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.

[indyank]

@captainsalad2, that article, to an extent, explains their findings on why the losers lost but doesn't attempt to explain the recovery for the winners.

[indyank]

Wow Jez123, guess we posted at the same time and yes I do agree with your observation on long tail.

[indyank]

The preceding figure illustrates for a random sampling of non-branded, long tail keywords eBay was previously targeting, 80% of them are no longer on the first page, despite relatively low competition for these highly targeted keywords.

ebay was probably getting away with thin pages because of their brand strength. The above statement and my exp. suggest a brand weight dial down in the panda formula. is the dial down done for long tail in less competitive areas? any thoughts?

[kokopoko]

@SnowMan68 who did you use? I'm trying to convince my boss we need an outside company to verify my recommendations and find anything I missed.

[chrisv1963]

if this is the start of the end of authority sites getting away with the type of thin pathetic pages we see dominating many niches now that can only be a good thing!

Unfortunately this update didn't hurt Pinterest. Thin content with known copied photos shouldn't rank.

[nickreynolds]

Just an observation from one of my little sites to add to the overall picture. I started this project a while ago and then abandoned further development - only about 20 pages and ranked well for exact match. About a year ago it started a gradual decline so that by this April the Google traffic was down to about 5% of what it was (plenty of traffic from elsewhere though such as Ask.com). I checked at some stage and wasn't on first few pages of G. Then 23rd may, big upturn of traffic and I'm position 3. The only change I made to the site was moved some inline css over into the stylesheet.

[Pandacide]

the penalty will be dropped 7-10 days later and we see a panda update next month that suddenly restores all lost rankings

@CaptainSalad2 Wy do I think that I am seeing that change already, in the last 2-3 hours?

[sem4u]

I am seeing something interesting with a site possibly hit by Panda last July - the "Panda Recovery" update. This site has been down on its main keyword since then. On Sunday the ranking for its main keyword returned to its early July position. This site is based in the UK and is on a subdomain.

[ColourOfSpring]

I would guess ebay will now move back into adwords, the penalty will be dropped 7-10 days later and we see a panda update next month that suddenly restores all lost rankings without e-bay making any onsite changes the rest of us would need to. Call my cynical........

I agree. It's 100% guaranteed that eBay and Google are now in a negotiation and eBay will be back to their former rankings (or close to) after a week or two, if not sooner. When do we stop calling it cynicism and just call it for what it is: realism?

[heisje]

and just call it for what it is

yes : cartel and criminal abuse of market dominant position.

[heisje]

Brand weightage in the panda formula had been dialled down

and will be dialed up soon, before this "dance" (still going on) is over.

.

[aristotle]

I just did a Google search that ranks a worthless article from How Stuff Works above articles by experts and specialists in the field. I thought this was exactly the type of thing that Panda was supposed to prevent.

[indyank]

I think it depends on the type of query and user intent. Sometimes, if sites with brand authority like How Stuff Works have content that users were normally looking for, they will rank about the expert written content.

[aristotle]

Well I didn't realize that How Stuff Works has "brand authority". Maybe some people would be satisfied with the superficial information (or mis-information) in their articles, but it's the last place I would look for "authority".

[indyank]

A site which is widely known to users has brand authority and "How Stuff works" definitely fall in that category. May be you are right on the second one. But I might not be able to comment on the other observation without getting into the details and I would avoid that. Ultimately it depends on users and how google perceives their intent and satisfaction.

[seodudez]

Is anyone noticing that their traffic and rankings are still going down? Today was another down day for us in comparison to last week and I don't know why.

[graeme_p]

Mine are still going up - but the recovery (from a drop over the last two years) started on the 18th, before the Panda roll out was announced.

[Andrea Wasik]

My mom and pop online store site has seen its organic clicks increase by 53% since May 20. We are now ranking back above Amazon as well. Almost all rankings that I track have increased since then. We have never done any shady linking, and have been around since 2001.

Our business used to be enormous but has crashed over the couple years. Maybe this will stop us from going bust.

[EditorialGuy]

the recovery (from a drop over the last two years) started on the 18th, before the Panda roll out was announced.

Maybe Panda 4.0 was being tested, or rolled out selectively, before it was fully and officially deployed?

FWIW, we started seeing a climb in traffic on Saturday (two days before the rollout), with a bigger jump on Sunday. Initially, the biggest improvements came from several countries outside the United States, with U.S. traffic following on the day of (and, even more, in the days after) the official rollout.

[heisje]

Our business used to be enormous but has crashed over the couple years.

While at the same time large corporations (ex. Google, Amazon, eBay) benefited immensely from their de facto conspiracy against you and others like you, still unpunished.

.

[niggle]

Hi Folks

We started to see an upswing on April 22.

By May 1 impressions were up 110% and clicks 34% (on April 1)
By By June 1 impressions up 616% and clicks 229% (on April 1)

Also the number of top 10 positions has risen around 300% from 250 to over 1000.

The major spikes are on:

April 22
May 11
May 24
May 29

Early April I took down the only three microsites that we had set up years ago and were pointing at us and 301'd all content to the main site. Apart from that its been an ongoing battle getting rid of duplicate content and making the pages less spammy.

I hope that helps. It doesn't quite fit in with your Panda 4 timeline.

[teokolo]

Anyone like me seeing traffic drop to pre panda 4.0 levels?

[Mentat]

I see a disaster in my niche since Thursday.
A lot of PURE spam pages, a lot of new sites with thin content, but very clean design.

If Panda was about content and thin content, something terrible is broken!

For me, the result pages looks like this:
1 - 3 (fixed positions) brand sites, that are using a lot of #*$!ty SPAM SEO (indexed search results, warez, rich snippet spam etc)

3 - 5 small, pretty new, unknown sites, with low quality content and few pages.

When you see -20% drop for your site/brand name is really curious...

[superclown2]

I'm still watching brandspam bubble back up to the top in my UK niche. It's as though Panda 4 never happened now.

So, I ask myself - why? Has this been done deliberately by Google, is it user metrics, have the brands got ways we don't know about of promoting their sites further? Anyone got any ideas?

[EditorialGuy]

Anyone like me seeing traffic drop to pre panda 4.0 levels?

Our Google referrals and traffic continue to grow, albeit slowly.

Results for the queries that I watch are mostly somewhat better than they were Pre-Panda 4.0, although some of the results are still spammy or flaky. Changes seem evolutionary, not revolutionary.

[menntarra 34]

@Mentat
With panda 4.0 our traffic doubled, but since Thursday our site's traffic has dropped to pre 4.0 panda levels... not happy at all :/

[BillyS]

Anyone seeing a change in traffic? We had a small uplift in Panda 4.0 (25%) and we're seeing another 30% in the last three hours. The site gets a decent amount of visitors, so it's easy to spot changes in traffic.

[seodudez]

i had a drop around Panda 4.0, but then had an uptick today early day... now back to the same.

[RedBar]

I still want to know WHY I have to append UK to a keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 query to get rid of all the US SERPs results for many of my widget searches in Google.co.uk?

It is ridiculous Google, WHY, WHY, WHY are you serving ALL US SERPs for a product the US CANNOT supply to the UK under a normal search BUT, BUT, BUT, I append UK and, HELLO, sensible results!?!?!?

Yeah Google, you get loads more PVs than Bing quite simply because no one searching for my widgets can find the effing things!

[Martin Ice Web]

Redbar, i yesterday checked some keywords in my special niche. This keyword does not makes sense in any other niches but Google realy showed my a site from a DENTIST! It proudly highlighted a similar ( it was not simialr ) keyword on this site!
I do not wonder why bounce is at over 95% right now.