Panda Refresh Monday 8/20/2012

[netmeg]

Panda data refresh this past Monday. ~1% of queries noticeably affected.

[twitter.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 9:26 pm (utc) on Aug 22, 2012]
[edit reason] make link clickable [/edit]

[HuskyPup]

Great, their ~1% is 50% of my Coppermine page views, awesome job Google.

[zeus]

Once again nothing has worked for my site hmm. I have noticed that my frontpage is on the lats page for a keyword, before omitted results, is that normal for a panda hit site.

[snickles121]

My site got hit big time. I bought a new domain name and redirected all the old pages from my old site to the new site and to their appropriate pages. Problem is that Google indexed my new site and has not found all my redirects yet from the old site. So im sure I am getting a duplicate content penalty from Panda.

I also told Google about the move in webmaster tools, but according to the autoreply message I got it could take 6 months for my rankings to level out.

I thought I would share that for anyone who is thinking of changing their domain name.

[timwilliams]

one of our sites took a big hit in conversion rate but not traffic at the release of the panda update. have to wait to see the referral stats but i'm guessing some good converting articles got slapped and some poor converting articles got promoted, guess i'll have to up our adwords spend...

[Martin Ice Web]

This ranking changes could not be alone from a data refresh. Ther must have been a alog change, too.

I think we do need a new name for the panda:

-re-quality algo
-GoFindSomeNonsens Algo
-KillSmallBusiness Algo

[Bewenched]

Our ecommerce site saw a boost in traffic, not a lot, but a boost. Too bad it's not really converting.

[louieramos]

One of the client I am working on to lift their Panda issues have successfully reclaimed most of their rankings last 19-20 August 2012.

[Martin Ice Web]

@louieramos,

good job. Can you provid further information.
-when did it get pandalized
-is it ecom or informational
-when did you start to work on the anti-panda
-what did you do?

TGHANX

[nsqlg]

I see a boost of 25% in my traffic. Well established site, 12 years old, reorganized brand by almost all tech people in my country. Penalized by first Panda, we have articles, online full books (we sell physical copy too) and a forum (which I believe be the cause for penalization).

[louieramos]

Thanks Martin, its a website that provide online services, it was penalized back in December, I started working on it July done a lot of onsite SEO changes and tried to clean up the backlink profiles as best as I can

[Martin Ice Web]

You did start in July and now you are back? Wow. Did you kill a lot of backlinks? Did you have duplicate content?

[louieramos]

Martin, I have done it before on a US online store site, got wacked by Panda in May, reclaimed the rankings back in July with pretty much the same methods I have used recently.

You just need to analyze carefully the entire site and jot down the obvious, then assess it further using tools then implement necessary onsite SEO changes, then focus on offsite SEO. Then I've tried to get the pages re-indexed so fort and so on..

I guess once Google sees that the previous violation is not there anymore, they will take the red flag away from your site.

[realmaverick]

I am 99.999% certain I resolved the issue that caused one of my sites to be pandarised in January (a refresh) and not had the result I was hoping for. I cannot fathom why. Unless Google perhaps needs a longer time to see the violation removed before removing the flag. It's been fixed about a month now.

Hmm this website has been my livelyhood, my full time job, my pride and joy but really disheartened and feeling ready to sell it and move on. Really not happy.

[backdraft7]

some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug...today I'm the latter.
@mav - I hear ya!

[louieramos]

Guys I know how you feel about these constant Wheel of fortune that Google is trying to do. As I always tell my clients the common phrase "do not put all your eggs in one basket"

Have you tried doing other websites on different niche? Or another way to monitize your online income? No one is really safe now-a-days if we rely too much on Google, sometimes even the most innocent site gets the hammer.

[garyr_h]

@louieramos can you be any more specific on the onsite SEO changes? Links, synonyms, same title, h1, h2, etc?

Seriously, is there anything else you can say that can help us?

[louieramos]

All the above garyr_h, I am generic with my answers because assessing Panda issues varies from site to site. So I am just telling everyone to look into the things I have mentioned and find out where they have gone wrong, it's better than trying to figure it out from scratch.

What does Panda focuses on? Content, then look at your contents. Find out any violations. Look at your successful competitors, how does their site vary to yours.

If I give a specific answer and it didn't work on a person's site they might say "your solution doesn't work". There is not one size fits all solution to this, that is why I am only providing you with the generic answers and point you to the right direction and It requires a lot of time to assess a penalty.

[brinked]

interesting. My one site that has been hit what seems like every single panda refresh would get dropped further and further til finally reaching page 4 for its main term. On monday it climbed up to the bottom of the 2nd page. So a partial recovery I guess. The funny thing is the only change that was made since the last panda refresh was I moved it to a different dedicated server company.

I also noticed a competitor who has been in the top 5 results for about 4-5 years was hit hard and has dropped to the 2nd page right above me.

[garyr_h]

@brinked Interesting. I've been hit by the past few Panda refreshes (was hit in the Feb 2011, April 2011, then not until December 2011 and again in June 2012.)

I've tried many, many things. Worked on bounce rate, changed up design, took off ads, made speed improvements, added breadcrumbs, and many more.

[tedster]

Another site I work with may have recovered from the June 8 refresh. Compared to many other Panda derpressed sites I've heard about, it seemed to have only a minor Panda problem. During the June 8 Panda refresh its rankings were mostly knocked out of the top 3 but still were at position 4-7 or so.

This site showed a serious Google traffic boost on Monday, Tuesday. It's up over 200% but the traffic now has a very high bounce rate, higher than ever before in ten years!

Still, the time-on-page is over 1 minute on those high-bounce landing pages, so I'm not really concerned about the conventional bounce rate number at all. I expect a lot of that high time-on-page traffic to come back and buy.

Another good indicator - the search traffic to those landing pages that doesn't bounce has a VERY high conversion rate (over 20%). I'm still not totally comfortable calling this a Panda recovery, but it may be because both the beginning and end dates line up. If the new traffic levels are essentially sustained for a few weeks, then we'll celebrate.

-----

Since June 8, we made some on-page changes to improve usability, added new products for the first time in several months, and sent out some email newsletters (a practice that had fallen away since April). These changes were not really made to address Panda but were mostly done as a kind of retention marketing - to encourage return business.

[Naveenn]

I have been hit by all Panda updates, Penguin updates and any other animal based updates which exists. At one point my site ranked well in the rage of 4K-6K.

Strangely, this panda update actually helped me a bit .... say ~0.5%

[Martin Ice Web]

@louieramos,

thanx for your answers, although they are generic ;).
But I last thing I would like to know. You say it is an ecom side. I guess with a lot of apperently smae widgets ( eg. colr, lenght... ). Did you add the canonical tag?
( Becuase Matt said DC on same domain would not hurt rankings ).

edit:
Did you kill backlinks?

Thanx

[Zivush]

One of my site that I haven't touched for almost a year has a traffic boost of 300%. Now it gets hundreds of visits from Google. Still it is under its score records - This site got hit on Panda2.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My site remains unchanged however I did add a googlebot noindex tag to the previously smacked pages and I have no intention of removing it one iteration later, perhaps in a year I'll review the pages for Google.

Just a reminder - The Panda iteration dates and website reactions suggest that Panda doesn't *always* take out an entire site, it has also targeted sections.

[aristotle]

According to another thread about a recent Google patent, even if you make improvements to a website, the Google algorithm will sometimes temporarily lower its rankings as a way to detect possible reactional SEO activities.

[backdraft7]

@aristotle - that actually makes sense. They wouldn't want anyone to discover the holy grail of how the algo works.

The problem with this is that we can now be tagged as "seo bad guys" just for housekeeping our sites. They sure put you in a "damned if ya do, damned if ya don't" situation.

[Shaddows]

The problem with this is that we can now be tagged as "seo bad guys" just for housekeeping our sites. They sure put you in a "damned if ya do, damned if ya don't" situation

To be fair, we're all creating a lot of FUD around that patent.

Google are not whacking you for making changes. They're just TEMPORARILY obfuscation the impact of any changes you make. If you make a change and stick with it, you will eventually be rewarded.

If you make a change soley to impact your Google rankings, Google considers you a spammer, whether you like it or not. This patent is looking to firmly identify so-defined spammers by catching them react to an unexpected Rank impact.

While not every SEO is a spammer, every (vaguely successful) spammer is an SEO. By targeting their action against SEO-maintained sites, Google is seriously reducing the number of sites they have to monitor for spam.

[gehrlekrona]

First of all I want to say that even though it look like a recovery, there is no such thing anymore so we need to get rid of that idea or we will be on a wild goose chase for the test of our lives. What we have now is what we will have in the future, if that. You can probably gain a little bit here and a little bit there but in the long run Google determines where your site should show up in the SERP. You better be Damn careful with any changes to your site because whatever you do could be seen negative by Fooled and they'll slap you all the way to where Pandas are cute.

[netmeg]

o be fair, we're all creating a lot of FUD around that patent.

To be fairer, it's a patent, we don't even know if they're using it yet.