A Good Panda... Google confirms a softer, better targeted update

[whatson]

Finally a more targeted panda update. One that is intelligent enough to leave good sites out of the "penalty".

I was nearly going to post this yesterday, as wife's blog was suddenly ranking well in Google, but I couldn't find any posts about Panda anywhere, so wasn't sure if that was the case. But it would appear so, Google are refining their Panda algo, so other sites, that may not have the best design, etc, still dont suffer. [searchengineland.com...]

[backdraft7]

@whitey - No idea, serps haven't changed that much in the last few days, but referrals are really odd. My competitor who never maintains his site had a record day today (he copied my site and membership structure so it's easy for me to see his sales) ...usually I beat him in sales 10 to 1. I see this pattern every now and then and it usually marks a substantial algo change. Terrible day.
Since May Day 2010 I don't think I've had one clearly positive move that has stuck.

[zehrila]

So, one of my dormant site, which was getting 10 to 12k unique visitors a day, got battered in June when Google rolled out two week long update, traffic went as low as 5k, but it was understandable as i had not worked on site for about 1 year, so 8 days after 4th of July, my site got 13k, then next day 23k and gradually rose to almost 30k unique visitors a day. My site was initially hit by first Penguin update, i cleaned some of the links but site never responded back, so now if this was panda alone, it does not make sense why my site recovered during this update, when none of previous panda updates affected my site!

[helenp]

In my niche, I can still see the big brands domain the market, wich is ok, but they appears with several pages and whats worst with many different domains, they keep buying domains so they domain the market. I think this should not be accepted by google. How can one fight against this? The big eats the small and gets fater and fater.

[EditorialGuy]

I was just looking at SearchEngineLand's list of Panda updates since February, 2011, and I was struck by the fact that only one of the updates (Panda 1.0) was said to have affected more than 10 percent of search queries. The rest of the updates were mostly in the low single digits, except for the updates where no figure was cited.

I wonder how much impact this latest update had?

[Whitey]

@EditorialGuy

Do you mean versus the outputs circulated by Google on "x % " of queries?

I question the usefulness of this metric to those affected and haven't seen an answer yet.

Or was your question more along the lines of what was the beneficial impact amongst those who saw their traffic increase? I guess an improvement of 1x to 3x isn't going to make much of an impact to the sorts of initial drops reported over the last few years.

But it may be a sign to encourage some with improvements which need to be resourced. And I doubt if it could be resourced from the magnitude of lifts shared in most communications. If Google's goal for users and site owners was to convey some hope to allow them to make required changes , I think it will take a great deal more traffic improvement relief to re create that opportunity to reinvest organically, for the majority of folks IMO.

I wonder how the community views the impacts of those lifts. Thoughts?

[smithaa02]

Rough timeline on my end.

12/13th received a very nice bounce up to close to pre-penalty levels.

14th - 19th results slide back down but still better then before grey-panda ran

Today (22nd): Minor terms most the same with some minor shuffling. Major term climbed three spots though which is huge.

Maybe grey-panda is still running and today or tomorrow is the last day of a 10 day rollout? That or google's delayed ranking boost patent is in effect.

[EditorialGuy]

Do you mean versus the outputs circulated by Google on "x % " of queries?

Yes.

I question the usefulness of this metric to those affected and haven't seen an answer yet.

It might not be useful to those affected (in terms of actionable data), but it would provide insights into the scope of the update.

[EditorialGuy]

If Google's goal for users and site owners was to convey some hope to allow them to make required changes , I think it will take a great deal more traffic improvement relief to re create that opportunity to reinvest organically, for the majority of folks IMO.

[Note: I'm addressing this in a separate reply because it merits discussion on its own.]

I think you've brought up an interesting point. If someone has been boosted from, say, page 50 of the search results to page 2 or 3 for an important keyphrase as a result of the latest Panda update's "softening," his or her euphoria is likely to be temporary, because ranking 20th or 30th isn't likely to bring a whole lot more traffic than ranking 500th.

As for motivation to make changes (a.k.a. to "reinvest organically"), I think that probably will depend on how committed the site owners are to their topic and to being serious publishers about that topic.

Is Google likely to care if, say, Suzy of Suzy's Widget Hound Blog decides to spend less time blogging about hounds and more time breeding puppies?

Will Google be hurt if, instead of investing money in Web content that's designed to attract customers organically, Ernie of Ernie's E-Commerce Site decides to spend that money on advertising?

If I were Google, I'd probably concentrate on trying to maximize the quality of the top 20 results and not worry about the motivation of site owners who didn't make the cut.

[Martin Ice Web]

One of the biggest brands is back with multi domain entries on page one. The annoying thing is, that the this pages are copies of each others only in a slight different outlay. They didnīt even make the effort to put them on a sub-Domain.

When does Google turn down brands authority, so that they are not able to do anything and come away with this?

ecom, germany

[Whitey]

When does Google turn down brands authority, so that they are not able to do anything and come away with this?

It's been on the lips of many good spokespeople directly to Google and SearchEngine claimed a reaction to their complaint in this article: [searchengineland.com...] with Matt Cutt's announcing [youtube.com...] He gives a timeline for improvement which is/was due around now.

But I don't think this is OT and belongs in a separate thread as eliminating one set of criteria is not the same as surfacing marginal sites out of Panda. I acknowledge your concern about diversity and quality in the results being contrary to the intent of sites that are surfaced fairly and with quality in mind per Panda's contribution to the intended improvement of mix. Clearly, multiple results from a single domain is not diversified and Google has been slow to react to complaints [ until now - let's hope ].

......... >

Aside from this, is anyone seeing the dominance of keywords reserved for brands being eclipsed with this update, or are they still tightly held by brands?

Most of the traffic improvements appear to be from the long tail, which is where a lot of traffic was of course removed from. And the degree of release appears throttled to traffic release thresholds, depending on the perceived "authority" of the site.

I think it's really interesting that Matt talks about authority in relation to this "softer" Panda, when folks have been chasing around on purely UI related things for Panda, perhaps knowing that brands were out performing them regardless.

What was the logic behind the motivation to release back more sites? Matt does speak candidly about assisting webmasters through a transition and seemed to express some concerns that in certain popular verticals site's couldn't compete and may as well give up.

Personally, I found that overly harsh, but I'm not sure it was intended as a declaration of putting smaller webmasters to the sword. I think the intent might have been to better assist innovation and change, by jolting the web into an aggressive wake up call. Not sure that approach was helpful - but that just my opinion.

Maybe the soft Panda hasn't gone far enough in it's release ability to alleviate the difficulties many webmasters were obliged to confront in managing resources to pay for improvements to dig their way out - as Whatson indicated in his OP. 2 years is a heck of a sentence to endure without the means to improve.

What's your thoughts - did Google go far enough to assist "transition"?

Are you prepared to make improvements if Google lifts your site? I mean REAL quality improvements.

And do you believe Google will really reward your efforts?

.... questions, questions....

[edited by: Whitey at 9:49 am (utc) on Jul 23, 2013]

[helenp]

It's been on the lips of many good spokespeople directly to Google and and SearchEngine claimed a reaction to their complaint : [searchengineland.com...] with Matt Cutt's announcing [youtube.com...] He gives a timeline for improvement which is/was due around now.

Thats for domains and subdomains, but what about those big goes that buy existing domains, and apear on first page with 4 or 5 different domains wich has the same owner..

Regarding my site, it has been raising and had a big lift on last update, however its falling now, and it is also falling in google.ie and google.se

[Martin Ice Web]

@whitey, that would be a good thing, if brands would have been included into this new algo. But jet, all is see is they rank for everything and with every silly page they make. It is a free ride and jet all of the new google is against organize the worlds information.

[EditorialGuy]

Martin Ice Web: In my information sector, the big brands aren't quite as dominant as they were a few months ago. In some cases, they've been replaced by low-quality EMD sites. That may not be good news for users (or for Google), but it does suggest that megadomains aren't hardcoded into the top three spots on the SERPs.

[Whitey]

Some of those initial lifts are settling back down to where they started on some domains I watch. Is anyone else seeing this?

[Martin Ice Web]

@Whitey, do you mean that the sites are back to rankings/traffic pre-grey-panda lift?


ecom, germany

[Whitey]

Yes - some have returned to the preceding levels. Others have managed to hold - so far. I notice some similar reports in other threads. Maybe we'll hear more +/-

[helenp]

Think my site was hit by this one, not in improving, the contrary, ever been hit by panda or penguin I think, in the last update in July we had a boost. As per webmastertools on the 18th July many pages were spidered, about 3/4 parts of the total, on the 19th until today the spidered pages been low, about 1/4 of total and some days 1.5/4 of total,
when the normal spidering before 18th July been one day 1/4 total next day 2.5/4 or 3/4 of total.
I can see in serps we have lost positions, but not visitors.
Whats is worse is in google.ie we been for long first using any keywords.
I thought the reason was a very good backlink from some good .ie page, now in google.ie we are on page 2, and on top big brands, however between the big brands and me I can see many for me unknown sites.

[chalkywhite]

From the 23td ive had a 100% recovery, traffic is back to pre may 9th. Hope it holds.

[Martin Ice Web]

@chalkywhite, i hold my thumbs for you!

[chalkywhite]

@martin, Thanks, all ive done from that date is hack the site. Took pages that did not get traffic and remove them from the index. Cleared around 10% of the site.

[Martin Ice Web]

@chalkywhite,

but that is not in sence of the users. Even if they donīt get traffic from Google, it could be that this pages are interesting for users.

Or didnīt they get any traffic at all ( beside Google) ?

If g* acts in this way then this would completely disagreed with " make sites for users not for SEs".


From the current serps i see that:
-high targeted pages that have only the one widget on it do suffer
-mixed pages with lots of different widgets are winners ( brand sites )
-in our niche Amazon, ebay and one big brand took over the complete serps

I canīt see anything softened in the Pandaa algo. Inour niche it got worse.

ecom germany

[chalkywhite]

Nice and 4 days later that extra boost has gone..give us a break google let us try and understand where we are going wrong.

[Whitey]

Maybe we'll hear more +/-

@chalkywhite - I think we're out of this update now, actually several days ago the 10 days was up. When were your drops starting to come in?

[chalkywhite]

@ Whitey, Tuesday this week I got around 20 25% back...a great weds and thursday then today back to normal, stinks of panda!
Check this out

[Whitey]

@chalkywhite - [i40.tinypic.com...]

I couldn't see a recovery and drop on this graph along the lines of what's been reported in the "softer Panda" - everything looks like normal cycles to me. What convinced you otherwise?

[turbocharged]

I think the "soft panda update" was appropriately named. It was so soft that it had next to no impact in the sectors I'm watching. The same brand bias dominates the serps now as it did before.

The lack of activity in this thread is a good indication that the soft panda was a dud for most small businesses. I really did not expect to see much anyway, to be honest. Google previous updates have all been structured in a way to drive small businesses into Adwords if they want to get any appreciable traffic from their search engine.

[EditorialGuy]

Google previous updates have all been structured in a way to drive small businesses into Adwords if they want to get any appreciable traffic from their search engine.

Let's not forget that many (most?) sites aren't e-commerce sites: They're information sites, personal sites, community sites, etc. that will never buy AdWords because--if they did--they'd be throwing money down a well.

If Google's updates were a secret plot to sell more AdWords, Google wouldn't favor commercial results in so many searches that could be either informational or transactional, depending on user intent.

[purplekitty]

I think you've brought up an interesting point. If someone has been boosted from, say, page 50 of the search results to page 2 or 3 for an important keyphrase as a result of the latest Panda update's "softening," his or her euphoria is likely to be temporary, because ranking 20th or 30th isn't likely to bring a whole lot more traffic than ranking 500th.

That would be incorrect. Most of my keyword phrase recoveries puts me back on page 2 where I was last summer before my sites were hit.

My impressions are up 400% and the resultant traffic has effectively doubled from pre-soft panda levels. I am still euphoric and the only way it would be temporary was if Google took these rankings away again.

[purplekitty]

The lack of activity in this thread is a good indication that the soft panda was a dud for most small businesses. I really did not expect to see much anyway, to be honest. Google previous updates have all been structured in a way to drive small businesses into Adwords if they want to get any appreciable traffic from their search engine.

I don't think the activity level in this thread is indicative of anything. Many website owners were commenting about their recoveries when the changes started in a different thread a week before this thread existed.

[EditorialGuy]

Most of my keyword phrase recoveries puts me back on page 2 where I was last summer before my sites were hit.

My impressions are up 400% and the resultant traffic has effectively doubled from pre-soft panda levels.

I wonder how that would compare with, say, the impact of a boost from Page 2 (or even from the bottom of page 1) to the top three results on Page 1?