Panda 4.1 Rolling Out

[netmeg]

Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.

Depending on the locale, around 3-5% of queries are affected.

Google+:
https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/7CWs3a3yoeY [plus.google.com]

(sorry, it's https so it won't link)

Searchengineland:

http://searchengineland.com/panda-update-rolling-204313 [searchengineland.com]

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:40 pm (utc) on Sep 25, 2014]
[edit reason] Made link clickable [/edit]

[chrisv1963]

This love Google now has for Pinterest is getting absurd.

I agree 100%. Pinterest = copied content = duplicate content => should actually be penalized by the Google algo.

In a number of cases you can call the photos on Pinterest stolen content because many webmasters don't want their property to be stored on Pinterest's servers. A good algo would ban stolen content.

[aristotle]

ChrisWilson --
What you're seeing with Pinterist isn't much different from what happens with wikipedia: First, someone will create a wikipedia article using information from one of your articles. Then the wikipedia article will quickly displace your article from the top of the SERPs and start taking most of the traffic that you had previously been getting.

[ChrisWilson]

@snippet

I thought about that, but here's the thing. My site is actually ALL about that keyword, for instance, if you searched that KW, basically whatever page G returned from my site would be relevant.

I still get what your saying though, it just seems their algo would want to point to the actual source, as a whole, which the site is, over some crappy Pinterest page, where the majority of the pins are pointing to anyway.

[Sand]

This love Google now has for Pinterest is getting absurd.

So create Pinterest boards that drive traffic back to your site.

[Lorel]

It's more likely that Pinterest is ranking higher than your site because it has more traffic, links, participation, sharing, etc.

[rish3]

Getty images was successful in squeezing Pinterest:

[techcrunch.com...]

It's too bad there's not a credible webmaster's association/guild that could gather enough people to do the same.

[JD_Toims]

It's more likely that Pinterest is ranking higher than your site because it has more traffic, links, participation, sharing, etc.

I think it's more likely Pinterest ranks as highly as it does, because they're ahead of the game and hired a copy writer since Google's Panda Updates have really cut down on thin content and even helped small and medium-sized sites with 4.1 -- [webmasterworld.com...] -- ;) LOL

[seoskunk]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Great Post JD just shows you popularity still outranks original content!

[BillyS]

I'm still seeing some movement, we're up 40% over the last two hours. Looks like google continues to churn through the data...

[brotherhood of LAN]

It's great to hear about upticks in traffic when we often only hear about bad news.

[samwest]

the good news is one in a million. the rest of us have died already.

[EditorialGuy]

the good news is one in a million. the rest of us have died already.

For every site that goes down, another goes up.

And no, the winners aren't just Amazon and Wikipedia. (For the queries that I watch, the top 10 search results are less skewed toward big brands than they were a year ago. YMMV.)

[Zivush]

the top 10 search results are less skewed toward big brands than they were a year ago.

I hope Google will continue in this direction.
There's no benefit in presenting more than one result per website for any particular query.

[trabis]

For every site that goes
down, another goes up....

Perhaps SER is spreading to thin. If one has to loose 1000 visitors to 1000 zombie blogs then math does not match reality. End result is 1001 zombie blogs. yay.

I see dead people.

[EditorialGuy]

I hope Google will continue in this direction.
There's no benefit in presenting more than one result per website for any particular query.

For what it's worth, "domain crowding" isn't limited to big-name sites. Google's SERPs show multiple results from mom-and-pop sites in some cases, even for competitive queries.

[iammeiamfree]

I reported last week that I was seeing big gains Friday and Saturday with overnight traffic. Sunday traffic returned to 'normal levels'. This Friday I am seeing big gains again, more than last Saturday (which is usually my quietest day) so fingers crossed it sticks or gets better. I am planning to work on some link aquisition as the site is still well below potential. I am aiming for atleast a 300% increase to be on schedule and my analysis suggests good links should work to make that possible.

[Kelowna]

the good news is one in a million. the rest of us have died already.

My sites have all gone way up, income close to doubled so far.

Here is a thought, if where you hang out everyone is losing, dont you think you should hang out where everyone is winning so you can learn from them?

Just saying, nothing wrong with WW, but there is more to explore.

[Itanium]

I think domain crowding has something to do with Google trying to send traffic to a site according to some internal ranking, which isn't shown in the public results just yet.

In other words: One site is ranking for "blue widgets" on #4, while another one is on #5 and 6# for the same term with two different pages. It my take some time, but I've seen it happen more than once, that the second site eventually will overtake the first one at a time of Googles choosing. At this point, the domain crowding will disappear (or not, if the "end-position" is not reached yet).

I saw this happen more than once, which is why I still think Google is sending traffic to pages according to some internal ranking system. One keyword goes up, another one goes down, but the overall traffic Google sends to that webpage remains the same. Why? Because this way it's easy to determine the quality of a site for different topics and pages and see how the user interaction changes, without completely screwing everything up.

[chrisv1963]

So create Pinterest boards that drive traffic back to your site

And give your content away to Pinterest for free and then let them make money out of it with "sponsored pins" and any other form of advertising they might come up with in the future? No thanks.

Also I'm pretty sure that at some point in the (near) future Google will penalize sites for "Pinterest stuffing". It is a sort of link building isn't it? Pinterest links are no-follow, but who says that Google always respects the "no-follow". They might consider Pinterest links as real links and with this intensive artificial link building you might at some point later on get in trouble.

[BillyS]

Panda 4.1 appears to be settling down for us. Overall, it appears we came away with a 35% increase in traffic from Google.

Like others here, this has been a long road. The site is over ten years old, roughly 1,700 pages of content. We were first hit by panda back in 2011 and from then until around December of 2013 we were on the losing end of every update. To give you an idea, we went from over 30,000 visitors a day in 2011 to around 2,500 in the fall of 2013.

We pulled around 150 pages in 2012(the site had around 1,100 pages back then) of syndicated content that was 7+ years old and not maintained (updated) or appeared to be duplicate content (pages with very similar topic). We combined seemingly duplicate content into one topic, redirected links... following the typical advice for panda affected sites.

Then we embarked on a year long process of refreshing articles, removing what might be deemed spam (lowered keyphrase instances). We've actually edited every article twice over the last three years. If the article doesn't answer the reader's question it was killed or we add content to make sure a reader comes away with their answer. At the same time we started adding about six new articles each week.

We're also excited to see Google may be adding mobile user experience to its ranking since we've gone through the process of creating a responsive web design. On Page Speed Insights, we score 89/100 on mobile and 97/100 on desktop. Ironically, the remaining "fixes" have to do with AddThis and Google.

It still isn't time to celebrate. Currently, we're getting around 9,000 visitors per day. My guess is we will never reach a million visitors a month again. I'm also thinking the road back to a steady state position will take as long as the slide down.

I live by the old saying, winners never quit and quitters never win. That's probably what kept me going over the last three years. Best wishes to everyone here. - Bill

[philgames]

"Also I'm pretty sure that at some point in the (near) future Google will penalize sites for "Pinterest stuffing". It is a sort of link building isn't it? Pinterest links are no-follow, but who says that Google always respects the "no-follow". They might consider Pinterest links as real links and with this intensive artificial link building you might at some point later on get in trouble. "

Yes that confirmed. Didnt that morally bankrupt person say in a video once that the google cult reserve the right to penalize sites with manipulative excessive no follow links

[mrblister]

Hi all,
I'm a seo noob and just looking for some pointers as this latest update seems to target ecommerce sites...

I created a drop ship site around march this year - it has had a few sales and was crawling up nicely but no results on first page and very few inbound links etc.

Around end of Sept I decided to help my category pages rank by adding lots of content etc - just by coincidence and just after I did this my site tanked on Oct 4 due with pages going from page 2/3/4 to 5/6/7/8.

Now I am the first to admit this site is basically using product descriptions from my supplier on all product pages.

Also of about 1000 pages indexed (before Oct 4th) about 200 were not indexed when I check in webmaster tools.

What I am asking is:
If my product pages are all duplicate content will this harm my site overall? (I don't care about ranking individual product pages)

What if my category pages are all unique with good related content - can poor product pages affect my category pages? I thought GG ranked a page rather than page(s) or sites?

Many Thanks for any help in advance

[GreyBeard123]

Yes that confirmed. Didnt that morally bankrupt person say in a video once that the google cult reserve the right to penalize sites with manipulative excessive no follow links

I think it must really be, an all-out effort, to be excessive...

On one of our sites we have more than a few thousand NF back-links, and that site as well as the relevant pages ranks rather high on Google’s first page.

Thus, either a few thousand NF links aren’t enough for a penalty, or they help you to rank...

[EditorialGuy]

What if my category pages are all unique with good related content - can poor product pages affect my category pages? I thought GG ranked a page rather than page(s) or sites?

That may have been true (at least to some degree) before Google introduced its Panda "quality" algorithm in 2011, but in the Panda era, things have changed. Pages that Google deems "thin" or of low quality can affect a site's rankings overall.

[robert76]

BillyS

Ironically, the remaining "fixes" have to do with AddThis

Can you elaborate on AddThis? Did you remove it from your site?

[dethfire]

AddThis and Google resources are always flagged for Page Speed problems like no compression and no cache expiration etc etc

[JesterMagic]

@BillyS - Glad you came out with an increase with 4.1. Our 10 year site saw an increase with Panda 4.0 (+ 60%) after being hammered in 2012 by Penguin and a continued slow decline until Panda 4.0. During that time we lost over 80% of our traffic (peak was about 6500 UV a day). Unfortunately with Penguin 4.1 we have dropped again by about 20%.

In our niche the larger sites have crawled back a bit with increased domain clustering as well ins some cases. I am not sure why Google does domain clustering. If they want to list multiple results for the site why don't they do it the same way as they handle multiple forum posts from one site. List what they thing the best result is first followed by 3 or 4 similar pages contained in the same listing.

[BillyS]

@robert76

No we didn't remove AddThis from our site.

For AddThis, we use what's called their Mobile Toolbar at certain screen resolutions. This has Follow and Share on the bottom of the mobile screen. We lose points for tap targets being too close to other tap targets. This is the same for Google, we use their Custom Search Engine and the "clear" X is too close to the Search button. Again, we're green at 89/100 which was better than the 50 or so we were getting before the redesign.

dethfire is not correct, we do not lose points for compression or no cache expiration (this might apply to something like YSlow?) Not sure.

[Martin Ice Web]

Very big hit started on last friday the 24.october for our Panda hit site. After gaining about 30% back and seeing very good improvements on bounce rate and sales.
Today it is worse though. Bounce is again through the Roof.
EBAYs phb pages that had a manualy Penalty back in May are back for allmost every search term in my niche.
I don´t get this. If user metrics are a part of Panda why are is Panda striking back while user metrics ( e.g. bounce rate ) are getting better every day?


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