Google Panda 4.2 Rolling Out

[netmeg]

According to Searchengineland:

Google has pushed out a Google Panda refresh this weekend, many of you may not have noticed, but this roll out is happening incredibly slowly. Google said the update can take months to fully roll out because it will slowly roll out through your site. The Panda algorithm is still indeed a site-wide algorithm but some of your web pages might not see a change immediately.

Emphasis by me, because WTF.

A Google spokesperson confirmed with us the update did being rolling out this past weekend. They also noted it can take months to fully roll out. Google did not share with us how large of an impact this was on their search results, but they did imply it was a fairly small impact.

I haven't seen any signs of it in any client sites yet, but maybe it'll be "months"

[searchengineland.com...]

[Martin Ice Web]

@netmeg, good for you. Since 2 hours we suffer a 90% drop in traffic on one site, 99% on an other site i manage.. Never seen something like that.
It is weird, cause rankings seem not have to changed as i can see, one thing is again that amazon ranks with total unrelated pages. Looks like big amazon biased serps again.

[RedBar]

Google's hit my US traffic big time, so far I'm at 15.9% of an AdSense day, they're having a blood bath on my sites at the moment, will they recover?

[Panthro]

I heard this is going to take so long to roll out bc it will be done manually. Turns out it's more efficient to get organic intelligence to rank sites than it is to try and develop reliable AI.

[Lapizuli]

@Panthro - What's your source for that? It would be a dream come true...

[Ebuzz]

So far, no changes.

I wish they would employ manual intervention though. And do this also for Penguin hit sites that are otherwise quality.

If only.

[keyplyr]

So far, this appears to benefit my sites. Traffic up across the board :)

[samwest]

I heard this is going to take so long to roll out bc it will be done manually.

If that's true, I'll be taking a dirt nap by the time they are a tenth of the way through.

[yafdecline]

If you spent months (or years) attempting to recover, this news is beyond awful. Do you keep throwing good money after to bad, hoping that at some point they'll refresh Panda for your site and you'll experience a recovery? How does one know if a continued slow decline is a result of previous hits or if your site was refreshed and it's declining as a result of Panda 4.2?

[Selen]

Based on the signals from other posters, maybe sites that recover from Panda get their rankings back BUT the visitors they get do not convert?

[TheMadScientist]

-- A little Blues Bro's Paraphrase keeps popping into my head when I think about Google "slow rollin' the update" for some reason...

Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin'

Keep movin', movin', movin'
Though they're disapprovin'
Keep them doggies movin'
Rawhide

Don't try to understand 'em
Just rope and throw and brand 'em

Soon we'll be living high and wide.

My heart's calculatin'
My true love will be waitin'
Be waiting at the end of my ride.

Move 'em on, head 'em up
Head 'em up, move 'em on
Move 'em on, head 'em up
Rawhide

Cut 'em out, ride 'em in
Ride 'em in, let 'em out
Cut 'em out, ride 'em in
Rawhide

[sximul]

I Don,t know what others gonna tell me, I saw a 22% increase in organic traffic on my site. Some English keywords flooding traffic .

[samwest]

Remember, Google givith and Google taketh away. Mostly the latter.

[glakes]

I Don,t know what others gonna tell me, I saw a 22% increase in organic traffic on my site.

Is it quality traffic? Are your visitors buying items, clicking ads, etc.?

I run an ecommerce site, and I logged no product sales from Google for days.. Thankfully It looks like sales are slowly returning from Google.

[rish3]

No increase in traffic for my ecom sites, however, bounce rate moved down, and sales are up...both in statistically significant ways. So I guess I probably moved up for keywords that match my site, and down for those that don't?

[aristotle]

I call it mis-matched traffic. It can happen accidentally due to the searcher's poor choice of search term. But a lot of it is the result of flaws in Google's ranking algorithm.

[Rob_Banks]

I call it mis-matched traffic. It can happen accidentally due to the searcher's poor choice of search term. But a lot of it is the result of flaws in Google's ranking algorithm.

How does a searcher use a poor choice of search term?

Searcher searches what they think will provide them what they want. If the site owner/publisher doesn't hit that, it's on them, not the searcher.

[Martin Ice Web]

I guess this is a as bad push as it could be. Sites with no content just a h1 with keywords are ranking very well. Amazon and ebay with domain crowding.
Just looked for a known technical term and google showed me a book ( books.google" ) from roman empire?! Realy?!

It seems that all references from knwon terms are gone. Like "buy wheel 205/55R17" -> looking for wheels for a car but google shows wheels for grinding flour.

[keyplyr]

...and google showed me a book ( books.google" ) from roman empire?

Didn't they use scrolls?

[Martin Ice Web]

keyplyr, i donīt get that?

Didn't they use scrolls?

[TheMadScientist]

It was a "play on words" -- Ancient Rome Scrolls: [bing.com...]

[Martin Ice Web]

;)

[justa]

I updated my site to https:// and began to see some drop offs before a complete reduction on the 22nd so I'm not sure where the responsibility lies. It's been a significant drop though, from 3.5-4.5k per day down to 90-110 per day. Landing pages down from 18k to 250-320.

Is there anyway to identify if this was a Panda thing without changing the site back to http?

[samwest]

@justa - dumb question, but did you be sure to update your GA and WMT account with the new https rather than http?
That might explain the drop.

[Nutterum]

First Panda impressions :

The German version of one of the big websites I handle got hammered in the 250+ SERP Results area. I expected this as more than 30% of the pages(10k+) were without translated content. What I find very shocking is that a blatantly scrapped content website with the same problem skyrocketed, occupying the 4-6th spot for most of the competitive queries. And to make matters worse, the German content that they have is comprised of "Product Fields: 1,2,3,4,4,5,6,7,8...." - I don`t know what Google are doing but this is ridiculous to say the least.

[Martin Ice Web]

it looks like ebays/phb pages are the big winner of this panda. I see them now rank at 2-3 for terms where they never played a roll. And this while the phb pages are all but compelling or full of content.

[mrengine]

it looks like ebays/phb pages are the big winner of this panda. I see them now rank at 2-3 for terms where they never played a roll. And this while the phb pages are all but compelling or full of content.

Thankfully this is not happening in my industry. No ebay on page one, but there are 3 Amazon pages out of 10 total results. That part I don't understand - just too much Amazon...

After panda was released, traffic remained stable but there were no buyers. We are seeing a slow but steady increase in sales coming from Google. But as we know that all can change in a split second. But in general, we are doing a little better so far.

[justa]

@justa - dumb question, but did you be sure to update your GA and WMT account with the new https rather than http?
That might explain the drop.

@samwest - not a dumb question at all. I did update that setting the day after making the change so I wouldn't expect it to still have dropped past that point.

The tracking code is still working, and the Current Traffic is still showing the usual number of visitors.

When I look at the Traffic Sources and Source/Medium and compare between the two periods I can see an 8% drop in overall traffic and a 7.4% drop in Google/Organic, but when I look at the the Search Queries there's a 94% drop in Impressions and 142% drop in Avg position. When I test on Incognito mode the usually high ranking terms seem to still be ranking the same.... I just don't get it.

[aristotle]

justa -- It sounds like you might still be looking at the WebmasterTools data for the old http version of your site. You need to add the new https version to Webmaster Tools and delete the old http version

[indyank]

saw this coming when I posted about it here and the good thing is it still holds....

slow rollout of a change with a small impact! Why so? anyone?

[mrengine]

saw this coming when I posted about it here and the good thing is it still holds....

slow rollout of a change with a small impact! Why so? anyone?

Probably to hush webmasters from constantly asking Google employees when the next Panda update will be. Now Google can say, at least for a couple months, the update is still rolling out. Then onto the next question they go.

I would think that many webmasters would have worked hard to fix Panda problems on their sites. For all of the efforts that I assume these webmasters undertook, for this Panda to have a 2-3% impact seems low.