at windmills and start focusing on improving your website and developing other traffic streams.

There's a little FF addon I use called mywot. It's utterly absurd that Google would be serving pages with such bad user experience that users take the time to rate these sites badly and post their disgusted comments. Search results are absolutely riddled with bad ratings from users who probably found these sites via Google search.

Yesterday, I was showing a friend of mine what the search results looked like, and then provided him with proof (and a quick explanation) that 8/10 of the top ten SERPs purchase truckloads of links. At least a couple of these top 10 sites also have complaints (a lot of them) of tricking users into installing malware. At least 6 in the top 20 results had "red" ratings -- meaning stay away.

Is this how people are supposed to improve their sites in order to be worthy of some decent rankings for content that people seemed to really love before Google started with their Panda shenanigans? Whatever Google is saying, it's dishonest. If you want some more insight, check out some third party ratings of some of the sites you see every now and then in the top 10 (minus Google.com and Wikipedia).

Do you know why nothing happened? Because they were outnumbered by people like yourself at the time who were ranking just fine and thinking "why should I rock the boat, I might be forced to give up my rankings just to bail out these other people". You say you don't trust them and "several people on this thread don't trust them" - but none of you uttered a peep back in Feb during the first round! LOL

Well it's hardly funny that you're "LOL"ing or laughing at people who previously did very well and perhaps even have had thousands of real, positive social signals like Facebook "likes" and/or thousands of backlinks. I think it's horrible that you're laughing at someone else's misfortune because they were doing well playing by the rules and now things are looking very fishy (see above).

Needless to say, a lot of people that were affected by Panda deserved it. Many others, and perhaps even the ones that you're laughing at, really didn't. I can think of a few myself who actually took part in Google case studies which may or may not still be published on Google's site somewhere.

[gyppo]

Google released another weather report via Twitter:

[twitter.com...]

Looks like no major updates until the New Year.

[robert76]

I doubt if Google will want to run Panda before Christmas, but I most certainly do! Now that would be a nice Christmas present - even if the results showed no improvement, at least you can try something else - I'm thinking pig farming!

I agree, it would be a good present and we would have some indication how to proceed. Would even possibly save the last weekend of holiday shopping. Very disappointed to read this weather report that there won't be major Panda updates until the new year.

[micklearn]

Lots of people are doing very well indeed out of Panda - some have even got a new business model which is buy a Pandalised website for a knock-down price, fix it, and voila, big earnings.

Wow, not the most ethical way of doing business, though, right?

[Planet13]

Wow, not the most ethical way of doing business, though, right?

While I haven't been able to score any panadlized web sites, I really don't see anything wrong with it.

What would the difference be between that and, say, a merchandise liquidator who buys up inventory from companies that go out of business and sells it for a profit. Or those "storage wars" guys that buy up the contents of storage containers when they go on auction because the owners stopped paying their rents (or died).

If you can't "fix" your pandalized website, then why not sell it to someone who can?

Now, if google were going around pandalizing profitable websites so the owners would go out of business, and then google were buying them up to make money off of them, well, THAT would be a story.

[falsepositive]

Now, if google were going around pandalizing profitable websites so the owners would go out of business, and then google were buying them up to make money off of them, well, THAT would be a story.

Or if google were going around pandalizing profitable websites so the owners would go out of business, and then google enters the space with its own properties, then THAT would be a story.

Oh wait.....

[rlange]

Web_speed wrote:
Did you know they deliver their spybars into user machines with every flash player update?... the option to download and install the spybar together with the browser flash player is selected by default...

Only they (and adobe) would know how many trillion times this happens every week...

Spybar installed = total machine/joe-public control !

Call me tin hat paranoid if you'de like, but sometimes i can help it getting the feeling we are dealing with a very cleaver 1000 heads slithery Snake...

I'm pretty sure that anyone that has installed anything that includes a bundled third-party application is aware of this. It's quite common. There's no sense in singling out Google as the only, or even most heinous, perpetrator of this sort of scheme.

acee wrote:
Talk of improving your website is nonsense. You were making an income from it before Panda, so why not now.

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

— Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)

Some people love to throw the phrase "adapt or die" at corporations, but for some strange reason they absolutely refuse to apply the sentiment to small businesses or individuals, especially themselves.

--
Ryan

[Web_speed]

I'm pretty sure that anyone that has installed anything that includes a bundled third-party application is aware of this.

Don't be! ..... your statement shows luck of experience.

The spybar is being unintentionally installed over millions of machines every day by joe public and their family galore. It is a sad fact of life and a major part of the reasons Google are so popular and successful.

Common scenario: Son or dogther wants to play a game online, browser often needs to update the macromedia player. Son/dogther clicks "OK" this and "OK" that so they can get on with their game (third party applications? ha? what the.. "OK" "OK" "OK"). Bingo, spaybar downloaded and installed, start background Google "update" services, change home page, turn on keywords suggestion default (so Google can immediately get a feedback of every freaking thing joe public type into their adderss bar). Bingo! machine fully owned... and this happens millions of times around the world every freaking day.

I have many clients. Some of my clients would hardly know how to write and send an email yet when i check their machine i see the spybar installed and running. You get the drift...

No one is sneaking and spreading as bad or as fast as they do, no one...

[rlange]

Web_speed wrote:
Don't be! ..... your statement shows luck of experience.

Hardly. This bizarre belief of yours that Google is either the only or the worst offender indicates a lack of experience with installer bundling on your part, not mine.

The Yahoo! Toolbar and Ask Toolbar are other toolbars that have made their way into a number of application installers that I've experienced, and they're all selected by default.

Installer bundling is one of the weakest issues to champion in any anti-Google fanaticism. Installer bundling sucks, but again... don't try to convince people that Google is the only or worst offender here; they're not. Not even close.

--
Ryan

[Web_speed]

The Yahoo! Toolbar and Ask Toolbar are other toolbars that have made their way into a number of application installers that I've experienced, and they're all selected by default

The others are not bundled with nearly as much popular/essential applications like the macromedia player OR take control of computers and browsers the way the spybar does....

Once again... luck of experience buddy!

my "bizarre beliefs" are a sad fact of life we webmasters later have to deal with...

[micklearn]

I really don't see anything wrong with it.

Really? Well, that's good to know, I guess...

If you can't "fix" your pandalized website, then why not sell it to someone who can?

Why, you've asked?...because I don't have the heart to take advantage of a small business owner who's never even visited WebmasterWorld or a similar forum and has no idea what 'Panda' is... I'd rather try and help them.

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Point to other search engines? They're not lily white either. Did you read about how Bing deindexed a bunch of Black Friday and Cyber Monday related sites...

That should have gotten more attention than it did...