Why have so many sites changed position since Panda 4?

[superclown2]

Many of us saw considerable changes straight after Panda 4 only for many promoted sites to sink slowly back into nowhereland and major brand sites to float back to the top. Were Google just playing with us? Did they turn the dial back? Was it user metrics that made the difference? Or were there other factors in play?

I think it is very important to get a good idea of just what happened and why because it could be fundamental to the way we should design and promote our sites in future.

So; did your sites rise and then fall? Did they rise, and keep rising? Did they never rise at all at first but do so afterwards? And most important of all, do you have any idea why?

[netmeg]

Mine is still going up, but I'm reasonably sure it was something of a false positive in the first place (I have seven other sites just like it serving different regions that have almost doubled every year)

I do know of one non-Panda'd site that has some heavy linkage from another site that tanked last month, and it's had what I believe is collateral damage from that.

[SnowMan68]

Our site saw a huge boost with P4.0. We have risen each week at least 10% since. This week the trend continues.

It seems to me that we saw a major boost in our rankings right away with Panda for short tail stuff. After that we have seen smaller movement on the short tail and then our longer tail stuff has been constantly rising.

[Martin Ice Web]

We suffer a lot. After gaining traffic from Panda 3 to about 80% from prepanda, we got now hit worse ever. We are down to about 30% and big brands are outranking us it doesn matter if there is a relation to the query or not.

I think the Panda 4 distinguish more between informational and transactional queries. Where small info sites now can outrank the big ones but if it Comes to transactional serps big brands are weighted more. Last thursday 06/05 i think they adjusted again to more brands power again.
It is obvious biased towards Amazon again. I am astonished that Amazon outranks us even if you search for an item they donīt have but we do have it exclusive.
Keywords treshold for brands seem to be higher than for smaller ecoms.
I noticed that brands pages are most the widget page itself while pages from smaller ecoms are in most cases categorie pages or summary pages.


My guess:
informational Content is getting more important
transactional: how much money do you pay

[EditorialGuy]

We're seeing a trend similar to SnowMan88's: a continued increase in Google organic traffic. Rising three, four, or five places for key search phrases can make a big difference in traffic (assuming that you're on the first or the top of the second SERP) even if the overall mix of results isn't dramatically different from what it was before.

Matt Cutts has said to think of Panda 4.0 as a new architecture, so it's reasonable to assume that tweaking is still going on or that new elements are being tested.

[LuckyLiz]

We had a big increase on one site from Panda 4, and then smaller increases from Google since then. This is usually the time of year when our traffic declines, too.

On a second site, we had a very small increase from the initial Panda 4 and then had a much bigger jump starting around May 27.

[abhijit12a]

we are experiencing mix result, some of our site got hurt by panda 4.0. we lost ranking from first page to six- seven page and there are few sites which saw boost in ranking from seven-eighth posting to second page. we are not able figure out how exactly to deal with it.