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.

[MrSavage]

Day 2 Report - Still seeing fantastic results. Traffic looking to be at the same level as yesterday.

This site made no tweaks, no nothing. However I would say it's not the "site" that's kicking rear right now, it's the articles that are kicking rear right now. If that makes sense. This site wasn't around from the initial rollout so I can't speak to that situation. I just know that it was whittled down and down. Now it's back where it belongs in my humble and unbiased opinion.

[aok88]

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

I think this is an important question for this thread.

Also, what WERE the changes that were made if you did make them and saw an improvement?

---

For two sites I deal with that were hit heavy by Panda 1 and lots more, till it was really bad, we made a ridiculous amount of fixes to the site to improve their 'Panda score', so to speak.

They included:

#1 Finding and then either fixing, 301-ing or deleting all bad pages based on user performance (this took months)
#2 Merged lots of pages into less pages and made those pages much better with lots of original content on them
#2 Got rid of as much dupe content as possible
#3 Made every effort to get rid of any and all on-site over-optimization

And both sites got about a 30% increase in traffic since Monday and are holding strong I am and hoping it sticks!
#4 Continued to earn links but did no disavow for one and did do a disavow for the other

[lee_sufc]

The improvements I made were:

1) Complete site redesign to improve speed and make it responsive for mobile
2) Removal of all outgoing links (even on articles where I felt a link was worth including).
3) Disavowed 2,000+ spammy links (directories mainly)
4) Improved what Google might have thought as 'thin' content (either by re-writing old articles or combining lots of smaller pages to 1 large page)
5) Inclusion of videos on product pages
6) Increasing engagement on social networks
7) Improvements to internal navigation
8) Identified articles that had been plagiarized and at risk of duplicate content and getting them removed (this was the most stressful)
9) Improvements to coding to make entire site W3C compliant

They're the main points...

[petehall]

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.

It seems to me the main change in the algorithm is not to punish a site as a whole for offending Panda. Previously if you didn't get a good score the whole site suffered...

[explorador]

Related or not, nice improvement for me since the beginning of the week.

[dflayfield]

We're up 100% (Google traffic) on one site and 75% on another since Monday. That doesn't come close to closing the gap that Panda and Penguin created over the last 3 years but it helps.

The site with a 100% increase (from 600 daily visitors to 1,200) was completely rebuilt. We've actually seen a gradual 1,200% increase since early this year with various other updates. As of today, that's 2,400% traffic growth since January.

The main work done was:
-moved from ASP to PHP
-increased speed tremendously
-added much deeper content; page length was quadrupled; the amount of information on each page is much denser
-the content is very unique, unavailable anywhere else while being exactly what the user is looking for
-disavowed several thousand bad (uninvited) links that had accumulated over the years
-we filed 3 dozen copyright infringement cases with Google where our content had been copied; 2/3 of the requests were honored
-we added XML site maps that had not existed before
-we added microdata where there was none before
-we rewrote any of the content that had been plagiarized removing the copied versions
-we created social network pages where the site had none before

We pretty much did everything we could think of that would push the needle in the right direction. We spent over $100,000 on the rebuild not to mention thousands of man hours.

On the site with a 75% traffic increase we did much of the same however it was newer and needed less of an overhaul.

Frankly, after all of our work and frustration for years now not seeing an increase, always dreaming of the day when Google would come back around, I still have high expectations for growth to come. Back in 2011, we had 7,000 users a day coming from Google that eventually slipped to 50 early this year. We're back to 1,200 but we'll need to double three more times to attain our former glory.

I will say this about Panda/Penguin and Google's algo improvements in general. I was the first to complain about how Google almost destroyed my business. It has been very hard. We have laid off numerous employees and lost more advertising customers than I can count. It's cost us more than one potential acquirer. Safe to say that Panda/Penguin has cost me personally millions of dollars in the last 3 years.

And I believe, Google did the right thing with these improvements. I got comfortable and when you get comfortable you can get lazy. I got lazy. I didn't innovate my sites. I didn't improve the content like I should have. I didn't police the scrapers and copyright thieves to protect my content. I didn't employ the newest, fastest technology to make sure my users had the best possible experience. I didn't do these things because we were getting $10,000's of AdSense revenue a month without making any investments. I thought that would never change. Why invest in the health of the cash cow if it just keeps producing milk every single month with only minimal care?

Shame on me and every other webmaster that got comfortable. It's like a marriage. You don't get to stop working at impressing your spouse once you're married. You have to keep working at it or one day, you'll wake up and they'll be gone.

I will never let this happen again to my business. I have learned a valuable lesson that I hope I get to use to my advantage before the bankers come beating down my door.

[lee_sufc]

@dflayfield

You made a point that I was thinking about earlier. Back in the 'good days' of pre-2011, when you're busy with work, improving / innovating your sites often gets pushed back as you're busy with 'proper' work...then when you're quiet you realise your mistakes. If and when things pick up it's going to be a case of not letting it happen again!

What you explain is exactly how I have been!

[Martin Ice Web]

So yes the Results are a Lot better. I like it to See smaller Sites can Beat Amazon and Ebay Again.
But some results are afull. When searching for "widget Fuer Schweiz "(Widget for Swiss use) google presents .ch results in google.de. Think this is a localization error?

[aok88]

dflayfield - well said.

[EditorialGuy]

It seems to me the main change in the algorithm is not to punish a site as a whole for offending Panda. Previously if you didn't get a good score the whole site suffered...

You may be on to something.

It's also possible that subject expertise now counts for more than it did in the past. (In my sector, many, many niche sites were clobbered by Panda 1.0 and 1.1. as "broad and shallow" megasites took over the SERPs.)

[MrSavage]

Not sure if this is an oversimplification, but what seemed to happen in my area of work is that a website with 100% topics on Blue Widgets was suddenly replaced with a brand type site that contributed one article on Blue Widgets. Brand site could have .0000005% Blue Widgets content, but heck, they talked about it so they must have done it better than that little nobody who spends 100% of their time on Blue Widgets. Size of site killed me off. There was no possible way to compete unless some value was given to my level of Blue Widget coverage. If I not mistaken, in a nutshell this is what Cutts said they hoped to accomplish with a softer Panda.

I'm a little bit surprised that people are so forgiving about all this. Time will tell is this is going to be a turn around for a lot of us who are classic webmasters who don't run a brigade of writers and don't have newspaper like status in society.

Update wise, still holding strong. No Panda crash yet!

Edit: I should be clear that it's my main, well done, good content site that saw a recovery here with this Panda update. Some of my other projects remain banished, but at least I can understand why or to an extent what I need to do to turn them around. I'm very encouraged to hear what other people have done and who has good news to offer. It's been far too long for positivity.

[dflayfield]

Sometimes it takes a while to reach a state of forgiveness and admit any level of culpability when something goes wrong.

I've hated on Google for a couple of years now. I finally snapped out of it and got to work fixing what needed to be fixed. And did we work hard. We banged our head against the wall month after long month.

We had no manual penalties. We hadn't participated in any black hat SEO. And since Google didn't tell us what was wrong, we assumed everything was wrong.

So we set about fixing everything. I mean everything. From the technology to the content, there wasn't anything we didn't attempt to improve based on the best practices being discussed in the industry.

And through all of that, something really amazing happened. We took a site that hadn't changed much in 10 years on a subject we thought we couldn't make deeper with richer content and we stumbled on an angle that delivers incredibly rich, current content that no one else has or can easily obtain (unless they scrape us).

We just haven't built a Panda proof web site. We've built a site that will help solve problems and make research easier for hundreds of thousands of people. Instead of just helping them scratch the surface like we did with the old site, we're giving them all the info they need to make informed decisions without going anywhere else.

That's good for our users and it's good for the quality of the Internet and increases its benefits to society. Just think about the disavow tool alone. We did Google's work for them in cleaning up the Internet. We all told them where the crap sites were. If the same link site was included in several unrelated disavow files, I'd doubt if those sites ever see the light of day again.

I believe that any change, no matter how drastic or painful in the near term, is good and necessary if in the end it results in overall improvement.

For anyone who didn't recover just a little this week, I'd ask yourself the question I asked myself last year: Can I make my site more useful for my users, with dense, easy to digest information that is focussed on them, not the dollar? If you can, you'll come back and the dollars will take care of themselves. If you can't, save yourself the slow painful death and go back to your day job.

[spreporter]

@Martiniceweb have you check the html tags of the websites if they are lang=de ?

[supercyberbob]

I believe MrSavage has a site that was untouched and recovered traffic.

Apologies for putting you on the spot.

It's important I think, because something like that is an indicator of a flawed algo.

Also folks, correlation isn't causation. I don't think anybody can say for sure that the work they did is THE reason for a recovery in traffic.

It could just be Google fixing their broken animal algo.

Let's face it, there was a lot of collateral damage, and even McGooble admits that. ("Softer Panda" duh)

[Martin Ice Web]

@sprereporter, i checked it and they donīt have any lang attributes set. But google bolds then .ch domain ending. So i guess that this has something to to with their similarity database ( swiss = ch ).
It is silly because 8 out of 10 results are from swiss.

this panda:

we took a deep dive with one domain its allmost gone. The second has got -40% this night. I hope that this update is still in progress.

[spreporter]

"Seems to me the winners are the ones you paid $100,000 to redesign a website... " I've seen guys who came back on top with the same old design they had back in 2002 and earlier...But new responsive`design, fast load, html5, is a must we have to admit it.

[lina]

My site is a small site with low traffic in a niche topic. However, my content is excellent and it's all 100% on one topic. I was never hit by Panda before and my Google organic traffic has doubled in the last few days.

[Martin Ice Web]

Guys, i donīt know how it is in your niche but ours is worse than before.
One competitor with about 20 domains ( all cloacking and redirecting to one domain ) is back in serps. He was gone with first panda.
Amazon is back, very, very shallow sites are ranking very good. Tons of price compare engines ( some i dindīt know that they were existing ).
Our nice is compuer accessories and most ecoms (inclusive amazon) use manufacturer csv files for their description. We do not use them. But still got hit with our 100% unique content and pictures.

ecom, germany

[EditorialGuy]

I've seen guys who came back on top with the same old design they had back in 2002 and earlier...But new responsive`design, fast load, html5, is a must we have to admit it.

Our Google referrals were up 176 percent yesterday, and we're still using static pages whose look and feel has evolved (but not been entirely replaced) over the years. No HTML5 or responsive design, although our speed has been improved thanks to CloudFlare.

[ubound]

I had a very nice increase in traffic on May 12-13 but when Panda 4.0 was announced things went back to what it was before May 12 (which was nice but you always want more traffic, right?). However today, despite it's Friday, which is always a low day for me my increase seems to be back. Maybe they are rolling something back?

I have access to private community were people build sites based on keywords and are basically taught to keyword stuff at 1 percent exact keyword or 2-3-4 word key phrase. They have a lot of recovery stories since Panda 4.0 was announced.

[dflayfield]

My business did indeed burn to the ground. The fire left only a stone foundation to build back upon. But I can't honestly say that Google was the arsonist.

There was no arsonist. It burned down because it wasn't invested in and made stronger.

Billions of times a day Google makes a business decision that makes 10 websites kings and hundreds of others peasants. You can be a king one day and a peasant the next. And the only way to retain your spot in the top 10 is to work very hard at playing by their rules.

A friend recently asked me why I and other webmasters that had suffered under Panda/Penguin didn't get together and do a class action lawsuit. Aside from my disdain for most litigation, I explained that there is nothing to sue about. Google made a business decision to send their customers to someone else offering the same service I offer. Much like I decided to buy my office supplies from a different supplier because the service was better and their retail location was more convenient. The losing office supply company can't sue me. I made a business decision that was best for me, not for the office supply company.

In the world of websites, Google has been designated Kingmaker by the world. They get to choose (based on what they think is sound data) who gets traffic and who doesn't. How can I blame them for choosing someone else when I know in my heart I hadn't done my best for my users.

I wish I had more warning. Time to make changes. We were at the top for years. We held the #1 to #3 position for all of our keywords for more than 5 years straight, rarely seeing any flux.

I was actually afraid to change anything...to rock the boat. I remember conversations with staff who talked about how ugly and thin the site was and wanted to overhaul it. I said no. If Google is going to keep us at the top, it's what they want to see.

Only when we fell to 200+ in the rankings overnight for the same keyword we ranked #1 for for years did I realize my mistake. And then it was too late.

If Google has done anything wrong, it's this: They didn't tell us what we were doing wrong. Danny Sullivan's article yesterday on MetaFilter speaks to this. He compares it to a cop pulling you over and writing you a ticket put never telling you what you did wrong or how not to commit the same crime again. Why not just tell us what we did wrong.

Even now, we are left guessing what it was that fixed things just like we were guessing what broke them. We made wholesale changes to our sites. Which of those did the trick. We'll never know. I think Google should at least let us know why we were penalized instead of making us guess about it. That's all I can blame Google for.

[MrSavage]

Like God (if you believe in that sort of thing), you will never understand the Google. It's the way it was meant to be.

I will confirm my site which is seeing a nice spike of post Panda 4 traffic wasn't touched. It also wasn't around from the first Panda (perhaps there is something too that) if you know what I mean.

I might be jolly today, but of course the Google can say that I (we) are far too jolly and something needs to be fixed. I'm going to assume the "they are all happy there must be something wrong" aspect of expectations in the future. This is step one in my "rules to live by" Panda handbook.

[jojy]

I noticed my old contents are ranking higher again. I haven't made any changes to my site for about one year.

[waynne]

Again no changes* made here, a previous site with good respected and well linked authority pages is ranking well again visitors up around 70-80%.

(*No link building, no content updates, no new content added, no disavows or link cleaning and no template changes, there was no capital return to invest in the site so it was abandoned completely.)

Most other sites I see are still suffering but this update seems to be going in the right direction. I'm seeing more honest/accurate content in the SERPS!

[Martin Ice Web]

I guess all the winners informational?
Amazon is winner no 1.
Our niche gets worse and worse. Amazon is now on 1-3 for every ecom search in our niche. Followed by the same price compare engine. Then forum posts (6-8 ) followed by big brands.
I canīt see any good with this Panda 4. Most pages are from low quality, known redirectors and cloackers.
Quality, deep information does not matter anymore.

I canīt see what poeple are saying about responsible design. Most sites have small font-size ( for mobile too) and a very old and heavy navigation style.

I noticed that google shopping ads are now full of ebay ads. Did they rise their budget? It must hurt them very hard though.

[ecmedia]

Well, Google is simply a broken search engine. From a dozen or so domains that our firm runs, two have gained additional traffic (2X) while one domain has recovered some of its lost traffic (though nothing like the pre-Panda 2011 levels). Other domains are largely unchanged and one has actually lost some more traffic.

What did we do? NOTHING. The content is actually all the way from late 90s and there is nothing fancy at all about new content either. The geeky things that some of you have been doing is rocket science to us. So it really doesn't matter if your website is technologically superior.

It appears to me that survival in this uncertain landscape is to have a portfolio of domains and hope that some of them will be up and others will be down because folks at G are simply throwing darts rather than really knowing what to do.

[supercyberbob]

That's at least 4 folks in the last few posts on this thread reporting traffic recovery with no changes made.

ecmedia has it right for the most part. Thanks to everyone else for the reports. Need more.

Anybody else notice how (relatively) quiet Google is about this Panda 4.0 update? Not even a post on the Webmaster Central Blog.

Yup.

[ubound]

Matt Cutts promised a softer Panda so I guess that's what it is. I read somewhere, I don't remember where, that he hinted that those who recover in this update may gain even more traffic in the future. I recovered in first Panda softening in July 2013. There was a sharp gain on the date of update and then site continued climbing nicely growing even more traffic.

[SnowMan68]

We have seen a big up tick in traffic since the release of the Panda 4.0. Currently we are up about 230-240%. We run an ecommerce site based in the USA. We weren't affected by Panda until January 2013, from that point forward we began to lose about 5-7% of our traffic every few weeks. A really slow death...it was agonizing. Over the next 16 months or so we would eventually lose about 80% of our traffic from Google. This wasn't the typical 40-60% overnight a lot of people had become accustom to and it took a while to realize WTF was going on.

Around November of 2013 we had enough of trying to figure out how to fix the issue on our own and needed a fresh set of eyes on the problem. We hired a consultant who IMO is an expert on the Panda algo. Not cheap by any means and his findings required us to gut the site.

What we did.... revamped the navigation structure (to more contextual feel that changes depending on where you are in the site), complete redesign for better usability in the meat section of the pages, resolved our technical SEO issues (canonicals, rel= next prev functions, fixing a soft 404 issue to hard 404's, and improper use of noindex tags) we noindexed pages that don't need to be in search, updated/improved or deleted content with bad user metrics, rewrote every meta title and meta description (shorten and make it flow, not stuffed with keywords). There we some more items but you get the idea. A BIG time change.

I would say through the entire process our site has gotten much better. Things we needed to change for probably 2-3 years and unfortunately had focused our efforts elsewhere during that time. After doing what we've done so far I realize there is even more we can do to improve our site. That is another project we plan to start this Fall and will hopefully push live late 2014 early 2015. Either way I've realized that in this online world everything is moving EXTREMELY fast. If you do not keep up with the times, they will kick your ass. The less time you spend wondering and complaining about why your competitor isn't being slammed and focus on your own issues, the better off you and your business will be. Their time will come if they let it happen as some of us have over the last 1-3 years. Just my two cents

[simonmc]

The moral of this story is don't rely on google as being a stable source of income. If you get biz from google you should treat that as a bonus but don't become reliant on it as it can disappear in a heart beat.