Panda 4.0 Roll Out confirmed by Matt Cutts

[EvilSaint]

Just saw a message on twitter from Matt Cutts alerting to an update of their Panda Algo Change...named 4.0.

Matt tweets just 8 minutes ago that there is an update to the "Payday Loans Algorithm" which is targetting "very spammy queries" at this stage.

[twitter.com...]

Wondering if anyone noticed a shuffle in site positioning already?

Algoroo is showing activity spikes over the past 4 days.

[elguiri]

Interesting. I'm seeing a new site that had been gaining traffic week by week drop a little. Shifts are 1-2 spots. Seems to be caused by recovering competitors.

Just have to build a few more links.

[chalkywhite]

Strange that its announced on the 21st, ive seen a 200% increase now in traffic since Sunday evening...

[seodudez]

For those of you that are recovering what changes did you make to the site? If any. Maybe some of you made no changes?

[Stickywebz]

Just finished a quick scan and found that a majority of our clients are going up slightly. I will have to check again later this week, but for now our clients are safe.

[aok88]

Has anyone seen a Pandalized site make some good gains in the last few days that has done Nothing to the site? if so, then maybe this is the softer Panda version MC was talking about.

[Coleman123]

I have a dedicated server with <snip> and they were down for several hours Monday. But my traffic was still decent Monday and was improved Tuesday compared to the past several weeks.

Today a lot of my keywords are bouncing around and seem to be trending upward in the rankings.

One thing I did notice today after seeing my improved rankings, checking my Webmaster's account today I see the manual spam penalty has been automatically removed. This was a shock because over the last 12 months I have submitted 4-5 requests to G and all were denied.

This manual penalty removal came without a request. Has anyone else experienced this today (5/21/14) or very recently?
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:33 pm (utc) on May 21, 2014]
[edit reason] removed name of hosting company [/edit]

[MrSavage]

Holy geez! Sometimes this is a gift that keeps on giving. I don't oversee that many sites, but one in particular I missed until today. What a whip cracking spike in traffic. Best way to describe it? To the moon! Surely to C this has to stick. I'm fully juiced and ready to bite down and add more content. If this crashes, be assured I'll post back here whining about it. If I'm silent, then be assured I busy creating great content (in my opinion). I've always thought it takes one great site to fill the pockets and having too many sites just clouds priorities.

[menntarra 34]

@MrSavage
I suggest you cross your fingers and sing halleluja only after things have settled. I had a site which traffic doubled in the last 3 days, just to find out now that in the last 12 hours it lost 80% of all traffic. So all in all it is -20% traffic. Strange shuffles going on.

[MrSavage]

Whelp, I have quite a lot of confidence in the quality of the content and articles. In my opinion, the site and certain pages are getting their due. My celebrations are almost sarcastic at this point because certainly I'm not going to be shocked to find in two days that it all but disappeared. I fear very little these days because as I've said before, I've had my front teeth kicked in from Panda, and that followed up by a Panda wedgie. My expectations have settled to such a low extent with Google organic that it's really dead to me in reality. I'll certainly take what they are offering but by no means will I ever think that I'm safe with Google organic traffic. Not to sound overly dramatic, but honestly as long as I live and do this, I will expect to do business with ZERO organic traffic from their end of things. That's how I approach things now.

[Saffron]

Does it take a few days for results to stabilise? My traffic is down by about 10% (over the past 2 days).

I'm watching the real time stats, and have a general idea of usual numbers, but they are going down by about 50% and then going back up. This is quite unusual.

I am terrified I'm being hit again, last year we almost lost everything but made a recovery in September. I'm scared the site is being hit again.

[keyplyr]

@keyplyr the recovery began since Monday? How is your traffic today?

While my traffic has increased only 15% (conservatively) it's the SERP ranking I'm excited about. This tells me the changes I made were effective and it also shows the "penalty" has been reduced, possibly lifted altogether. This also leads me to believe that I can do even better.

For my main single keyword my index page went from SERP 12 to the top of page 3, and my main two word phrase went from page 5 to the very top of page 2. Most of the other keyword phrases, for specific secondary pages, went up to page 1 or 2, an increase of at least 1 or 2 SERP.

Because of my subject content, immediate traffic changes will always be subtle.

[Coleman123]

@keyplyr did you have a manual penalty in your GWebmasters account? If so, check to see if it was removed recently. Mine was.

[keyplyr]

No, no mention in GWT, so no actual "penalty" manual or otherwise. Just lost huge SERP placement on almost every one of my 260 static pages, all at once, in 2011 due to getting caught in an algo filter of some sort.

[Sujit Rocking]

Hi All,

I didn't though see any major spikes on GA for my website but i saw my website Domain Authority from 29 to 35. Its in a day improvement. I hope i m bless by Google and Matt Cutts.

Still unsure how Alexa counts it as it still doesn't show any improvement. Any takers on that please?

Thanks

[minnapple]

1000 day penalties removed?

[Mentat]

@editorialguy, google does not send directly to mobile version.

The correct implementation is like this:
1. Redirect mechanism on mobile detection for the main site/pages.
2. In header for the main site

link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" LINK to the MOBILE PAGE

3. On the mobile page, you must use canonical, to avoid duplicate content

[GlennStone]

Hi Guy's,
I'm in Australia and thought I would add that for the last month especially I've felt there was something holding us back from ranking for our major keywords.We have an old ASP site and a NEW ( 13 months old) WP site. Both sites have different names and have not a lot but a few external back links. As of yesterday (our time) I noticed a HUGE jump in our rankings for these keywords for both sites. I have felt for some time that spammy sites and very basic Ebay stores have been ranking way too high when compared to legitimate sites.So currently I am very happy with GOOGLE ( normally not as I can never figure out what is on google's mind).
Good luck to us all with the Google updates etc, as it seems like we are on a roller coaster ride.

[petehall]

I was just about to post I've seen a big Panda related to change, then noticed this thread.

Definitely this is softer in my opinion - many sites which were struggling are rising up.

[jojy]

I have seen 40% traffic increase in my one website. Getting hope again :)

[andrewc]

Does someone has any idea of to speedup noindex of some sections from my website? I got a ton of high-quality links to my website but everything is going so slow. Would it be a good idea to create some sitemaps just for those categories?

[edited by: andrewc at 11:18 am (utc) on May 22, 2014]

[Rockzer]

Can you please tell me its been rolled out for India ? When Panda get update its rolled country wise?

[lee_sufc]

I had posted on a different post but this is probably the best place for it now...

We (like numerous people here) were hit hard a few years back and kept getting hit by Panda / Penguin. I have spent hours upon hours improving every aspect of our site - making faster, responsive for mobile, disavowing spammy looking links (that we didn't add), moving to a faster server, improving the quality of articles...the list goes on.

I was considering packing it all in this year. However, this update has given me a glimour of hope. From mostly page 3-6 rankings, we've jumped back to pre 2011 levels on page one. The results at the moment are better than anything I could have previously wished for.

We've noticed 125% increase in traffic already.

However, I'm not going to get too excited until the dust settles and we're still sitting pretty.

[indyank]

a definite softer panda 4.0 update. Is it softer on brand signals? any thoughts?

[indyank]

"Also when I spoke to Matt Cutts, he made it sound like this update may appear gentler for some sites but it does lay the groundwork to future changes in the direction of a softer and gentler Panda algorithm." - that definitely sounded like a more gentle Matt Cutts...he must be too tired of webmaster bashing and name calling, isn't it? lol...

[mrengine]

did you have a manual penalty in your GWebmasters account? If so, check to see if it was removed recently. Mine was.

@Coleman123

What kind of penalty did you have that was removed? Might it be that Google finally is addressing the issue of how they handle spam links/unwanted links/negative SEO within this update? I certainly hope so as I have better things to do with my time then to disavow scrapers.

I do see keyword stuffed meta descriptions in the search results (keyword1, keyword2, keyword3), which leads me to believe Panda was not just softened but outright neutered.

[seodudez]

@mrengine: panda was definitely not neutered. We have zero recovery.

I am curious about those people who have seen improvement. Did you make any changes to your site or did this just randomly happen?

[RedBar]

Did you make any changes to your site or did this just randomly happen?

No changes whatsoever however I wouldn't call this random, so far this seems to be very targetted and reasonably accurate, a definite improvement all round at the moment in my niche for me and all my quality competitors.

[Rasputin]

Seeing about 35-40% improvement overall, some sections more than others, but have made a great deal of changes since April 2011 that have affected pretty much every aspect of the site: content substantially rewritten, many poor articles removed, metas changed, template changed, new faster hosting company...

More strangely the foreign language version of the site also seems to have benefitted but I never thought it had been penalised in the first place. Possible the links from the main site to the foreign language subdomain are now being counted because of Panda release?

The gain is less than the original loss, but the site has changed so much, and was also attacked by a Penguin last year, that I have no idea what to expect any more in terms of where rankings should be. Just pleased to see a step up for the first time in at least three years.

[EditorialGuy]

I am curious about those people who have seen improvement. Did you make any changes to your site or did this just randomly happen?

We were hit by Panda 1.0 and have lost traffic, bit by bit, in most of the subsequent Panda releases. (Overall, we didn't fall more than half a dozen or a dozen places, but a drop of even half a dozen places on a SERP can have a big impact on search traffic.)

Thanks to Panda 4.0, we're back at the top of the SERPs for our highest-ranked pages (mostly the same evergreen pages that have ranked high in Google for years), and Google traffic is way, way up.

And yes, we've made changes to our site over the past 3-1/4 years, but not with Panda in mind.

[rowtc2]

I have a recovery with this update. Previously, i have changed the design, removed a lot of pages, added new pages with good content, no link building.

I think Panda looks at brand searches, although i don't understand why they listing big brands always first: is easy to rank big brands and they don't spend anymore on Adwords if they are in top results.

I have searches for brand name, even is a long name - i didn't moved to a new domain because it was the main source of income.

I hope they don't continue to game site's traffic up and down too much. Now, I am back in business.