On Friday, Google posted an update on its Webmaster Central blog entitled "Providing More Guidance on Building High-Quality Sites". The piece expands on much of what Google has said about the Panda update since its original release on February 24th.
In public statements about the Panda update, Google has referenced a number of questions that they're attempting to answer algorithmically. "Would you feel comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?" and "Would you accept medical advice from this site?" are two that have been around since the beginning. Friday's Webmaster Central post offered up a more substantial list with some of the highlights below:
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
- Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
Along with the set of questions, Google's Amit Singhal also added:
One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.
Answering the "Feeling" Questions
We can deduce how Google can algorithmically answer quite a few of the questions (Richard Baxter did just that in a great post), but what about those "feeling" questions, like the credit card question? It's tough to say, but actually having most of the questions answered about your site might provide some valuable feedback. If you're an in-house SEO for a site that has been punished, perhaps one of the following services can be used to support a claim for a redesign or some other change in site philosophy.
Mechanical Turk/FeedbackArmy
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The cheapest and most scalable way to get this feedback would have to be through Mechanical Turk. If you haven't used the service, mturk allows you to break a project down into mini tasks that mturk's users will complete for sometimes as low as one penny.
Let's assume our task is for the user to visit the site in question, then answer one of our "feeling" questions. It would take no more than a minute of a Turkers time, so a fair price would probably be around 10 cents. Set your project to run until you've got 50 answers, and for $5.00 you've got 50 responses to your question. For another $5.00 you can ask Turkers to visit a competing site and ask the same question, allowing you to compare the results between the two sites.
FeedbackArmy is another option that would work. Think of FeedbackArmy as a front-end for Mechanical Turk, as they both use the Turk workforce. You'll end up paying a bit more than if you dealt directly with Mechanical Turk, but the setup process is much simpler.
UserTesting
UserTesting is a higher-end feedback solution. For $39 you'll get a video of a user interacting with your site. UserTesting allows you to ask the user up to 4 questions after they've completed the feedback video, which would be a perfect place to ask some of our Panda questions.
Other Panda Odds and Ends
NPR did a story on Panda's effect on one company's struggle since getting Panda-fied: Google's search tweaks puts a company at risk
Matt Cutts quote from that story:
Think about something like an Apple product, when you buy an Apple product you open it up, the box is beautiful, the packaging is beautiful, the entire experience is really wonderful.
It sounds to me that this statement is really just another way of saying "large amounts of duplicated or poor content on your site can impact the entire domain".
Reversing the Effects of Panda
Tom Critchlow had this exchange with Matt Cutts on Twitter:
@mattcutts assuming a site completely reworks their site/content after panda, how long before they will regain traffic?less than a minute ago via web 
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Tom Critchlow
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@tomcritchlow short version is that it's not data that's updated daily right now. More like when we re-run the algorithms to regen the data.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet Reply
Matt Cutts
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Moral of this story: Don't expect rankings to come right back after making changes. This is a little frustrating because webmasters can't make a change, wait to see if the change "worked", then try something else. It also might explain why there have been so few reports of sites regaining their traffic.
A Third Panda Spotted?
Rumors picked up in early May that a third Panda update may have gone live. Users were reporting wild fluctuations in rankings and other oddities in the Google cache and site search commands. Considering what Matt Cutts said above, it makes sense for Panda updates to hit suddenly and all at once, rather than over a period of time. Some are reporting that their exact match domains took a hit.
So our Panda timeline now reads:
- Feb 24th, 2011: Panda rollout on Google.com searches
- April 11th, 2011: Panda rollout to all English speaking Google sites. Additional tweaks made to original algorithm
- May 3-6th, 2011: Third Panda update?
Have you seen any traffic changes during this time frame? Have any of your sites recovered from initially being Panda-fied?
I have two huge frustrations about this whole mess, to put down my SEO hat and speak more as a webmaster:
(1) I completely understand, in theory, Google's bias toward brand and "authority" (in the sense they're using it, which doesn't necessarily correspond to how SEOs use it), but it's also a blow to the original level-playing field of the web. More and more, search seems to be becoming like mass media - the big players with the most money will get self-perpetuating success, and the barriers to entry will keep going up. It's not surprising, but it's disappointing. If the "best" sites are the ones with the most "authority", then they'll get more search traffic, become more authoritative, and keep being the best. It's circular reasoning, to some extent.
(2) Panda seems to be an algorithmic update that doesn't have an algorithmic fix. So, if you really learned something and did your best to fix it, the algorithm may not care, and even reinclusion may not work (since this wasn't a manual penalty, either, and Google will want to push it back on the algorithm). In essence, then, they rolled out half an algorithm. On the heels of Caffeine, this makes no sense at all, and the only interpretation that seems plausible is that Google is desperately behind the spam-fighting curve and struggling to keep up, forcing them to put something unfinished in place. An algo change that effected 11% of SERPs (by their own estimate) shouldn't be beta.
Strictly from a logical standpoint I just don't understand how something that had an algorithmic cause doesn't have an algorithmic fix... if the algorithm run on May 5 decided your site was poor because of X, Y, and Z, and you get rid of them, how does the same algorithm run on May 9 still think your site is poor? Did the first run dump you into a List of Poor Sites That Get Penalized On SERPs and the second run doesn't take you off?
The explanation, at least as I currently understand it, is that while Panda is algorithmic (code-powered, in essence), either it or the data that drives it isn't part of the core algorithm. So, Panda-related adjustments are being made on a much longer time-scale than the core Google algo. Admittedly, that's almost all speculation on 2nd-hand evidence right now.
So, what may be happening is that there is an algorithmic fix, but it's much slower than we'd normally expect (so, it seems like nothing we do is making much of a difference). Right now, it's all still so new and there's so little data that we're all guessing. Considering Google may be on its 3rd iteration of Panda already (as of the weekend), it seems like we're not the only ones guessing.
Sorry, I should be more careful with the word "algorithmic" - we're so used to thinking of this as a clear dichotomy - the Google algorithm vs. manual intervention (with nothing in-between). There's nothing to say, though, that Google couldn't write another set of code and apply it to their data without changing the core algorithm. I suspect they avoid that at all costs, but it sounds like some part of Panda is happening separately from real-time data.
I suspected the same thing when the first panda hit. It made since to look at large sites with large sets of documents (article sites), panda 2 hit smaller sites with medium sized sets of documents and one of my sites took a major hit in that update. I think I know why, the site used 'content variations' something Amit Singhal called out in his post. That's where I had several blocks of content, like 15-20, and would just plug in the page topic and generate that out for a few thousand pages. I knew it wasn't that high quality and had been working to replace them little by little, but it allowed me to make a page FOR USERS in the interim. This is a sales focused site and not an article website, so the content was for the users not for search engines. After Panda 2 hit the crawl rate on the site skyrocketed for days, the content variations were removed and replaced where possible with fresh content and a month later still no changes.
My gut feeling is that all the analysis google is doing on the content takes a lot of computing power. I alone updated 7k+ pages and if it's a domain-wide penalty it makes sense that they would want to analyze each page after the hit before recalculating the SERPs.
As noted in my comment here https://www.seomoz.org/blog/more-panda-update-information-slowly-starting-to-come-out-#jtc140710 I was able to turn a post panda flat line in generic keyphrase traffic back into a postive growth trend within a month by implementing the strategy, so I do agree with you in that sense.
However, if the algorithm is indeed favoring "authority" over "non authority", there isn't much else to do but build that authority up, which certainly takes far more time and effort than what I did. So in that sense there would be no quick algorithmic fix to that change in the algorithm, especially if it is now harder to build authority in a post panda world.
I don't think the algorithm would allow for quick fixes like this (fixing X,Y and Z) without a monitoring phase. I don’t think they would just say “thanks for fixing it quick” and here your rankings back. Google has never worked like that. No reason to think they would now?? My bet, this is just another form of control.
I agree and saw this effect firsthand in the aftermath of the update. One client who has one of the most authoritative sites in their industry was unaffected by the update, despite having many of the same issues I described in my comment below which occured on a site which is a smaller, regional player in a different industry. The smaller client had actually done a better job of implementing my quality content recommendations, and had a slightly better low/high quality content ratio than the authority client. However as noted below the smaller client experienced negative effects from the update, which thankfully were corrected, but the only reasonable explanation of why they were affected and not the larger client was the authority metric.
It appears that the Panda update has increased what I like to call the "search engine economic moat" effect. Unfortunately this seems to imply that the barriers to entry (or improvement in general) have increased for smaller organizations, even those who are committed to producing the exact type of content google claims the Panda update was supposed to favor. Far too easy for multi-billion dollar company to push out a very beta update which has had a negative impact on so many quality small businesses. Just another twist and turn in the topsy turvy world of search engine marketing!
Great point about the circular reasoning of Google's "Rich get richer" philosophy.
Aaron has a good post about the whole Panda mess over on his blog:
https://www.seobook.com/questioning-questions
Both are good.
Yupp!
This reaffirms a strategy that I put into place for a client shortly after the Panda update. The client at my recommendation had been adding high quality and highly relevant content to their site for several months and was getting great results. A stable growth trend had been established in their tightly targeted generic keyphrase segment and was deliving solid business results. The site however had many low quality pages being indexed as a result largely of a calendar they used which created many pages, with the only variation being event titles, dates, times and locations. They also had some other inadvertant sources of low quality content. After the Panda update I noticed a significant drop in the generic keyphrase traffic. Considering that the content driving this growth was the very type of content which was supposed to benefit from the update, the only logical conclusion was that these other pages were the cause of the negative effect. My strategy was simply to remove those pages from the SERPs and minimize internal linking to them as best as possible, and also to establish workflows and policies that would eliminate the problem recurring as additional pages of these type were inevitably added in the future. Other efforts were simultaneously undertaken to better promote the quality content. The result was the return of the positive growth trend within a month of implementing the strategy. Very nice to see some verbal confirmation of what was already confirmed through analytics. Nice post!
It's nice to hear even a partial post-Panda success story. We've heard shockingly few.
Well, it seemed more like putting out a fire than a success story ;-) Certainly diverted resources from our central focus of creating a steady stream of quality, optimized content. Which is just what Google intended to accomplish with their Panda update no doubt ;-)
Thanks Mike
I've been speaking with a few of my UK SEO friends. The consensus is that when "Panda" rolled out in the UK, it was a deeper, more complex update that the initial one in the US. I suspect that by that point, some of the user and webmaster feedback had been incorporated into the results.
Something feels different in link valuation and exact match domain lately too. Can't put my finger on exactly what yet.
On Panda - great post and thanks for the shout by the way, I'm personally of the opinion that what Google is doing is the right thing - encouraging webmasters to build decent sites and get rid of all of the garbage that hurts user experience and plaigarises other's work. I don't think they're completely there yet (particularly in original source attribution), but hey, no one's perfect.
Richard
IMHO they should have had source attribution down rock solid BEFORE they rolled out this sort of algorithm.
By rolling out this algorithm first, they likely created at least 10,000's of new additional scraper sites...but possible an order of magnitude(s) more than that!
Richard, read Aaron's artile if you haven't already. Some really GREAT points are made with deep methodical thought :) (you probably have read it already, but I thought it was kick ass, and really made Google look like they contradict themselves in policy setup)..
OOPS! Forgot to post the link!! https://www.seobook.com/questioning-questions
Agree with this. Panda 2 seemed to be quite different from Panda 1.
What I find most interesting about this whole thing is that we are now coming up to the three month anniversary of Panda 1 and despite all sorts of SEO experts and amateurs trying to figure it out, no one has come close (unless someone has cracked it and they are not saying for business reasons).
Good post... but after more than 3 months I start to see Panda as something affecting another parallel world.
Why?
Pandas seem extinct in not english Googles...
And I am wondering why
Are not spammed the Google.it, Google.es, Google.de, Google.fr... SERPS? Yes, they are
Are not seeing in the first positions so called "unuseful" websites? Yes, they are
Even worst... they are the kingdoms of the translated from english sites but with no author attribution sites, with people/enthities that own a false consideration of expert because of this practice.
So, even if I'm preaching to clients to prepare themselves to the Panda coming adjusting their sites to the best practices suggested by Google, it seems as I am Cassandra, prophesying a future that apparentely is postponing itself everyday.
As Europeans, we're constantly confronted with backlog of updates.
As soon as a new update to the algorithm or serp layout happens, we can set our alarm clock 6 months down the line. It's not until 1/2 year later that we might see these updates to occur in our localized Google version.
I know, but I'm starting to be pissed off by this attitude by Google (and all other Search Engines). When will they understand that also in the Internet the world is not an english speaking universe?
The garbage content that was being created which required the Panda update was largely driven by a deep ad market in the United States.
About 20% of Google's search volume is inside the US & yet the US accounts for nearly 1/2 of their search revenues. The UK is something like another 11% to 13% of Google's revenues as well. So by dealing with the English language first Google is dealing with the spam problem associated with where roughly 2/3 of their revenues come from (likely higher than that when you include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.).
In a lot of foreign markets the markets are smaller, GDP/person is lower, and the ad markets are less liquid. The combination of those 3 variables makes a lot of the content farming action not profitable. A lot of people speak Chinese or Spanish, but the former has a tiny ad market & the later has a content market split across a bunch of countries & still largely the issue of ad market maturity.
French and German ad markets are somewhat more mature, but the revenue driven by those markets is still a minority of Google revenues. And the economics of content production in a lot of those markets has not yet moved to a point where there are a ton of AdSense content farms, like there were in English.
If Google pushed too hard to filter before they had robust enough selection of alternate content sources (and less depth in relevancy signals) then ultimately the relative amount of collateral damage would be higher in those markets, while the potential upside is much smaller than it was in English (since the English language had so many content farms).
Thanks Aaron for your answer, really appreciated :)
I had / have the same feelings like Gianluca but with that answer I calmed down more or less (at least regarding the Panda theme).
well if you think about it another way, at least the major bugs are out before it gets to you. Fewer sites that get hit and shouldn't? :)
Good answer, I agree 100% the traffic is deffiantly not only in the US market these days the likes of Japan, Brazil, china are killing it compared to the US market. But the CPM and CPC and even affiliates are not really playing hard in these markets so the money is not their. Sure it is great to have your site linked to a massive japanese forum but when you see the traffic converts to $0 it is not worth it.
I know that Aaron is 100% right, but still, most black hat seo tehniques are still live in non-English language countries, spammy sites, diplcate sites are rulling the SERP. yes the revenue is almost insignificant compared to US alone, but just consider the number of sites, real sites, suffering because Google is way too late with their updates for other languages, well, that is not just an issue with Google!
The panda update is a bit live on french Google, I know some sites that were hit, traffic were divided by 6, between April 15 and April 30.
I think the algorithm is not effective as the google.com panda, they rolled out a smaller version of Panda that hit the obvious low quality sites.
In France we don't have content farm sites, it is very different, there is much less content sharing sites.
Country specific versions of the Panda update will come slowly, I guess they are some english-specific code that will take time to adapt to other languages. That's why, IMO, the Panda update is not totally effective in Europe.
The best defense against this sort of algo updates is to just not put all your eggs on the same basket, not relying on just Google organic traffic. Easier to say than to actually achieve it but it can be done.
Wow this site has so many interesting comments. I agree I think the key is writing interesting and unique content. Google seems to be dominating the conversation a little to much. Remember google says that we should to keep in mind what our readers or visitors are looking for rather than worrying about the search engines because they are not your customer.
Google- Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine",
we'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first
and foremost on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the
main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find
your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the
organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results.
Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot
forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your
ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.
Great comments everyone.
Is the panda going to be changing the way google looks at article links such as in places like ezinearticles etc. What about blogging on Huff post?
First of all - thanks for the post.
Panda influenced lots of websites indeed. Unfortunately, one of my client's websites faced a considerable drop down in organic traffic on Google.
I'll tell you want had happened. Who knows, may be it might be useful for all SEOs to analyze the changes in Google's algorithms.
Before, the homepage of the website was ranking top 3-5 for a number of popular key phrases. Now Google sends no visitors from natural search homepage. Instead it sends them to old pages (different pages that are 'focused' on only one key phrase).
e.g.
Before: 'band hats' and 'band t-shirts' – homepage in search results
Now: two different pages (none of them is the homepage)
N.B. Old pages rank not as good as the homepage ranked.
I do understand that the duplicate title tag issue must be solved, but the pages that are now in SERPs do not have back-links, while as homepage has a number of good links from quality, trusted and relevant websites pointing to it.
I tend to believe it happened because of 'Panda' because:
1. I did only white-hat SEO
2. I sent a re-inclusion request and got a reply stating there were no spam penalties manually applied to the website.
I am still investigating on the matter to learn in more details about the changes in organic traffic of my client's website. So please, if you have faced something similar too, share your experience. I am sure it will help us to understand 'Panda' better. :)
Interesting... I wonder if there is more notice taken of internal linking / architecture.
So perhaps the trust/authority to your home page is now being (correctly?) distributed to the pages you are telling google are about "band hats" and "band t-shirts", even though from an external link stand-point you would have expected the home page to rank higher.
Hope this helps
Steve
P.S. Great post BTW!
Most likely you are right that it is the matter of the website's architecture and also title tags issue. Old pages do not have back-links but they are more focused on a particular key phrase, while as the homepage is powered with back-links but is optimized for too many key phrases.
Currently I am worried about two things:
Google doesn't send organic visitors to the homepage at all, so I presume it might a kind of penalty (but what for?).
What shell I do now? Wait till Google re-reivews the website once again? Improve old pages from the marketing prospective and do link building for them or/and add 301 redirect from old pages to the homepage?
The client suffers from considerable traffic (and, thus, sales) descrease, so something should be done ASAP.
Homepage penalty, likely from aggressive anchor text link building. Try get some new fresh content and build a more natural link profile.
Nopes, unfortunately, this is not the case. I am 99% sure. There were now other link building but linking from trusted websites that allow to publish unique content for free. Anyway, thanks a lot for a peice of advice. Adding more fresh content this is what I was thinking about.
I think you are right on the matter here. Try to focus on and narrow down the keyword's or keyphrases that target each page specifically. Don't try to optimize the landing page for 5-20 different terms as you'll just dilute the value of the main content on the index page. Really hammer in development the site's main landing (doorway) pages and work to get traffic to the landing pages you are trying to target for "band hats" and/or band t-shirts" etc.. etc..
Thanks, Rob. :)
We lost 50% of our Google traffic on March 3, and then got it all back on Sunday: https://gyazo.com/ad6545ee3f8f9bac0ca32230c6c833cb.png
Are you sure this was Panda and not another penalty? Panda roll out was Feb 24th in the US. Reported recoveries have been very rare.
What changes did you make to your site?
I am working on client website from last six month and we were getting decent traffic from last four months but as Google updated it's new algorithm my site traffic is going down day by day. I am trying to recover from that issue, I tried everything I am building more links, spoke with content writer to write unique content but we are not able to get traffic again.
I want to concur on the third update. I thought none of my clients sites were effected, but at the beginning of march I saw a huge drop in traffic and weird ranking changes that didn't really make sense.
It's funny. When the "Panda" update was released, my site jumped to the top of Google search results. 2-3 weeks later, I've slipped back to page 2 and 3.
It's amazing how many "legitimate" webmasters are out there. :)
Really it comes down to writing intelligent, worthwhile content for a site. No more junk, useless and spammy websites, Google is looking for useful and professional pages. I'm expecting good things from panda since all of my content is unique.
I can verify that an exact match domain that was a competitor of ours took a hit in early may and has not seen the light of day since.
I have noticed some ranking changes in projects that I didn't promote for last couple of months. Some are stabile at their ranking places , but one project dropped drastically three weeks ago. Probably there is some content which is not unique or low quality. Now, it all have sense. Thanks for comprehensive information.
Just a questuion of time when the PANDA is coming to france, german, italy, etc. google serps's.. thx for yor post.
We took a big hit after the April update even though we've spent many thousands of dollars on high quality, original content over the past few years (perhaps it has been scraped?). We ranked in top results until mid April, and now we are roughly 30% below normal.
We seen some changes may4th, 2011. Notices of Google dance across many of our sites. See below sites for ideas of our network. Work From Home Jobs SEO Services [links removed]
Not only does a site need to be reworked before a latency in impact.
We saw the impact of the Panda 11 deploy, 1 week after the deploy, when we had made no changes in this period. The effect for Panda on us was very positive.
I'm done with google and loving it! Got rid of my adsense and everything. Tired of the same old up and down hoping to see what they want. I had an authority site I built up that had all original good useful content and it took a big hit. That set me over the edge and I scrambled to find new ways of doing things. I'm done with google, adsense and using them as a search. I suggest others do the same as they just keep becoming this giant monster we all hope to satisfy. If word gets around and more and more people start doing this maybe they will change their attitude.
Is there any data on whether or not back links from these types of sites effect the linking site? Some of these sites had a decent page rank before the update, has anyone seen a change even if the site itself was considered quality?
Interesting to hear rumors of a 3rd panda update. Traffic on one of my sites has more than doubled since May 5th, but it was already on the upswing and going from 50 hits/day to 100 hits/day is hardly worth mentioning. Still it's an anecdote, and it involves a site with original written content that I subjectively consider to be high quality :) My other sites have stayed the same.
I think these companies who founded their business models on producing 1000's of similar articles had it coming.
Any good online marketing director should have seen this coming and they should have been working quicker and harder towards a system that stressed the better content and weeded out the weak, which is what they are now implementing.
As for agencies etc using this similar tactic on clients sites, it may not have been affected this time due to the small scale of the site but in the future it may well happen...
As always, core confirmed practices are best and besides.
Anyway, thought of the day, with the internet maturing slowly the way it is, there's plenty more routes to market now than the unpredictable SERPs if you can operate in these efficiently then you won't take such a battering in the SERPs 'game' (Small Business Point of View).
"Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?"
More support for putting the expert back in expert content.
Good post, All panda updates have had positive results, imediatly and after a bit of retooling we where able to squeeze even more out :-) But this is just from our highly optimized ecom sites. Running SEO on two newer campaigns that are not specific to ecom ill run over analytics(juvenile sites) and post a follow-up.
Very interesting post. I'm not convinced that this factor is particularly good though - 'Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators' - there are plenty of websites where a large number of creators are valid and not used to game the search engines, forums for example. Realise that most/all other factors will be taken into account too, but it seems a little unfair (and in reality will probably be used to target a few 'known' websites). - Jenni
Is it correct to notice a shift in Google's approach towards SERPS; from a scientific (algorithm) to a more subjective validation of site quality?
Hey, I pretty much agree, it's not 100% there yet but it's certainly a step in the right direction and hey, it makes our job better as it's far easier to optimise a great site than it is to try and help promote a bad one.
This is what keeps it interesting as well hey!. :)
It can be frustrating for site owners who are trying to fix their site, mainly because it takes a while for those changes to have any affect on their ranking position. SEO doesn't happen over night, so it might be a while before you figure out exactly where you went wrong AND give it enough time to correct.
Some really good points to pay attention to here, and like he said, Aaron has some really FANTASTIC explinations and questions based on Google's changes.. and how they almost contradict themselves in the development of the new Panda rollout algo. https://www.seobook.com/questioning-questions
thank you for information.
Relevant content from Trustworthy sources seems to be the name of game. Thanks for the update.
I think the bad thing about Panda as an update is all the small sites and medium sites have taken hits, if you are a big site with a high authority you seem to be able to get away with any thing :O. We see the likes of Huffington Post and Mashable now reporting about any thing to get the main trend keywords in SEO for long term and they know what they are doing. It is quite crazy too see like 15 videos on Mashable about Bin Laden as Viral Video I mean come on it is meant to be social related but they know they can flex influcence now and panda keeps throwing traffic at them from years of aged content sure it is unique but it may in most cases not be the same quality as smaller sites annoying isnt it.
Dealing with the Australian market it is really hard to see if an impact has hit home hard, msot sites I own which are 95% + Au traffic seem to be fine. I own alot of sites targeting 95% + US traffic some have taken a hit and I can see it in my earnings.
But it is a method of testing over and over aggain to see for changes, I agree with the comments about quick fixes I dont think this is going to be fixed quickly at all.
I'd like to know how Big G intends on determining the factors of sites who are "authoritive" sites? Who is to say that a company selling real estate in California is any less an authoritative site than the competitor down the street? This goes for any business online, in any market with any products.
Will they determine authoritative sites based on "back-links", "inbound links", new blog style content, fresh new content, social media buzz ??? What will entail the factors which will regulate the algorithm for SERP results? Aaron's posting is just great at getting you thinking about all the rules that Google is implementing in the Panda update and how they really do contradict each other when seriously contemplated.
As someone who holds a BA and MA in English Language (ooh get me) I was particularly interested in the inclusion of "spelling mistakes" here. There is an opposition between 'prescriptivists' - those that prescribe language use, and 'descriptivists' - those that embrace language variation and change. Google are apparently putting themselves firmly in the prescriptivist's corner here - but to what extent will they penalise 'incorrect' language use. Don't forget "lol" is only a recent inclusion in the dictionary but has been commonplace on the web for years. What about deliberate, stylistic misspellings like "2 cool 4 skool".
Forgive me the liberty but I have discussed this in a little more detail here: https://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/blog/google-punishes-websites-for-incorrect-spellings/
The update seems to have affected our site in that our purely informational pages are suddenly receiving more traffic. We run an e-commerce site so that's not exactly what we are looking for but we will find a way to better monetize those pages.
I can tell that some of our pages that were linked to by article directories have lost some juice. I attribute that to the article directories themselves losing juice. But it doesn't seem like simple "SEO friendly" directories got knocked down in the same way. Anchor text still seems to be winning the day. I'd still like to see Google address those 2 things (SEO directories and exact match anchor text). They go hand in hand.
Nice information you have provided here. I have added your blogs in my bookmarks. Waiting for more post related to traffic.
Thanks.