Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jan 2012

[londrum]

< continued from: [webmasterworld.com...] >

i tried to sprinkle different variations of one phrase onto each page

if the target phrase was "big red widgets" then the page might have a couple mentions of each of these

big widgets
big red widget things
big widget things
big red things
red widgets

plus an exact match in the <title> and <h1>

[edited by: tedster at 12:31 am (utc) on Jan 2, 2012]

[Content_ed]

Blogs are Panda death. Even top bloggers, like Seth Godin, have seen big Panda drops. Matt Cutts blog got hit by Panda if you believe Alexa, I don't hear Matt bragging about it, but his frequency has dropped to around a post a month.

Google hates blogs because it sees them as duplicate content. It's impossible to blog about the same subject on a regular basis for years without the blog posts looking the same to Google, which face it, isn't too bright.

I used to be the top blogger in my field, main two word key phrase was always above the fold pre-Panda, just below WikiPedia and a couple $100M+ companies selling services. Now my blog is lucky to make the third page of results. The only change I've made to my main site since getting eaten by Panda was deleting around 500 old blog posts. I arbitrarily got rid of the ones that had the fewest incoming links, but there hasn't been a Panda update since. I noindexed them as well, didn't even try to salvage the page rank.

For what it's worth, Google had been hating on blogs for some time before Panda as well, all their talk about fresh content is BS.

[onebuyone]

Blogs are invaluable source of information SOMETIMES, but I guess that Google is aware of cheap idea of content farming via blogs, which is obvious concept for anyone trying to make easy money on the internet. "Cheap blogs" are also created for linking purposes so this is another reason why Google should kill them.

For all those webhamsters, who are not making cheap content farms: try to NOT make your website look like a blog

My bet on current G!@#le update:

They adjusted traffic shaping curve, you will get minimum traffic on friday already, not on saturday as it used to be. Curve starts going down since wensday already.

I observed some changes in rankings, but still I go with my bet:
> This is update of traffic shaping algo <

[edited by: onebuyone at 7:48 pm (utc) on Jan 16, 2012]

[Hooya]

" all their talk about fresh content is BS"

I think fresh content in relation to number of pages/non updated pages is very important. If someone has 2000 old static pages but only 1 blog page gets updated once a week you could well be in trouble.

[Bewenched]

Not sure if there was a recent "panda" update, but traffic and sales increased dramatically today for our pandalyzed ecommerce site.

[alhutch]

our site got a boost starting Saturday and Sunday, today looks better as well, we are e commerce also. the weird thing was bing and yahoo traffic flat so it does not seem seasonal.

[reseller]

@alhutch

Has your ecommerce site been affected by a previous Panda update?

Thanks.

[alhutch]

yes we got nailed in February 2011, this little boost still not close to where we were.

[Hooya]

anyone noticed increase cpc on adsense without an increase in overall traffic.

[reseller]

Hi Folks!

Of course its too early to draw any conclusion about the effects of algorithm changes which has been taking place since 4th-5th Janury 2012.

However it seems that some of the effects of the said update are as follows:

- Partial recovery of some Pandalized sites

- Some other Pandalized sites being hit again

- Drop in organic traffic to some blogs

Pease keep observations coming. Thanks a bunch.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:14 am (utc) on Jan 17, 2012]

[mhansen]

anyone noticed increase cpc on adsense without an increase in overall traffic.

Yes, we saw it drop by 35-40% in early December... and beginning over the weekend, recovered almost exactly.

In our field, that's normal every year between Thanksgiving and Xmas, and the recovery in January is par for the course as well.

MH

[Gshaughn]

My other sites running WP blogs in the same, or similar, capacity, have shown no significant changes. Must be either a matter of time, or something else, with my site(s) that got hit.

I know content had not been modified in years on the site that suffered the biggest hit, particularly on pages that got hit the hardest.

[Gshaughn]

@reseller "Some other Pandalized sites being hit again "

In my case, the site(s) that suffered 75-95% drop in organic traffic were never pandalized. They were stable and steadily improving over the past 16-18 months. This was the first hiccup in ages.

[garyr_h]

anyone noticed increase cpc on adsense without an increase in overall traffic.

I'm seeing decrease in CPC by over 50%.

Is there any possibility that this is a panda-recalculation and not a panda update?

For that I mean, simply crawling the panda bot and recalculating our panda-scores.

[gyppo]

SERPS bouncing around all over the place today, almost looks like it's switching between 2 or 3 sets of data (on a Pandalized website). Non-Pandalized seems much more stable.

[Hooya]

Thanks mhansen

I don't know Gary. I only have a small % of ads that are adsense but for the last 4/5 months cpc went down to pennys. This week I am now getting £1-£1.50 per click.

Obviously maybe I have moved higher on certain keywords so they now pay more but overall traffic numbers have remained the same so I wouldn't have thought this to be the case.

[Martin Ice Web]

gyppo,

confirmed, looks like a new panda update.
Since yesterday we steadily gained more traffic, looked very good.
Today it seems like a switch turned on/off every few minutes.

[ehgee]

Is there any possibility that this is a panda-recalculation and not a panda update?

For that I mean, simply crawling the panda bot and recalculating our panda-scores.

certainly seems that way for me

[reseller]

@Gshaughn

In my case, the site(s) that suffered 75-95% drop in organic traffic were never pandalized.

Thanks for drawing my attention to that point. Accordingly I'm updating the list of the effects of the current Google's algorithm update which has been underway since 4th-5th January 2012 as follows:

- Partial recovery of some Pandalized sites

- Some other Pandalized sites being hit again

- Some Non-Pandalized sites being hit

- Drop in organic traffic to some blogs

[tedster]

Given the spread of dates over almost a two week period, I suggest that we're looking at more than one update.

[AlyssaS]

Agree that there are two updates - Jan5th and Jan14th. IMO the first one was to do with scrapers/duplicates and the second was to do with link quality and neither was Panda. G seems to have been playing with both since Dec.

(P.S. I'm sure we saw something similar at the start of 2010 - there was a scraper update late Jan, a link update Feb 8th and then Panda.)

[workingNOMAD]

So how can Google tell if your site is a blog or not? I use Wordpress as a content management system, it's not a blog but more like a magazine websites. The posts are articles, not blogs. Will I get penalised?

[reseller]

@tedster

Are you thinking of a situation similar to that of 2007 ;-) [webmasterworld.com...]

[Gshaughn]

@AlyssaS what makes you think the change on the 14th was link quality related? Very curious, thanks!

[tedster]

@reseller - that's been the situation with Google ever since 2007! Only Panda "iterations" come along one in many weeks. The rest of the algorithm gets updates, both big and small, almost every day.

[oneniture]

@alhutch. I am an eccomerce site as well. Badly beaten on February 24th by Panda. Traffic down for most of the year 70-75%. We got some small seasonal lifts around holiday as we do every year. But on January 11th we got a small bump from the prior week, then on Saturday January 15th got a huge bump to the most traffic we had since February 23. If this sticks its not a full recovery, but puts us around 50% instead of 75% which is a huge boast. Has anyone been able to confirm with google whether it was a panda update or regular algorithm update?

[skweb]

I can also confirm that one of my websites got a big jump this past weekend. Background: About 3k indexed pages, about 350 daily visitors, not Pandalized Feb'11 but traffic continued to go down in subsequent Panda updates to about 150. During this one year period, I did not publish even one new page and basically abandoned it since the income was very small and at one time I had even sold paid links on this domains (I made my money while it lasted and did not care that G would not like it). And now despite making zero changes (I do not think that I have gained any good links) since Panda started, it is back with a bang and I am ranking for dozens of highly desirable keywords.

Google is so messed up and Panda has been nothing but a disaster. My excellent sites that are of the highest quality and brought $100,000 plus a year in AdSense are suffering while bad websites like this one and other content farms are thriving.

Has G abandoned search altogether and getting obsessed with social media?

[reseller]

@tedster

I wonder whether they have already incorporated Panda different factors within the general scoring algorithms. I.e we are not gonna hear about a Panda update anymore ;-)

[tedster]

I'm wondering the same thing - but it will be a major achievement when they do that, and I'd expect to see some kind of "bragging".

Then again, as someone else already observed, there may well be a difference between just running an iteration of Panda (taking in new data) and actually updating the Panda Algorithm itself (adding new metrics, weighting.)

[alhutch]

as an ecommerce site I am seeing Amazon rankings down across the board.

[Gshaughn]

another observation on my side - seems keyword related more so than page related. Rankings for some keywords remain the same or fell slightly, others fell completely off for the same page.

Would that suggest a kw related factor was tweaked? Perhaps anchor text weighting? Or, perhaps CTR for particular kw phrase being weighted more heavily?

Seems like if/when old content is hit, the whole page is hit, losing all terms, not preserving some. Also, bounce rate and time on page for some of the pages that lost a lot of kw positions were good, well above average.

Anyone observed similar in the 1/14 update?