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]

[GreyBeard123]

@ Whitey – Nothing wrong with your logic :)

We decided against a reconsideration request due to a few reasons…

a) We didn’t know of any violations of Google’s quality guidelines, nor did we see any unnatural links in WMT.

b) To spend a week or two looking for unknown links will cost more than a few bucks, for both labour and third party tools; and if we don’t find anything, what then?

c) It will be much cheaper, and faster, to delete and then replace a few pages, rather than to follow the reconsideration route.

d) We were also curious about the effects of the penalty; and seeing as it would be a rather difficult experiment to duplicate, we decided to leave the pages as is.

[Whitey]

We recovered from a manual penalty, on a few pages (not site-wide), without a reconsideration request.

@Greybeard123 - How do you know the penalty was lifted ; did you see a traffic increase or just the penalty notice in webmastertools disappear ?

FWIW - I sent a question to John Mueller, prior to yesterday's hangout, about the confusion in Webmastertools over the following :

The manual action is against the link. You can’t change the link. What are you being considered a request for? This instruction on Google makes no sense IMO

Partial Matches

Some manual actions apply to specific pages, section or links

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole

Request a review
Tell us how you have addressed the specific issues we have listed, including all relevant information.

relating to this :

Once you’ve corrected any violations of Google’s quality guidelines, the next step is to request reconsideration. With this new feature, you'll find a simpler and more streamlined reconsideration request process. Now, when you visit the reconsideration request page, you’ll be able to check your site for manual actions, and then request reconsideration only if there’s a manual action applied to your site. If you do have a webspam issue to address, you can do so directly from the Manual Actions page by clicking "Request a review." [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au...]

I'm not sure if the question was read in this January 13,2015 hangout, but John did say they were going to fix some of the text in WebmasterTools as well as specifically the disavow file area in his latest hangout:

55m17s We’re going through all of these messages that we’re sending out from webmaster tools anyway. To kind of update them to new layouts. So I am sure we will get to that message as well (disavow message he is referring to), specifically to make text changes there too. [youtu.be...]
Thanks to RustyBrick for surfacing this information: [seroundtable.com...]

[GreyBeard123]

How do you know the penalty was lifted ; did you see a traffic increase or just the penalty notice in webmastertools disappear ?

For us, traffic isn’t a good indicator of anything, due to the fact that we do a lot of other stuff (such as offline advertising) that give us spontaneous traffic increases/spikes.

Our rankings immediately told us the penalty was lifted; thereafter we noticed that the penalty message disappeared.

When one keyword drops from first page to 60+ it might be a fluke, but when all/most/more than a few keywords drop the chances are very good that you have a penalty.

When all of them are thereafter restored to first page, and they stick, then your penalty obviously was either lifted or it disappeared due to ‘whatever’ reasons…

[rlopes]

Any idea when the next Panda will be released?

[LostOne]

Hopefully this quarter. If I don't get out of this thing this time around I'm probably a lost cause. I've exhausted every possibility, heard every freaking theory and all the advice from those that haven't been affected.

The latter is what really irks me. I'll listen, but inevitably their thoughts have been mentioned and tried. Then I come back with...

"Have you ever been pandalized?"

"Well, no"

"There you have it"

Panda sufferer since February 2011

[toidi]

The mythical panda! I have read and studied this mythical creature and developed a fear of the thin content on most of my sites. Some of these sites only have 10+- pages with only an iframe on each page and no content. Should i start adding content to these sites? My bigger fear is they are on the top half of first page results for some very competative keywords and i don't want to ruin that.