Panda Resulted In Lower Traffic, But Increased Page Views

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

Something kind of curious, and I wonder if others have seen this:

I was hit by the March 23rd Panda update, and the month since then has seen a 31% decrease in visitors coming to my site compared to the month prior to the update.

However, the total number of page views is UP around 3% compared to the month prior, due to the fact that (if google analytics can be trusted*), pages per visit is UP NEARLY 50%

Average visit duration is up just a tad under 17%, while the bounce rate DROPPED 35%.

So I would like to think that while google is sending less people to my site, it is at least sending more qualified people.

On the other hand, my site is an ecommerce site, and sadly, where it matters most, it it primarily bad news; While the ecommerce conversion rate remained the same dismal .22% it has always been, the total number of transactions dropped 33%.

Strangely enough, revenue increased 3% due to the fact that the average purchase value increased 56%

So for other sites that were hit by Panda for the first time on March 23rd, have you seen something similar; a significant decrease in traffic while gaining in other usage metrics?

_{*I know the only way to truly verify is with my server based logs but unfortunately I only have access to an old version of webalizer on my server, and it requires a FULL month to month comparison (not 23rd March to 22nd April).}

[Andy Langton]

It's been a fair while since my last Panda data analysis on any scale, but this is pretty consistent with my recollection of that, with the "remainder" of traffic showing better onsite metrics.

[Planet13]

Thanks, Andy:

One thing I should note - and this could be due to Panda, Penguin, or another Algo tweak - is that google is sending less traffic to an optimized inner page and more to the home page (I started another thread about this phenomenon).

and traffic to the home page DOES have better user metrics.

My guess is that google is really mining data from chrome users and calculating that more prominently in the algo rankings.

(However, it could be other things, so I don't want to swear by it. Just a thought right now.)

[Andy Langton]

I'm not sure about chrome data. My belief is that the user data is a side effect and not the cause. If you look at Google's available data for smaller websites (and there are quite a few of places, from their site speed to trends and more) they really struggle to get anything meaningful.

Panda hit busy sites hard, of course, so I wouldn't rule anything out, but I've always seen Panda as an evaluation that may be tested against user data, but is not defined by it.