Post Panda Era (Is this what killed it?) And Future Strategies?

[MrSavage]

I have two distinct periods in my feeble webmastering life. There is the pre Panda and post Panda era. This is how I see it. I can further say that from what I see, Panda has essentially weeded out and snuffed out most of the enthusiasm that once existed in being a webmaster and running websites. I base this on what I see and the level of interest and participation in this here forum. I don't want to say Panda killed the web, as that's awfully dramatic, but I think it's safe to say that the recovery from post Panda is a fallacy. It's why I'm saying it's an era. I can't SEO my way out of this era. There is little to discuss in the way of organic traffic or so it seems. If anyone can suggest the forums are not a litmus test on the overall optimism or current state of affairs, then tell me a better source of analysis. I'm not dead, but the post Panda era has gone nowhere and I would think it's only traffic source outside of Google that will remedy the Panda era. I know vets have seen bad algo changes, but I can draw a line where all this went south and simply has never and feels like it will never be the same. The partnership is dead pretty much from that day onwards imo. I'm willing to discuss the post Panda effects because to me what we see here now is clear evidence that the impact is still felt today and will continue to chip away at the webmastering community.

[EditorialGuy]

From about that time period until now, I've seen nothing indicating there is a sincere concern for the webmaster.

There is no typical, all-purpose "Webmaster." There are lots and lots of different people who own Web sites of different kinds and of varying quality. Some of those site owners are competent, some are clueless; some are honest, and some are crooks.

And it isn't Google's job to care about "the Webmaster." Just like any other consumer business, Google needs to focus on the needs of its end users. If you think Google Search and its algorithms have ever been about you or me, you're barking up the wrong tree.

[MrSavage]

It's like pro sports leagues. What is the value on the athlete? Who are people paying to see? The site and content creators made "things" that Google could find, and them monetize by listing those "things". If those "things" (us) don't exist, what will they use? Ah, knowledge box? Answer box? Just host those images or show them. Who needs those "things". Well actually Google just need access to our "things" and then can populate various boxes and information. However they have next to ZIP without our "things". To suggest they don't owe anything? Give me a F break. You a person or a corporate flat board? To say that Google should not give a S about the "things" that populate their SERPS and fill their answer boxes is about the biggest joke comment I've heard hear, in years. Google now more than ever needs access to our content in order to fill their pages with our answers, yet you say they owe us nothing in your mind? Shoo. Your credibility evaporated just now. Poof. Gone. Refrain from conversing with me thanks.

[fathom]

While you can certainly look at things that way.

But a great example of where your logic fails is when a query has 1.3 million results ... Dumping the top 1% because they quit and thought as this (which is all of the current 1000) there are still 13,000 answers for that query.

Maybe not your answers but someone's answers.

Google really doesn't which are the best answers.... But which are the best available answers... and I sure the remaining 99% will up their game keep acquiring what you gave up.

[EditorialGuy]

MrSavage, you refer to "our things." Whose things? Yours? Mine? Or the "things" of the content farmers and thin affiliates next door?

I see a lot of frustration in this forum, and I'd guess that most of it comes from the fact that useful content--and the skills needed to create, edit, and publish useful content--are more important in 2015 than they were 10 or 15 years ago.

Ultimately, the best strategy for succeeding in the "post-Panda era" will be to create Web sites that searchers find useful. Forget the conspiracy theories and focus on having better Web content than your competitors do.

[MrSavage]

@Editorial, things are what populate the SERPS. That is content of which Google doesn't create. They list it. They monetize those things. The content doesn't cost them a penny. If those things don't exist, what would they have populated their SERPS with? To suggest that the content creators aren't owed anything? How about an ounce of respect for creating something that they could monetize? Look at Cutts comments before he went away. Something he said was about how there should perhaps be a payout for those content creators who create an answer that Google strips from their own site and puts on Google instead. Not his exact words, but along those lines. So you tell me, does that sound like the mentality of not owing us (content creators) anything? In fact that goes against the mentality of "they don't owe us anything".

I also think that Adsense plays a role in the Post Panda Era which I didn't mention. I call it the self interest rule. A lot of people, myself included benefited from the Adsense glory days. Eye balls were needing to see those ads and that required organic traffic. As the need for that type of revenue generation diminished, so did the concern for sending those said sites organic traffic. That's part of the shift in my opinion.

[netmeg]

yet you say they owe us nothing in your mind? Shoo. Your credibility evaporated just now. Poof. Gone. Refrain from conversing with me thanks.

Google doesn't owe me (or any of us) jack. Just like I don't owe them anything either. They can decide that what I'm doing doesn't fit their business plan and decline to rank any of my sites. And I can always walk away from the game and do something else that has nothing to do with Google.

And personally, I think that adhering to that belief is what keeps me doing reasonably well; I'm not invested in heavy emotional agita over whatever the latest G drama is. It's just business; adapt or do something else.

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 5:21 pm (utc) on Dec 31, 2015]
[edit reason] TOS - Let's focus on the topic and not individuals :) [/edit]

[fathom]

netmeg your candid opinion is quite refreshing. Google is just another channel you can get traffic from... There are billions of other places to get traffic from.

[ken_b]

Netmeg:

Google doesn't owe me (or any of us) jack. Just like I don't owe them anything either. They can decide that what I'm doing doesn't fit their business plan and decline to rank any of my sites. And I can always walk away from the game and do something else that has nothing to do with Google.

Well said!

[raseone]

MrSavage is completely correct. So many of us have articulated the exact same concerns, the exact same theories as to the reasons behind Google's shift, the exact same assertion that Google DOES owe us something.

I can't agree more and have said many times myself as have many others that the shift is very obviously toward the the virtual obsolescence of the "website" in favor of all things being found directly on Google pages and the pages of their partners.

Part of the problem is that Google has not offered to purchase or license my content. They've not made any honest effort to stop promoting and funding the top ranking sites that pirate my content. They've not compensated me in any way for populating their image results or YouTube pages.

One of the biggest problems is simply that they are not being honest about what they are doing and they are willfully urging millions of us to waste our precious time and money trying to earn back the fair treatment that we deserve.

Personally I think they want the organic results to be full of spam, piracy and useless, redundant crap. That makes the ads and the Google/partner pages look better and more reliable in comparison.

After years under the life-crushing unfairness of post-panda Google there are very few legitimate publishers, we masters or content owners who believe that Google has anyone's best interest but their own at heart.... Notice how many of the defenders are themselves SEO spammers who have probably benefitted from all this.

As for MrSavages comment that the best strategy moving forward is to avoid such singular dependence... I would as you all to remember that we did not ask Google to become a near monopoly and gain such sway over our lives. We don't choose it. We are subject to it.

Turning away from the Internet to save our businesses or surrendering the web to Google are not acceptable options.

[EditorialGuy]

Here's a "post-Panda era" strategy that's been working pretty well for us so far:

1) Focus on depth, not breadth. The Web is awash in blogs, content farms, and other "broad but shallow" sites, so why duplicate what everyone else is doing? We've been building up the areas of our site where we've already had a history of subject expertise or authority, and that approach seems to be resonating with Google (even though we didn't design that approach with Google in mind).

2) Implement things like link rel="prev"/"next" pagination that make it easier for search engines to discover, index, and rank our in-depth content. (This is the 2015 version of "provide easily-digestible spider food" advice from the early days of search engines.)

3) Don't sacrifice the richness of the desktop/laptop/tablet user experience just to have a mobile-friendly site. (For us, that's meant having separate mobile versions of our most popular or useful desktop pages. YMMV.)

4) Don't go crazy with advertising. In an era where many sites (including big corporate-owned sites) are littering their pages with ads, "sponsored links," and native advertising, having pages that readers can navigate easily (without interstitial ads or ads jammed into the body text) provides a competitive edge.

5) Above all, think long-term. (That's what we've been doing over the last 19 years or so, and we're still going strong.)

[aakk9999]

Mods note:
I have deleted bunch of messages from this thread. Please keep it all civil as trying to deride, denigrate or call others names or disparage their opinions will not be tolerated.

See TOS #4:

Always be respectful of other users, the system, and the moderators.

WebmasterWorld tries to maintain an unbiased discussion forum where the open and free exchange of ideas. Name calling and other subsequent attempts to incite an emotional response in others with derogatory terms have no place in a professional SEO discussion on WebmasterWorld.

Could you please keep your discussion professional and on the topic.

[jon_uk]

Fighting Google, despite the understandable frustration, is pointless.

Many know the story - it's inevitable and been repeated throughout history.

[en.wikipedia.org...]

Every corporation gets sucked in eventually. The visionaries get usurped by the unimaginative, the greedy-eyed bean counters and they lose sight of the original dream. They will be told and convince themselves they need flying cars and deserve meetings with Gandalf.

As for the so-called fanboys - there is a well known model. If the Russians do it, so will everybody else.

[en.wikipedia.org...]

All empires die or transmogrify into magnificent mundanity. Think of the Italians, the British, the Spanish, the Greeks and the Egyptians. Console yourself and move on. Today is day zero - Google will not 'give' you anything - ever again. Now let's ask ourselves - what's the point of discussing Google - at all? They won't change. They can't. They are done with giving. They now belong to Sauron.

One thing though we can rely on is human nature.

Try wild ideas that make more noise than your competitors. It's an arms race. Are you prepared to film yourself naked on a white horse while the crowds on film gape? - hawking your goods or services? There are not many major brands that will have the guts to do this :-)

[Leosghost]

^^^What he said ..:))( almost all of it ..details don't really matter )..( and I hinted ( not going to give my potential competitors any specific help.. am I ) at earlier )..

[aristotle]

Well if Panda is about demoting websites that have low-quality content, then it seems to me that sites that are full of lies and misinformation should be included in that "low-quality" category and should be demoted along with the others.

[netmeg]

Nobody wants Google to try to be the truth police more than they already do. And if they did - how would that be implemented? Would Google need to keep hundreds of "experts" on medicine, law (in jurisdictions all over the world) and thousands of other niches in order to be able to determine lies and misinformation? What about information that is in dispute? Or that parses differently in different locations? And information that one person might consider a lie could just be a fact of life for someone else (this very post should be proof of that) I don't see Google going URL by URL to determine that.

Nope. Nobody should want that.

[Robert Charlton]

Well if Panda is about demoting websites that have low-quality content, then it seems to me that sites that are full of lies and misinformation should be included in that "low-quality" category and should be demoted along with the others.

It's not clear whether this Knowledge Graph-related algorithm, about accuracy, has in any way been implemented, but it was discussed earlier this year...

Google's Knowledge Graph:Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources
May 2015
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4740325.htm [webmasterworld.com]

We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy. The facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases....

The question of "truth" is a difficult one, as the discussion notes. In the above thread, aristotle, who raises the question about accuracy here, does acknowledge some Google efforts in the direction of authority and trust....

Don't forget that Google has been interested in authority and trust for a long time. It was one of the main points they talked about when they launched their Knols. Later they also talked a lot about it when they created their Author's Tag.

[raseone]

Robert always has something great to contribute. Certainly not lying through your teeth might be one good post-panda strategy.

An algorithmic method for ranking one truth vs. another or truth vs. propaganda or marketing language is certainly an endless can of worms. Obviously such a thing would have to be deployed in vastly different ways for different types of sites. Some sites are fiction, some are satire, some are marketing... not to mention the fact the Google simply doesn't know everything & are in many cases not qualified & could never be qualified to determine certain truths.

Most of us are not in the business of competing with the main-stream news media or established academia. We are simply trying to offer our goods or services or share our thoughts or creations in a fair environment that is not designed to victimize us.

After a couple of years adjusting & rebuilding sites, trying to figure out how I should adjust my strategy to an internet ruled by a post-panda Google I was unable to come up with a single change that I was comfortable making. We learn & grow all the time. Other than diversification I learned nothing good from panda etc...

I decided to stick with the only strategy that makes any sense, to build efficient, well designed sites that provide easy & simple access to quality, desirable content. In other words to do what I always did & serve my human users & customers & virtually ignore Google.

Certainly one should craft language that a search engine has a chance of understanding.

Certainly adherence to wc3 code standards is a good thing when practical.

Certainly speed is good when it does not ruin quality. etc. etc. etc. web design 101.

... But we all know all these things or would learn it all in natural course. Googles shift was not a learning experience or a painful lesson like the SEOs would like it to be... just a scam or a screw-up by Google. Its something we want to get past but without abandoning our businesses or our educations or our content or our life's work... we sorta can't.

It is a proven fact that recovery for effected sites is impossible. The situation for new sites is iffy & unpredictable. Having an independent presence online is just not viable the way it was before.

I diversified my availability online to major distributors but they are as overwhelmingly outranked by piracy on Google as my own sites so that only helped a little and is cost me my exclusivity.

I built a strong social presence but only some of what I do is really viable in that environment & the social networks tend to steer my posts, ads & pages towards people "like" me rather than people who "need" me. Social is a ton of work & simply not appropriate for some things the way search is. There are things people search for when they need them & things people will do on impulse when they encounter an interesting post or ad. Social is good to a degree but not in any way a viable replacement for organic search.

My main post-panda strategy has been to keep my work offline so Google doesn't steal it.

[fathom]

Deny Google everything... Problem solved... NEXT!

[frankleeceo]

Been following this discussion for a while, but it seems to me the biggest issue that raseone has is with Google ranking pirated version of his "digital" goods far above his original sites or legal distributors. And P.S. I really doubt Panda is what killed the business practice, it is a result of an evolution of general user behaviors and buying pattern which I do not want to delve into.

I am not going to jump into the morality of Google business practices or the pirating sites, that's somewhat pointless as it is a no ending discussion as shown throughout the thread.

But I want to focus on rather, is there practical methods to actually outrank his sites or get paid for the work? Given that his "digital" goods is so easily pirated and redistributed for free? Or put in a broad term, how would anyone rank anything that are easily pirated? If it is what I think, the digital goods is a download once and forget item like fonts or artwork. How would you get someone to pay when that someone can get that stuff for free elsewhere albeit pirated easily. Users do not know and I reckon most do not care as long as they get it for as cheap as they can (can't beat free?).

Again I am not questioning the value of the content nor ethics, all content must have values. But the practicality of getting someone to pay for those easily pirated content. I personally can't think of anything other than something like Patreon or donations who support what "artists" do for their original work.

[raseone]

@frankleeceo

Thanks. Yes piracy, redundant aggregators, broken pages, pages that don't have the searched content... certain sites are outranked by a variety of nonsense but as you observed piracy is the worst. I will eventually rebuild some of the effected sites again and make another go at proper Google rank but I have that under control & I'm not currently seeking any advice on the building or promoting of any of my sites or those of my clients.

To clarify - Though some items can be freely downloaded from MY site. That does not give any other site the right to scrape them... but thats not the main issue.

The main issue is commercial items that can only be obtained through a purchase. Some are not downloaded at all but instead delivered in the mail.

Anything that can be digital can be "easily pirated". If charging money for personal or commercial use of digital items is simply not viable in the current google environment then we can not expect anyone to make a living creating any type of media or software. We do not yet live in the utopia where StarWars & Photoshop are created for free and groceries rain from heaven so I need to be paid for my work... sometimes.

You mention the practicality of getting someone to pay for something that is so readily available for free. Until Google went nuts the piracy was easy to control. Once the piracy holds top rankings for years on end I start to look like the weird one for charging money. When I am bumped down the serps by pirates I have a hard time even getting people to believe that I am the actual author of the works.

Not looking for advice on DRM or DMCA complaints to Google. I've been at this for decades.

...but this is not my thread & I don't get the feeling that piracy is MrSavages main concern.

[raseone]

P.S. No offense but changes in human behavior such as "buying practices" don't change overnight on one specific day and stop consistent daily behavior that has stood for a decade.

These sites went from 2500+ daily visitors to less then 200 OVERNIGHT. Aside from the drop in ranking and traffic there was a disproportionate drop in the QUALITY of traffic OVERNIGHT.

Every once in a while someone trips over a cord in the Googleplex and daily sales & emails start coming in again for no particular reason, with no sign of any new referrals or mentions or sources of traffic. It just happens, then stops.

Its been widely speculated that Google has managed to steer people who are on a mission to spend some money in very specific directions. This would provide one possible explanation for why some sites might only lose 40% of traffic but virtually 100% of sales & other conversions.

[frankleeceo]

No offense taken. I do believe that Google can separate out buying intent and assign a percentage of that traffic. Buying behavior shifts over a long period of time, but I believe that Google can artificially offset that shift by assigning you additional percentage of traffic. More or less buffering and blinding to see that overall shifts in buying pattern. Until Google turns the switch or filter that reverses those buffers.

I find it surprising that your niche has not had any setback with all the scrapers and the competitors from the past decade, until Panda hits that is. From an outsider point of view, I would think the niche suffers greatly with all the scrapers and chinese cheap knockoffs, and pinterest over the original creator.

My experience is that I had a site that got about 50% of the traffic when the thing is hot and in trend say 100% of search. Now that the search volume for the thing is about 10% of the peak, but I get more or less 100% of that traffic. For the sites that receive the original other 50%, their traffic on the topic plummets to 0 while my site on the topic still get 10% of that 100% of search volume. However, during the initial drop of that search volume, my rate of traffic drop is slower than that of the general search volume. I concluded that I am simply getting a higher percentage of the total search (declining volume), causing the buffer effect.

About bumping down on the serps, I like to look at this way. The users in general are looking for your stuff for free, pirate or not, if your site offers it - Great, if not, they will bounce from your site to look it at other SERP positions. Initially at the beginning you sit at top 1 for your stuff, where it rightfully belong. As more users want the pirate stuff, and spent more time on the pirate sites. Google begins to shift that weight toward the pirate site. Again I am not commenting on the ethics nor morality of this approach, but rather a simple observation of the cause and effect. And my original question stands, how do you beat this?

What do you plan on doing differently with your sites and client sites that you think can beat the effect of Google? I am curious and just want to learn and experiment. I am an original content creator that makes money on advertisement only, and it is my belief that any kind of edge helps in beating out other competitors.

[MrSavage]

There is a HUGE difference between being owed some respect and getting respect. Google isn't a person. A person like Cutts who tried to run search doesn't seem to have the ability to turn off his moral compass. I never said they owe me anything, HE DID if you care to read between the lines. Ignore that and live in ignorance about respect, morality and ethics. The guy who ran search questioned out loud the ethics of taking content creators content and displaying for their own purposes. The concept is what he fought against. Keeping the scrapers away from the top of the SERPS! So what has Google image search become in reality? That was just part of the new era.

If they choose to rank brands in the Post Panda Era, that's their prerogative. I never said Google would turn their concerns to what is happening regarding their rankings and whether the little guy gets some of the glorious organic traffic. They became much less dependent on the little guy, but I call it forgetting where you came from.

Corporations don't have concerns and I suppose the moral of the story is that some might have been sucked into that belief of a partnership. If you just do this and that, people will find you on the search results. Quality content! That's it!

If Google doesn't own content creators anything they he doesn't say what he said about answer box content. So for anyone here to claim a superior view point about Google, sorry, I'll listen to what Cutts has to say and make a judgement on where Google is at on the moral compass. Cutts isn't there right now. Draw your own conclusions. People here beating the Google doesn't owe me nothing drum are NOT in alignment with the guy who ran Google search. Who has more credibility? Geez, I wonder.

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 4:43 pm (utc) on Dec 31, 2015]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[fathom]

A person like Cutts who tried to run search doesn't seem to have the ability to turn off his moral compass. I never said they owe me anything, HE DID if you care to read between the lines. Ignore that and live in ignorance about respect, morality and ethics.

You don't need to read between the lines, you can, at any time, prevent Google from crawling your content.

The fact that you desire "what you want"... Things like Google ranks & Google traffic spells out what the problem is, not the solution.

Walk away. Problem solved!

[jambam]

Google= competitor.
Panda= Stagnation of googles competition.

[fathom]

Earning are up at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon. PANDA seems to be good for everyone at the same level.

[jambam]

Microsoft and Facebook don't rely on search engines and as for amazon I guess google needs to fill the organic results with something.
What I really want is not for google rankings but what I want is for people to be less reliant on google for searching for things because competing against someone with a 80-90% market share on search is like trying to make the internet 2.

[fathom]

So we actually agree, by default, that Google is not a competitor in this instance.

Google does have certain products that do directly compete within other verticals like Wallet vs PayPal or Blogger vs Wordpress or Google Shopping vs Yelp but PANDA is a web search algorithm.

Saying Google competes with everyone that lost ranks due to PANDA is a RED HERRING!

Here's a list of Google products [en.m.wikipedia.org...] point out which ones are positively impacted by PANDA.

[jambam]

Google translate---always pushed to the very top of the search results
Google books (as though larry pages wrote all these books himself) ...

The end game of google is to keep users on google.. get them to click ads and then come back to google and click some more ads. By creating resource scrapers properties keep people on googles domain and in google hands...and then you have also google devices to further cement people onto google.

All i can d is just try and get as many people as I can out of the google habbit and try to build my site regardless of google... as seo is just a wild goose chase with google in control.

[fathom]

I don't believe PANDA had anything to do with those.

I am sure if there is a case to be made for antitrust the EC will do it in the EU - But my bet is a similar occurence as in the US. Whether you jump on the conspiracy bandwagon in the United States or not, the FTC gave up with just some simple changes.

Although, like your last paragraph denotes Google is just one channel for traffic and WHITEHAT SEO has never been about rank building ... That naturally happens over time... Traffic Building (in all its form) is the correct answer.