John Mueller talks Panda and Penguin penalties on hangout-30Dec14

[Whitey]

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout

Streamed live on Dec 30, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba_qLBFlIe4&t=08m37s [youtube.com]

I thought this was one of the more notable conversations involving a potential specific Panda penalty issue on Barry Schwartz / RustyBrick's [webmasterworld.com...] website, the things that the algorithm may be looking for, and later some further insight into Penguin penalties and the disavow tool.

John Mueller said that he would pass on the Panda query to his team, and hopefully we get some insight into the potential Panda quality issue's Barry will need to resolve. It would be good to have some response from the G team.

All sorts of gems in the mix, things like proportions of content, comments, time to recovery, process clarification etc. etc. The video starts at 8mins 37secs, so I may have missed some other gems which I'll check when I next have a spare hour or so.

Anyway, the hangout might be worth having a look at, and passing on your analysis and comments. One thing, ..... it's complicated [ as if you didn't know ]. Any inputs appreciated.

Can we keep this thread OT and avoid the temptation to run Google down - more try and work out what this video teaches us.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:36 am (utc) on Jan 2, 2015]
[edit reason] fixed YouTube url [/edit]

[Whitey]

Seems we have a bit of a focus on this thread on Barry's site ( which I think is good ). But since there are so many other sections for analysis, I thought I'd highlight another area for comment. They still appear to be discussing Panda / quality issues, but this time with the Spanish SEO.

27m28s Talking about content quality in the e-commerce space ( highly competitive areas ) [youtube.com...]

Preceding this section JM says that the backend database system is still considered content so making sure it functions well is important. I interpret this to mean the quality of information and how it delivers it.

Question: If I start to improve the quality of our site, how much time will I need to wait to see an improvement in our rankings

JM :There is no fixed time for something like that. We would re-crawl quickly if submitted in site map or feed, probably show it in our index within a couple of days, depending on how much content, what kind of site it is, so we would know about it fairly quickly ... and from that point of view we would be able to show it in the search results ..... but it would be hard to say when that content would have an effect on your website's ranking, because it takes a lot more time to aggregate that information, and to turn that into a general positive signal, where we would say this website has gone from generating very little quality content to a lot of high quality content. So I'd be saying you'd be looking more of a time frame like half a year

Really... Panda... 6 months at best ? Thoughts / feedback ?

[RedBar]

So I'd be saying you'd be looking more of a time frame like half a year

6 months? WTF? No wonder my new sites are not ranking!

The last noticeable boost I had was last May 2014's Panda, am I going to have to wait another 5 months?

FWIW all my new sites are ranking well in Bing with very litle garbage around them whereas G in the UK is a joke for my widgets.

[Whitey]

Here's a Penguin specific question ( I've abridged it ) :

33m52s Will quality link building help release a site from a Penguin penalty, without the need for Webmastertools access or the disavow file being applied, by shifting the percentage of low quality links, so that the high quality links become the majority? [youtube.com...]

JM: That would definitely help. We look at it on an aggregated level across everything that we have from your website, and if we see that things are picking up and things are going in the right direction, then that's something our algorithms will be able to take into account. But if you have access to the disavow file you should look to clean up those old issues as well.

Mods note, sorry the links fixing.

[netmeg]

- brevity of post (i.e. pure character count)
That would make Netmeg our lowest quality poster. Yeah.

This might be off topic, or it might be related.

I had six event sites, all of which are essentially the same except they target different locations (I now have eight, but the two new ones haven't been around long enough to be affected)

All of the sites have always ranked very well in their space, and gotten tons of traffic in season *except* one. That one got hit by what appeared to be a Panda around the end of October/beginning of November in 2012. There were a lot of weather-related cancellations that year, and I suspected that might have had something to do with it. Anyway, it sunk like a stone.

The other five sites continued to grow and grow - even the one that's been around since 1998 more than doubled its traffic. But for all of 2013, there was essentially no difference between the five successful sites and the one Panda'd site. It had just as many - in some cases more - active events listed, just virtually no traffic at all. But I still didn't do anything differently with it.

As hinted at in the quote above, none of these sites have in-depth content; mostly they just give information about events that is otherwise often difficult for users to ferret out. There is some UGC in the form of comments, but I moderate it pretty heavily.

Since the five "good" sites were doing so well, I didn't see why I should have to do anything drastic to the sixth, so I just kept updating it like I did the others, and whatever improvements I made, I made to all of them exactly the same.

When Panda 4 arrived, the sixth site recovered. Again - I had done NOTHING to pull it out, just updated it like all the others. This site is now pretty much recovered to where it was when it was hit, and growing apace.

Six months? This site spent NINETEEN months in the dog house. Why? I dunno. And I don't think Google does either.

Obviously all this is anecdotal, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Barry did nothing different to his site whatsoever (even including more UGC moderation) and it comes back. He just might have to wait a while.

[RedBar]

Why? I dunno. And I don't think Google does either.

Do you consider that your conversion to responsive "may" have had anything whatsoever to do with it gaining traction or nothing at all? Was the improvement after May 2014 Panda?

FWIW an existing site I upgraded to html5 responsive with all new images and information etc 3 months ago today, yep 3rd October, has fallen flat on its face insofar as Google search referrals are concerned.

So much for doing as Google recommends!

[Planet13]

Well, the RESPONSIVE blog on one of my sites saw a 100% increase in google traffic after Panda 4 in May. While the NON-responsive ecommerce side of that same site saw only a 10% increase in traffic.

I had changed the blog to a responsive layout maybe a year earlier. I don't think I had updated the blog in over a year otherwise.

May be related... might not be. Not sure why I was hit by Panda back in 2012 in the first place.

[netmeg]

Do you consider that your conversion to responsive "may" have had anything whatsoever to do with it gaining traction or nothing at all? Was the improvement after May 2014 Panda?

No, we went all responsive early in 2012. The affected site was responsive from the get-go.

[RedBar]

Well, the RESPONSIVE blog on one of my sites saw a 100% increase in google traffic after Panda 4 in May.

Interesting, me too/similar, in fact the new responsive sites which were getting very little traffic are now about 500% and going past some some of my much older sites!

The sites I have now not getting any traction are all built on the same template therefore is it going to take another Panda update for these to get going?

Could this 6 months thing now be an expected G updation?

because it takes a lot more time to aggregate that information, and to turn that into a general positive signal, where we would say this website has gone from generating very little quality content to a lot of high quality content. So I'd be saying you'd be looking more of a time frame like half a year

I keep reading the above, there are several messages in it for both those who have had issues and "maybe" for those of us having traction issues.

If it takes G that long to re-evaluate an existing site then new sites probably have to go through it too? The new sandbox?

[netmeg]

Well if you take seriously Rae's proposition that Google doesn't want to make sites rank, it wants to rank popular sites, then that would kind of make sense. Why would Google want to rank a site it doesn't know will be popular yet?

[EditorialGuy]

I'm not sure about a good definition of 'USG.' It looks webmasterworld is 100% USG then? Is USG content automatically penalized in search results?

No, but low-quality user-generated content should (and probably does) have an impact on search rankings.

Remember, too, that what a "community" may enjoy isn't necessarily what a searcher is looking for. If Joe and Jo Baker want actionable information about which type of Karo syrup works best in pecan pie, are they likely to be satisfied by a page that consists mostly of rants about the evils of corn growers, GMOs, and the food industry ("and anyone who disagrees is Monsanto's bitch")? Probably not.

[RedBar]

Why would Google want to rank a site it doesn't know will be popular yet?

Agreed however why is Bing able to do this faster and more efficiently now?

Has G got SO MUCH info it can't cope with it except for once maybe twice a year?

Is Panda so process intensive that they can't run it more often? I know that sounds stupid with all the kit they supposedly have but that's the impression I'm forming.

[ken_b]

Why would Google want to rank a site it doesn't know will be popular yet?

How will they ever know how popular a site will be if they don't rank it high enough to be found?
.

[Wilburforce]

Why would Google want to rank a site it doesn't know will be popular yet?

Its content is well-matched to a search query? Its content quality is high/original/unique?

Or

Why would Google want to rank sites on the basis of popularity alone?

And (re the start of this thread)

Why would Google want to stop ranking a site it already knows is popular?

[martinibuster]

Why would Google want to stop ranking a site it already knows is popular?

The answer may be in what jmmcormac posted above, that Google's ideas of what constitutes quality content are rooted in academic observation which might represent an aspiration of the kind of content Google wants but might be rare to find in the real-world. The real world example of quality may vary from what Google believes is quality, particularly for a certain segment of Netizens.

So... how does Google find quality content? I believe it's a matter of weeding out sites with low quality signals. That's an inclusive process, too. It's not just weeding out, it's also weeding in, so to speak. There is an excellent Microsoft research paper that describes this process and it's likely Google is also looking at similar factors. Google Quality Raters handbook might be a good starting point for understanding what kinds of things might be bad for on-page (like huge ads that get in the way of content, sound familiar?).

So there are usability factors that can get in the way. There are crawl factors (blocking JS), but getting down to the on-page quality issues there is the word count factor, repetitive words (keyword stuffing); across the entire site if the title tags seem to closely match search queries (even longtail queries) then that could be evidence of trying to influence search rankings (unnatural).

Unnatural
Everyone talks about being natural and prescribes random percentages that represent their opinions of what natural is. However that's bogus and has always been bogus. What is natural is actually a factor that is decided by the Internet itself. When you make a graph of let's say word count/page number ratios, a pattern emerges. What's literally the norm is bunched together. What's SEO spam are graphed as outliers. So in a way, what's normal or quality is not necessarily decided by Google but by the Internet itself.

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:48 pm (utc) on Jan 3, 2015]

[FranticFish]

are they likely to be satisfied by a page that consists mostly of rants about the evils of corn growers, GMOs, and the food industry ("and anyone who disagrees is Monsanto's bitch")? Probably not.

Except forums aren't Q&A sites. Each has its own flavour, dictated by the charter, the moderator's policies, the member's mood and the prevailing wind at the time.

If someone wants to know how much of an ingredient to put in a recipe, and find out that the manufacturers of that ingredient treat their employees like sh*t and rape the environment, then they got more than they bargained for. It might not be the experience they want, but it might be a 'better' answer to the question than they bargained for.

From your name and your posts, I guess that you run your own media website(s). Suppose someone doesn't like your editorial slant - do you think that renders your website worthless if it is popular with a certain demographic? Who decides what is acceptable?

[hannamyluv]

Really... Panda... 6 months at best ? Thoughts / feedback ?

6 months? WTF? No wonder my new sites are not ranking!

It is very possible that this 6 (to 12 months in my experience) months waiting period is kind of a quality signal too. If your site is not important enough to you to make it worth waiting for Google to come back around or if you did not make outside plans to deal with a loss or initial non-existence of Google traffic, chances are you site is not among what they would term "quality".

For a very, very long time Google has made it clear that they want sites that someone is dedicated to. We can all grip about Big Brand sites dominating, but the fact is that they are in it for the long haul and Google knows it. It wants smaller sites that are in it for the long haul too, not sites that are going to be abandoned after the owner gets bored or the site does not make enough money for the owner's taste.

How many of us have abandoned sites out there? Abandoned sites even that were of high quality but we just don't have the time or energy to maintain them?

I know I want to spit nails every time I have to do my bad link clean up on my site and we only link to high quality sites. And yet these high quality sites move or delete pages randomly, which is frustrating for someone like me who wants to refer people to good pages, not 404s. Imagine what Google has to deal with in this regards and at their scale?

I am not saying that Google has perfected detecting high quality sites that will stay around, but it might very well be their aim.

I don't think we should assume that every time a site loses position it needs "cleaning up". Possibly it is the algorithm that requires it.

I agree with this (I think - maybe we are thinking 2 different things). There is a possibility with Panda that Google simply does not want your site anymore, no matter how well you maintain it and what its quality is.

There is a possibility, for example, that Google feels that Barry's site is more of a site that should be looking to other sources for traffic than the Google SERPs. Maybe that is why JM was hemming and hawing so much. Nobody wants to be the one to break up, to say "I'm really sorry, but its not you, its me. I just need my space from you."

[Lorel]

Since when do site owners think they do not need to moderate the comments, especially SEO experts like Barry? I think that is just common sense. It affects the quality and trust level of the page if you don't.

[Wilburforce]

what's normal or quality is not necessarily decided by Google but by the Internet itself

That might be so if we were looking at a static population, but Google ranking factors impact on the behaviour of webmasters, so if Google cuts e.g. acceptable keyword-density, keyword-density will decline generally over time in the population as a whole: Google is having an evolutionary effect.

JM makes the point - with which I fully agree - that webmasters should concentrate on content rather than ranking factors, but when well-established websites with good content lose position because of some change in ranking factors it has the effect of concentrating attention on those factors.

One difficulty with which Google has to contend is a sizeable sub-population of sites that endeavour to game the system by any means possible (including, if "good content" becomes a ranking factor, by mimicking "good content"). Google can't leave that problem unattended, but I think a lot of what they have done about it to date does little more than destabilise the system.

[RedBar]

If your site is not important enough to you to make it worth waiting for Google to come back around or if you did not make outside plans to deal with a loss or initial non-existence of Google traffic, chances are you site is not among what they would term "quality".

Whilst I understand your comment, mine are corporate specialist widget brochure sites, I feel this is now, well it has been for quite some time, obviously having the desired Google effect of driving new sites to AdWords, Pay For Inclusion, quite simply this is not financially justifiable for us, like the vast majority of companies in the world we do have a finite financial resource, unlike Google!

So, a minimum of 6 months, maybe longer, is the new sandbox, plus if there is no Panda 4.0+/5.0 until April/May, it's no wonder I see so many disillusioned with what's happening to their hard work and efforts.

Just imagine waiting a year to find out if rectification work to sites or brand new ones has not been effective...we're going back to the dark ages, this is censorship, nothing less, but it is their search engine, no wonder I don't use it.

[EditorialGuy]

Except forums aren't Q&A sites. Each has its own flavour, dictated by the charter, the moderator's policies, the member's mood and the prevailing wind at the time.

Sure, but that doesn't mean a forum that's perfect for its community is what searchers are looking for when they ask a question or enter a keyphrase in a search box.

For example, if Webmaster World had a thread titled "Google releases Panda 5.0 update" and 90 percent of the posts were rants about how Google is evil and wants to destroy small businesses, the thread wouldn't be an optimum search result for a query on "panda 5.0 update." A searcher who wanted factual information (or information without a lot of background noise) would likely be happier with, say, an article at Search Engine Land.

[Robert Charlton]

For those who are surprised by the figure of six months, or who think that six months to build trust on the web and to rank is excessive, compare that with life and business offline.

Here's a thread on the topic from about two and a half years back, where the figure of six months is discussed. Coincidentally, JohnMu and serountable also enter into it....

Search engines need time & other signals to confirm a site is "fantastic"
June, 2012
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4467831.htm [webmasterworld.com]


PS: Instant rankings are a better fit for the churn and burn spam model.

[aristotle]

How many of us have abandoned sites out there?

In my opinion you should never create a website in the first place unless you intend for it to be around for a very long time (=decades), and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep it around for a very long time (=decades).

I don't know if Google's algorithm gives credit for longevity, but I think it might. My four older sites (9-12 years old) have been doing better than ever lately, but my newer site (about 18 months) seems to be treading water.

[hannamyluv]

Just imagine waiting a year to find out if rectification work to sites or brand new ones has not been effective

Companies have and still do wait like this all the time. This is how typical business actually works.

this is censorship

No, it is business.

I feel this is now, well it has been for quite some time, obviously having the desired Google effect of driving new sites to AdWords, Pay For Inclusion...

So... Google should support your personal efforts to make money at their own expense?

quite simply this is not financially justifiable for us

If you are saying this, then Google is saying to you that your business model does not work. If you can't support your business without free traffic from Google (not saying you need to pay Google, just saying if your model cannot support itself in some other way) then you are no longer the type of site Google wants.

I know that is a really crappy thing to hear, and trust me, I have had to hear it myself in the past, but I do think that part of the reasoning behind Panda is Google's way of telling site owners this.

I mean, let's think about this. This is actually really responsible of Google. Again, not saying it is the main focus of Panda... But in every major update of the past near couple decades there have been people completely ruined by that update. If Google starts to make sure that sites displayed in the SERPs are actually sustainable beyond the existence of Google, far fewer people would be completely devastated by future updates.

[ogletree]

Just more proof that Google has no idea what they are doing. They are trying to do something that is impossible. There is no way to just catch spam because spammers work very hard to make their sites not look like spam. The funny thing is Google is knocking out more legit sites than spam sites. Spammers are working overtime to not get caught while normal people are not doing anything and getting dropped from Google.

Google is just bad now. I have a hard time finding things because sites that have what I need keep getting blocked. Many areas Google has blocked all legit sites and the only ones left are sites that have nothing to do with what i'm looking for. I have had to go to Bing several times to find what I needed.

[netmeg]

How will they ever know how popular a site will be if they don't rank it high enough to be found?

I believe that's something that has to be baked into the business model before I start. I don't want sites that only rely on organic traffic, anymore than I want sites that only rely on Facebook traffic or Twitter traffic. When I launch a new site, most of the time I don't get really significant organic inside a year or more. That's why I develop multiple channels.

[Whitey]

@Robert_Charlton - thanks for that reminder to the old post. The consistency over 2 years still seems to be there. Why are we taking so long to work it out :)

@Tedster - I've seen the occasional site start ranking much faster than six months. It's usually something that catches media attention for some reason. [webmasterworld.com...]
I think there's a lot of hope in that. Don't sit back and wait. Great content that get's talked about probably ranks quickly.

So build great content and promote it well. Maybe that will reduce 6 months to almost instant in some cases.

In the context of that, does the Spanish SEO's sites and Barry's Seroundtable attract sufficient attention, that it is so great that folks go really "wow" - that's new / that's great / that's different. How does Google know or care that I think Barry's site is a great resource. I'm already converted to it's value to me, so no use preaching to the converted. Are their audiences growing or shrinking. Or are folks basking in the realms of self entitlement. That's a hard question everyone should be asking themselves, including myself. And it can help shift the approach to Panda IMO

One operation that I regularly track for great, informative and inspirational articles, Tweets, promotes via Linked In, is on Forbes and Huffington Post multiple times a day. Does Barry do that ?

In contrast, does Barry take ownership for the knowledge. Sorry Barry, I'm just calling it as I see it, true or untrue.

My belief is that you can have a great site, but if nobody knows about it, it's virtually useless. And in a competitive world, the site's have to stand out, which is why "brand" is winning. If all else fails - we just select brands. Just a challenge to cultivate some thinking on how you might want to re analyse JM's responses.

Really, you know, the problem isn't SEO. It's mindset, and how we set our intentions and want to create our opportunities that makes the difference. Content creation, great content, consistent content improvements and new ideas, promote it well to your audience, know your audience well, listen to what they want, analyse constantly what they are saying, rinse and repeat.

... and SEO is a long term play, like business itself. Be committed with the right intentions to the long haul and permanent excellence. Technical SEO then just bolts on the back of that.

Then six months may be a lot less, and perhaps you are a lot less likely to slip back into Panda.

[ and to think, we haven't discussed Penguin yet ]

[Planet13]

Are we certain that Barry's site is a victim of panda? I thought at the beginning of the clip he said that it didn't appear to be Panda because of the date...

Did I miss something?

[Whitey]

@Planet13 - True, we don't know. JM's emphasis was more along the lines of quality content which kinda combines with Barry's concern he may have ( or not )been Panda'd.

When Panda 4 arrived, the sixth site recovered. Again - I had done NOTHING to pull it out, just updated it like all the others. This site is now pretty much recovered to where it was when it was hit, and growing apace.

@Netmeg - interesting, you said you did nothing to these sites. What if you, hypothetically had, say promoted them? What do you think if the festivals started to get talked about more out there? Was there an issue perhaps around co-citation, social, or the lack of it. What do you think Google picked up on to give it that current growth. What's your hunch? Just curious / asking :)

[EditorialGuy]

@Netmeg - interesting, you said you did nothing to these sites. What if you, hypothetically had, say promoted them? What do you think if the festivals started to get talked about more out there?

I'm not netmeg, but we had a similar experience: a long, slow, steady drop from Panda 1.0 onwards, followed by a sudden leap last May and continued growth in average Google rankings and organic traffic ever since.

But.... Our niche site never plunged in the rankings: We were just pushed down a few slots, on average, as pages from more generalist name-brand sites and megasites moved up, resulting in more search traffic for them and less for us. What's more, I know owners of other specialist sites who had the same thing happen to them. Then, last May, Google released Panda 4.0, and it was back to the good old days. Our Google organic traffic is now running about 265 percent ahead of the same time last year, and we didn't make any effort to "beat Panda." We just kept on doing what we've always done, with a few evolutionary (and incremental) improvements such as going from a three-column to a two-column layout.

Sometimes Google gets it right from a site owner's point of view, and sometimes it doesn't. Overall, we've done well in Google over the last 13+ years, but there certainly have been hiccups along the way. I do think Google wants to rank sites that deliver intrinsically useful content and a good user experience, and over the long term, it makes more sense to focus on serving your target audience than it does to second-guess the search engines or chase the latest SEO fads.

[Whitey]

I do think Google wants to rank sites that deliver intrinsically useful content and a good user experience, and over the long term, it makes more sense to focus on serving your target audience than it does to second-guess the search engines or chase the latest SEO fads.

Exactly.