Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jan 2012

So far all of these updates are positive for us we were pandalized in Feb last year and slowly got more pandalized through the summer updates.
this is the first sign we have of any recovery.

Would you be kind to post fresh feedback whether your Pandalized site has been affected positively or negatively by any of the following non-Panda updates during this month, January 2012?

@reseller, how about your sites? Are you working with any Pandalyzed domains?

@reseller re: stats

Our site is new, launched in August with +/- 2 Million pages. Don't think site is "panda'd" but thought it might be due to temporary boom. Think this might just have been some sort of testing or something now.

Steady growth up until Dec.25th
12-25 - Started getting higher rate of growth
1-6: Huge increase, nearly 300%, continued rise until 1-24
1-24: Started dropping
1-27: Hit bottom (which was higher traffic then pre- 12-25 boom

Current traffic is on the rise but not near "boom" levels.

Our site is new, launched in August with +/- 2 Million pages.

How does a new site launch with 2-million pages? Is it ecommerce products or informational, etc? We have a site that's 2 years old, and still only have -1000 pages of content.

I'm genuinely interested and this may be a topic for another post. Sorry for the diversion.

MH

@tedster

Have no Pandalized site(s) and not working on any Pandalized domains.

Just watching closely and studying deeply ;-)

@mhansen - national real estate listings...

@reseller

Pandalized site has gone up with each tweak in jan.

@jqwan, same here.... Feb pandalized site gets a bump up with each update since October -- it's been trending up almost weekly.

Does anyone have data/reasons to support if the Panda data-refresh happened on Jan 19, Jan 24 or another date?

I had removed potential thin-content pages from my US-site in Dec, and saw a 10% jump in long-tail traffic starting Jan 24th. I am trying to determine if this can be co-related to the Panda data refresh.

My data points are:
@reseller has posted on this thread about potential "Google Algorithm Update on Jan 24th and Jan 28th".

Barry Schwartz posted on SearchEngineLand on Jan 25th that Google acknowledged a panda data-refresh 'sometime last week' - but there was nothing specific about the exact date.

@tedster posted the iteration date as Jan 19th on [webmasterworld.com...] - based on the discussions on this thread.

2/24 Pandalized site has stayed same with each tweak in Jan

@robert76

2/24 Pandalized site has stayed same with each tweak in Jan

Have you made any changes to your Pandalized site since 2/24?

@jbcobbs - Thank you, that makes perfect sense.

Seems to me that it's not clear whether the 19th / 20th was a panda refresh as well as page layout release, especially for those who had intrusive ads because it makes it difficult to work out which algo was behind a potential traffic drop

Have you made any changes to your Pandalized site since 2/24?

Hundreds and hundreds.

I think the drop in traffic with my site on the 24th was not necessarily due to Panda. Probably just an algorithm change with signals that downgraded various pages on my site for whatever reason.

Hi,

I noticed the same happening to me with two sites on Jan 24, I use to be in positions 6 and 7 for main keywords on each site. then on the Jan 24 my positions moved to page 6 and page 7, my long tailed keywords went up, overall my hits to my sites are up 20%.

I first noticed the kw postion decline with a site that I was building some backlinks for, I immediately thoughts Oops. I did someting wrong with that one site, then I noticed the exact type of kw decline with a site that I hadn't touched for a long time..

After looking into webmaster tools, it said that I had in excess of 2,000,000 links from one of my other sites where I had placed links within the footer of each page pointing back to me partner sites using the same keyword that google killed me for. I am now assuming that because google nailed both sites that the problem must have been with the links back to these site that I had within the footer.. and have now removed them, I thought that have links in the footer didn't account for much, but I am now assumming that google considered this a No No..

Also I'm not sure where google ever came up with 2,000,000+ links as the site for sure doesn't have that many pages... thus that many footers with links in them.

Anyway I would be interested in hearing anyones thoughts. I also noiced that one ofmy competitors whom clearly buys many links and has a blog roll in his site going on for hundreds of pages with the exact same content with the exception of changing the city name withiin then title is now in a better SEO position then I, it seems hardly fair that google doesn't seem to take hit site into account...

< continued here [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 5:42 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2012]