Google Updates and SERP Changes - Feb 2012

[robdob]

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

Any help would be greatly appreciated, is it possible that this lastest update woull dump the SEO of my sites because I had link to them within the footer of one of my other sites? Also Google shown within its webmaster tools that there were some 2,000,000 + pages linked from the footer to my site.. is this a reason for google to penalize me? Any input wouldbe greatly appreciates..

I own all the sites involved...

Thanks

[edited by: tedster at 5:41 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2012]

[Marketing Guy]

Seeing a huge change yesterday (Sunday 26th) - organic referrals up across the board. Almost 300% increase compared to previous Sunday. Still shooting 50% less than pre-Panda (April 2011), but I removed a lot of content so would expect it to be.

Main keyword rankings still up and down (sometimes they are jumping in at top 5, other days they're nowhere).

May not be a Panda thing though - I did merge two similar sites into one. Redirects in place and WMT new address, etc all done, so it could just be this kicking in.

Still nice to see a big increase in traffic (and earnings!).

[petehall]

I think the fact you now have to login to turn on web history might be having an impact. This always used to be a pain...

[Zivush]

My Adsense earnings have been more than tripled (!) within the last 6 days as compared to the usual average eCPM of the site.
haven't seen any change in traffic. I don't know the reason for this spike.
Has anyone find correlation with an upcoming Panda update and a huge spike (or dive) on Adsense?
I remember back on April11 when the site got hit, Adsense eCPM went down for several days before getting back to normal.
I hope I am not shooting the wrong direction.

[onebuyone]

Maybe some other adsense publishers from your niche got penalized, so thanks to lower number of impressions in system average CPC increased a bit. AdSense revenues were completely random for last few months.

[crobb305]

Anyone seeing significant traffic changes today?

[streetshirts]

Not for us in the UK

[netmeg]

Looks like Google confirmed another Panda run in February; not a lot of details about it though.

[insidesearch.blogspot.com...]

[crobb305]

thanks for that link netmeg. Interesting they say, "Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow." This may explain my traffic changes today. [insidesearch.blogspot.com...]

[suggy]

Don't see any movement in the UK. And my cache dates are woefully out of date? Don't we usually see a clean sweep of fresh dates with Panda updates?

[Whitey]

and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow.

... that probably includes the Panda refresh. I haven't seen any shifts reported yet on this yet, but hope there are some good news stories to come. Too much blood , sweat and tears out there.

Thanks to Amit @ Google for the comprehensive update. The Panda update / refresh nearly morphed into March leaving a Feb gap. Leaves a lot of us sweating profusely.

Ears to the ground time for signs of improvements.

[backdraft7]

At about 11pm CST last night the switch was turned off. Wish I could post a graphic from my server. Then at noon today the switched was turned back on. Seeing scrapers and dup sites winning again and legit sites losing. It will be a temporary issue, but one that recurs almost weekly now.

[BillyS]

From blogspot...

Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

[Web_speed]

At about 11pm CST last night the switch was turned off. Wish I could post a graphic from my server. Then at noon today the switched was turned back on. Seeing scrapers and dup sites winning again and legit sites losing. It will be a temporary issue, but one that recurs almost weekly now.

+1

:( ..... running on fumes now and about to go belly up. The condition of dead, no-sales weekdays and then a spat of few sales during the weekends are killing us.

These idiotic, good for no one updates are destabilizing the entire web and killing it, a death by thousand cuts! (or should i say *cutts*)

[onebuyone]

This is getting boring, looks like they will repeat full panda cycle from last year during this and next month.

[Whitey]

This may explain my traffic changes today

Up or down?

Still not seeing anything on threads here or elsewhere about changes, unless they occurred unnoticed earlier.

Tedster pinned the last refresh somewhere between 19 and 26 Jan. Does anyone know the details of that range. Why it took so long, and what rolled out first?

[crobb305]

Up or down?

Whitey, I am seeing 25% to 40% increase in traffic on two sites. I'm not counting on it to last. Seems sudden and dramatic.

[Whitey]

@crobb305 - any observations that could give you a hint that it might be Panda related?

I've been watching individual page improvements all month, but they have all tended to be within the existing "quality score" which i assume comes on each data refresh. Nothing site-wide though and nothing with any overall traffic improvement significance.

With everything else going on, plus folks mending their sites for Panda it's hard to pinpoint.

[seaworthy]

I am seeing partial recovery of Pandalized sites in the last day or two. Not complete recoveries but many keywords that were in the top 5 before the Oct 14 2011 update have moved up anywhere between position 5 and 15 after languishing on the 3rd or 4th page.

The quality of the traffic has increased too. I am actually getting real enquiries and interaction via my contact forms which pretty much ceased last year when the traffic levels plummeted.

Adsense CTR, CPC and RPM are all up today too, perhaps to 50-75% of October levels - but how long that lasts remains to be seen as there have been a few one day spikes in the past few months.

The sites that have seen a small recovery I can't see a pattern too. Some I actively tried to improve after Panda and some others I never touched.

Maybe I was part of a by-catch, who knows. Still interesting to see what unfolds in the next few days anyway.

[Zivush]

Still seeing a great Adsense performance. Something not normal and across the board. I have Adsense for some years.
Also, no more than 10-15% increase in Google organic traffic during the 3 days of the weekend.
This is a high traffic site, so it may take a while for it to take off (a wishful thinking:-).
Could be that the latest Pandas are less aggressive in traffic changes?
as for,

Maybe some other adsense publishers from your niche got penalized, so thanks to lower number of impressions in system average CPC increased a bit.

The niche is very competitive with many players. Unless they made a complete clean up of the system from thousands low quality publishers, it doesn't make sense.

[onebuyone]

The niche is very competitive with many players. Unless they made a complete clean up of the system from thousands low quality publishers, it doesn't make sense.

Pandalization is not total clean up, yet it makes huge difference.

[suggy]

Any UK webmasters noticing anything? I cannot see any obvious movement on keywords I've been monitoring closely (from competitive to not very competitive). Has it happened and is a massive non-event for me or are Google taking advantage of the leap year?!

[ohno]

Great sales day yesterday but this morning has lots of foreign traffic showing. If it follows the previous pattern today (and probably the rest of the week) will be dead.

[wokka]

We're in the UK... not seeing any changes with the pages I'm monitoring, but we've been hit with some sort of weird -10 over optimisation penalty... I think.

The reconsideration request remains un-answered now for 8 days.

[Marketing Guy]

Well, saw a 300% increase in traffic on Sunday (week on week), and Monday was even better - 350-400% increase on traffic from previous Monday.

That puts me at about 80% of pre-Panda levels. But given I removed a 40k page discussion forum which was bringing in decent traffic levels, I'd say that I'm sitting in full recovery territory. Good times! :)

The only exception is one competitive keyword the homepage used to rank for - a deep page is ranking page 4 right now. I suspect this might be a non-Panda related issue though.

[Whitey]

@Marketing Guy - Glad to hear of your success - if you're convinced it's a Panda release [ sounds likely ] - do you want to pin your recovery remedy over here to help others : [webmasterworld.com...]

Although the traffic's up, has that translated to restoring your core terms that previously ranked?

[suggy]

Marketing Guy - are you US or UK or....?

I'm not seeing much movement of any kind in my niche.

[Marketing Guy]

@Suggy UK based - site is more international though, with the vast majority of the traffic coming from Google.com over .co.uk (although 30-40% of the traffic is UK based). There's no real geographic focus to the subject area, although some variations in terminology used UK vs US.

Looking at the rankings for the top 50 keywords, .com pretty much matches .co.uk, although .co.uk is slightly better in places (less comp).

@Whitey - thanks! Will post some later. Yes most core term have recovered, although the main one still isn't anywhere as I mentioned above (tbh I think it's over optimisation issue with some old link building efforts).

Off the top 50 referring terms (out of 300k) for 2010 (accounting for 300k referrals out of 1.13 million), 40/50 are now in top 30 results, of which 30 are top 10, 7 are 1st (on Google.com - Google.co.uk is more or less the same). Of the 10 that aren't ranking, 4 were for content I removed so I don't expect rankings and the other 6 are top 50 but should improve.

Similar rankings to pre-Panda - some actually improved (I removed similar articles and 301'd them to better versions). I also consolidated 30 or so articles from another site and merged the domains - those rankings are all going strong too.

Even though it's early days, it seems like a full recovery in principle. My one hestitation though is perhaps some of the rankings may have recieved a temporary new content / freshness boost - I only implemented the redesign in January and Google's still in the process of dropping the old content / factoring the 301's / etc. Will see how things settle out in a month or so.

[ohno]

Back to junk here, single page views & foreign. No surprise & annoying. Stability is a thing of the past IMO.

[Martin Ice Web]

Traffic is up, conversions near Zero. I personally switched my seaching to bing, cause i´m sick of goomazons irrelevant results.

What I´m wondering about is, that till tueasday, there seemed to be 2 sets of results to be switched in and out. I haven´t seen the better one till tuesday. That set was coming up first time, when goog launched their over the folt algo. This set was rewarding all my efforts to come out of panda situation.

[networkliquidators]

I am seeing 3 term phrases (product based) showing results for similar results. Let's say i search for "something something product". I am being returned results as "somethingsimilar product"

I guess Google figures that it thinks i need a different type of product than I was looking for.