Panda 20 - a Full Update - 2012-09-27

[SnowMan68]

Seoroundtable has reported that Matt Cutts confirmed a large Panda update occured on 9/27.

Update: Matt Cutts told me this is a fairly major update to the Panda algorithm affecting 2.4% of search queries. More on this tomorrow.Barry went into more detail at searchengineland [seroundtable.com...] [searchengineland.com...]

[edited by: Andy_Langton at 7:23 pm (utc) on Oct 5, 2012]
[edit reason] Corrected link [/edit]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

As usual the date feels wrong on the announcement. Whatever Google did I'm fairly sure they did it several days before... [webmasterworld.com...]

[xcoder]

Just gets worse and worse. No question this is deliberate garbage being served up.

+1

I hear next they will be penalizing all domains starting with www ...

Side note:
I sure hope someone is taking screen shoots and LOTS of them...

[thedonald123]

Where is this statement about the Panda Update being only for US traffic?

Tedster, I wrote

It just occurred to me that Matt Cutts on Titter mentioned the EMD update was US only.

Here is the full quote from Twitter

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.

I have 2 sites hat were hit and they are what is being called PMD, partial matched domain and I need to know if they were hit by Panda or the EMD algo.
Maybe Matt got it wrong, as it seems the EMD hit international also?

[xcoder]

They've been turning knobs back and forth so much this year i don't think anyone there including MC really knows what rolled and when or what would be the real impact...

This search engine is going down and is going to take millions of web business with it in the process...

[driller41]

One of my better sites survived, another got tossed.

Makes me dubious about changing/altering even the better site in case it gets hit also. I mean it ranks number 1 for it's main term, it cant go higher and I see only danger now making changes/improvements - strange position to be in.

On another note there seems to be more youtube spam in the index today.

[themistral]

Hey Zeus,

Which country are you based in?
I would love to concentrate on getting traffic from Bing - I rank really well. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, here in the UK Google has the monopoly on search - 90-95% I believe.
My traffic from non-Google search is negligible - certainly couldn't sustain the business.

If Bing had that kind of hold, Microsoft would be fighting another anti-competition lawsuit...

[MLHmptn]

I think they got their digits wrong on affected sites...I'd say its more like 24% of sites have been affected by this new algo update. No way in hell this update affected only 2.4% of queries, absolutely no way, its chaos in every forum I read!

[xcoder]

its chaos in every forum I read!

and then some...

[driller41]

It may be 2.4% of search queries, but I would assume it affects sites on page one more than other pages, so it's affect on usable SERPS must appear greater.

(changed the internet to search queries)

[edited by: driller41 at 10:22 am (utc) on Oct 4, 2012]

[tedster]

It may be 2.4% of perhaps the entire internet

I read 2.4% of all SEARCH QUERIES.

[menntarra 34]

Well i thought it has to be something else than EMD update.

Our stats show:

Thursday (sept.27.) Traffic: Similar compared to week before
Friday (sept.28.) Traffic: Similar compared to week before
Saturday (sept.29.) Traffic: Similar compared to week before
Sunday (sept.30.) Traffic:Best since JUNE
Monday (okt.1.) Traffic:Best since JUNE
Tuesday (okt.2.) Traffic:Best since JUNE
Wednesday (okt.3.) Traffic:Best since JUNE, even more traffic than the days before

It seems i recovered now two times:
I recovered in the 20th August Panda and now this Panda caused another 4-5% recovery. Still a long way to go but these signs are great, gonna celebrate it in the weekend :)

[sid786]

@menntarra 34 - Similar story here. But I lost traffic on September 15th, and I assume this was because of a new strategy I employed on the site in the first week of September.

On October 1st, however, the main site saw an increase of about 10% traffic. Now I have removed a couple of pages, went back to the old method (the wrong "strategy" is no longer in place since yesterday), and did a whole lot of editing last night. I just hope the site can recover completely. I miss those old days, but I am fighting back real hard.

[TypicalSurfer]

I think it would be safe to say that google revenues will exceed investor expectations in the coming quarterly report.

I'm seeing longer tail queries completely devoid of sites that have commercial intent, replaced with forum and magazine results.

[menntarra 34]

Because of pandas i lost about 60% of traffic. About 20% at a time. And now by these two pandas i gained back about 8-10%. The gain is nowhere near to the losses i wonder if anybody who recovered experienced this difference.

[menntarra 34]

@sid786 i think you should have waited with implementing that new strategy. I have a lot of thougths what to improve but after the Augus t recovery i put all of these new ideas on hold not to screw things up. And now i will implement them one by one and very carefully, slowly and after a lot of tests.

[gehrlekrona]

Not sure in what thread to post things anymore but as a tidbit this is how bad it has become:
Yahoo 35.3%
Bing 31.4%
Google 31%

It doesn't really say a lot except that Googleis not sending any traffic whatsoever. I don't know what hit me this time but its bad. Really bad. No recovery here :'(

[jimbeetle]

Can anyone qualify exactly what makes them think their site is regarded as "An Authority Site"?

In basic search use Hubs & Authorities go back a long way. It was first developed as HITS algorithm [math.cornell.edu] by Kleinberg and used by Ask and then a version of it was folded into PageRank [nlp.stanford.edu].

That's the technical part; as to what site owners think, I guess the old saw is true and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

[nomis5]

I'm seeing longer tail queries completely devoid of sites that have commercial intent, replaced with forum and magazine results.

That encapsulates exactly the G medium term strategy. To try and work out what each of these updates is about is meaningless unless the above is taken into account.

They are trying to obscure their medium term strategy with concurrent and confusing updates which keeps webmasters chasing their own tails.

In fact their real strategy is to remove all of the smaller websites which are taking money from G's own products. It's as simple as that.

[TypicalSurfer]

@nomis5

Yes, it looks like they are stripping commercial intent from organic search results, starting at the bottom of the revenue chain (long tail) and working up. It's pretty obvious that the trend/trajectory is firmly in place.

[tedster]

It's not obvious to me. I see too many counter-examples to that theory for me to jump to any sweeping conclusion right now.

However, there are certainly some - even many - examples of that effect. And there ae lots of crappy eommerce websites that I would never buy from in a million years. There's just too much of a mix for me to say that stomping out small ecommerce websites is the underlying strategy.

[Nostalgic Dave]

I read examples of people claiming their ecom sites are hit. Is a site with affiliate advertising/links on it considered ecom? My sites that suffer from Panda have affiliate content. I'm starting to think that simply having affiliate links puts my sites at major risk for Panda... period, regardless of where the ads are placed. Is G trying to filter out affiliates, regardless of them being thick or thin? Anyone seeing affiliate sites that are ranking high?

[maxmoritz]

I read examples of people claiming their ecom sites are hit.

My e-commerce site was hit again. It was hit by Panda 1.0 and knocked down further by other iterations, finally recovered fully in March of this year, and was just hit worse than 1.0 by 20.

And, we're not an affiliate site...real e-commerce with a real physical location.

[Sand]

So here's my recent Panda history:

April 2012: Hit by Panda. The next few refreshes hit me as well, and things were starting to look really dismal.

August 20: Recovered (mostly) after dedicating a couple months to reworking the site.

September 18: Hit again, lost ~25% of Google referrals.

September 26: Recovered again, so far up ~30% each day compared to the same day last week.

So now I'm pretty much even with where I was in April. What a long road to go nowhere at all:)

[SnowMan68]

@ maxmoritz

How many products did you have? Were you using mostly manufacturer descriptions?

[TypicalSurfer]

My e-commerce site was hit again.

Were your listings replaced by competition or were they replaced by non-commercial/informational sites?

[SnowMan68]

Were your listings replaced by competition or were they replaced by non-commercial/informational sites?

That is a good question. And if they were competition, was it a big brand or niche player?

I am seeing even more big brands popping into the #1 spots in our niches.

[maxmoritz]

How many products did you have? Were you using mostly manufacturer descriptions?

We've got about 2,500 products. And no, we are not using manufacturer descriptions. I did a fairly detailed guest post on SEOBook regarding freeing an e-commerce site from Panda. We removed all product pages actually...so all products are only listed on category pages, in order to decrease total page numbers and "low content" pages. It worked. Until it just failed!

Were your listings replaced by competition or were they replaced by non-commercial/informational sites?

They were primarily replaced by a combination of big box stores and competitors (many with very low quality sites)...both with a far smaller selection, worse usability, etc.

I may be biased, but anyone would be hard pressed to look at our site and our competitor's sites (including big box stores) and not come to the conclusion that we have the best usability and selection of products...if not design too. Our site is only 7 years old, but our business has been around for more than 30 years.

You've probably seen our products in public or on a TV show at some point in time. We sell to lots of well known companies in addition to individuals.

I can't imagine Google would want our site out of the results. But I've pretty much given up on getting back in. Google is run by careless bastards.

[outland88]

Yes, it looks like they are stripping commercial intent from organic search results

I would definitely say this is the case in the areas I traffic. Test after test I have run, in these areas, show small to medium sized commerce business sites are being wiped out wholesale. With dozens of keyword combos, again in the areas I traffic, the top 100 results are practically devoid (3 or less) of sites selling products. In fact it’s gigantically worse than that. About every one of these keywords and combinations two years ago had at least 50 to 80 commerce sites listed in the top 100. The main exceptions are Amazon etc. It almost seems Google knew its algo couldn’t distinguish quality in the true sense because commerce sites would naturally use more SEO and over-optimization. That is what selling and advertising is all about and it’s aberrant for a search engine to exhibit that. In fact they’re now targeting Adsense info sites that engage in even slight SEO.

You can slide a commerce site into the mix with well written articles absent SEO but isn’t the point to make money just like Google does. Also I was adding buy and purchase too many searches and it was even worse.

[claaarky]

Maxmoritz, do you have any non-ecommerce content on the site like a blog that attracts lots of Google traffic but doesn't earn you anything (people just read it and go - very high bounce rate)?

Or any ecommerce areas of the site that Google sends stacks of traffic but bounce and exit rate are very high (and consequently you don't sell much in those areas)?

[maxmoritz]

We did pre-Panda 1.0. But we got rid of almost everything that wasn't part of the buying process in order to come back.

Now, there is nothing on the site that has a high bounce rate. Bounce rate is typically under 20% for the entire site.