Any crowded space recoveries with Panda?

[Whitey]

Specifically, has anyone in a crowded space ( such as real estate, travel, restaurants , finance etc ), that's worked their butt's off for over 18 months; spent $10,000's of dollars with top consultancy , benchmark UI improves, social and full unique / useful content additions, achieved vast improvements in metrics and seen, against expectations, no Panda breaking.

It's understood brand stands out in the SERP's and gives a free ride, but was wondering if anyone has a view on what can be done successfully or has been achieved ... or are some crowded space verticals just locked out. ( frustrated )

Positive and objective contributions welcome.

[indyank]

Even i am yet to see or hear a story of that sort in a crowded niche. Do you think that Google's rank modifying patent for spam detection could be a reason? I don't know from where they got that idea but it looks like making any changes isn't good at all. I don't know what they monitor on a page. It could be anything like links or title or keywords used on the page, be it addition, deletion or modification.

[Whitey]

Do you think that Google's rank modifying patent for spam detection could be a reason?

@indyank - I don't know the patent well enough - but what makes you suspect it has some association with crowded spaces?

[klark0]

The site that was the subject of this thread & article is in a crowded space with lots of big players. They recovered.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[tedster]

In addition, I've posted in several spots about a site I worked with that recovered. It was in a relatively crowded space, too - hundreds of millions of URLs on the main query term and a solid complement of Adwords.

[indyank]

@indyank - I don't know the patent well enough - but what makes you suspect it has some association with crowded spaces?

Crowded spaces are usually the ones that get the most search engine traffic. Google unleashed Pandas and Penguins against "low quality" and "spam" sites respectively. Panda was fed with sites tagged as "low quality", that get traffic for the top 12% of keywords (in terms of search engine traffic). Penguin was fed with sites tagged as "spam". Later Pandas were also fed with long tail data.

People were making a lot of changes in response to the Panda and Penguin attacks. The changes included removing keyword stuffing, bringing down keyword density, removing meta keywords tag, adding more content, modifying titles, changing anchor texts, removing external links etc. But we now have a patent which indicates that they might actually use these panic responses as confirmation for pages (or sites) they have tagged as low quality or spam, using their manual quality raters. Isn't that possible?

[Whitey]

Isn't that possible?

@indyank - Maybe, but i don't have sense of it's potential relevance.

@Tedster - So you don't share a hunch that Google is giving special treatment to some verticals.

Matt Cutts: If it is already a crowded space with entrenched players, consider focusing on a niche area initially, instead of going head to head with the existing leaders of the space.
[stonetemple.com...]
I'm not sure about the context of these comments.

Googler's have often communicated that it's best to start with unique content and build it up, so i wonder if changing an existing large site in a crowded space is really hard work, despite the recovery example above.

[santapaws]

i might be missing something here but are you guys saying that they unleashed some software looking for low quality sites, then alongside that unleashed an algo that would demote you if your tried to rectify those problems?

[bloard]

Slow and steady decline at most every update since Panda first hit in October for my crowded space site. It's also a Penguin victim. I almost feel like this decline was set in motion from the start. I've made a lot of technical changes to the site to clean it up... good changes that google and visitors both would benefit from. Now I almost feel like every time I make a positive change to the site that I'm hurting it further.

The biggest issue I have right now is that I can't get new or updated pages into the index for days or weeks. I sense this is purposeful so that I can't correlate change X to result Y. The pages get crawled every day. Just no changes to the index.

It seems like Google doesn't care about the changes I am making because it's already been written off as a garbage site, even though a year ago Google had viewed it as authoritative for years on end.

[Shaddows]

@santapaws
No, have just been granted a patent that causes a site to bounce around the SERPs, before coming rest at the newly deserved position.

They have been incorporating that technology since at least MayDay, but its been highly visible since penguin (witness the large number of people complaining that whatever they do, their ranking gets worse).

Panda looks for low-quality sites. Penguin looks for SEO techniques.

If you get hit by one, and attempt to fix the problem, you are will not know whether it was successful or not as the mere fact that something changed will cause you to ranked in a semi-random way.

If you do nothing, you will eventually see that change reflected as you settle at your "true" rank.

If you panic, and revert the change or make new ones, Google will identify you as an SEO, and quite possibly a spammer.

Funnily enough, I posted on this topic just before the Patent news broke:

I've stated for years that "fiddling" with things, especially the sensitive areas (eg Title element), is a big no-no.

Test well away from your money pages, and then implement changes in one go.

Some important things to bare in mind:
1) Rolling back changes will not result in previous ranking (you can't uncook an egg).
2) Some changes take a while to bed down - ranking signals "ramp up" over time BY DESIGN.
3) Some areas are INTENDED to do certain things- to convey certain meanings. If you are constantly changing those things, it suggests you do not have a clear idea about those elements. If you don't trust the page, why should the search engines.
Source:If you make repeated SEO changes, do your rankings drop? [webmasterworld.com]
Some spelling corrected

[netmeg]

Matt Cutts: If it is already a crowded space with entrenched players, consider focusing on a niche area initially, instead of going head to head with the existing leaders of the space.

I take the context of that comment to be that if I intend to go head to head with Amazon on selling books, and I'm not offering anything that everybody else isn't offering too (or an affiliate offer that 9483 affiliates are also offering the exact same way) I probably shouldn't expect a lot of Google love on that.

In short, add significant value, or find another space.

[tedster]

@Tedster - So you don't share a hunch that Google is giving special treatment to some verticals.

As I see it, adult queries have clearly been given special treatment for many years - that area may well have been the first. I certainly do think there's specialized attention to certain query phrases in certain niches. That special treatment probably involves automated algorithms these days, plus a lot more human review of the SERPs generated by proposed changes to the algorithm.