From the article: "Everybody knows that Google Panda has rolled out, of-course it increased the user’s experience but literally messed up those search ranking manipulators.
I also tried these things in March-April and these techniques was working very well, like One can easily rank any keyword in just 15-20 days with those tactics.
But, now scenario has changed, Google has advanced its algorithm and slapped those grey practices for artificial link building.
What affects the amount of thin content that is condoned?
What is the best way to recover from Panda?
SEW run some very interesting tests across a few hundred web sites to find out what affected and triggered the Google Panda and how to best recover from it.
Their conclusions include:
1) Panda uses a steep threshold. Pages are either affected or not.
2) The threshold isn’t the same for each domain. Links seem to cause some difference.
3) Almost all keywords on an affected page drop in ranking.
4) Entire sections of pages are affected. Drops for a single page are unlikely to be caused by Panda.
5) You can recover from Panda by removing low quality pages from the index (canonical, noindex, etc.).
It looks like webmasters recently felt the affects of another Google Panda Update tweak.
Since what’s come to be known as version 2.5, Google has been making tweaks to it as promised, and these tweaks continue to help some sites and hurt others.
Search Engine Roundtable points to some webmaster discussion, indicating that a tweak may have rolled out on October 20.
There are indeed plenty of complaints in a WebmasterWorld thread here. Most are calling it a minor update, but even the minor updates can be major for some sites.
User Bewenched wrote, for example, “It may have been a ‘minor’ update, but it slammed our ecommerce site yet again… down 30%”
From the article intro: Yesterday we reported that Google rolled out a "minor" update to the Google Panda algorithm, which we labelled Panda 2.5.2.
The thing is, the level of complaints and forum posts, as well as comments on my post, is at a level that seems to be more than "minor" by our standards.
There are literally hundreds of complaints, complaints maybe at levels closer to a full major update to the Panda algorithm, as opposed to what we saw back on October 9th.
Here are some of the many threads I've seen with complaints at the Google Webmaster Help Forums, HighRankings Forums and WebmasterWorld.
Your site didn’t lose ranking because you have too many ads or because you have too many affiliate links.
You didn’t lose traffic because you have a shitty site.
You got buried because your overall quality score isn’t up to par with the Google.
When you get Pandalized, even your Google Adsense earnings will go down. Certain ads will stop showing up and your CPM will get killed. At least, that was my experience.
Ok. I’m frustrated with all of the hype and misinformation regarding the Panda Update to the Google algorithm.
There are very few websites willing to come out and share their experiences, with the exception of DaniWeb and a few others. Most have been fairly silent, which I can only assume is out of fear of repercussions. That’s lame.
So, I’m going to share my experience and lessons learned along the way.
...
All I want to do is help you understand the Panda Update on a intuitive level as well as a practical one.
...
Here are a seven tips you can apply to your marketing strategy to make sure you keep your site out of Panda.
If you’re short on time, make sure you read the first two.
October 14 ’2011, like other ordinary days, started very well for us and the rest of our blogger community.
However, none of us were aware that we were going to get hit by another deadly Google Panda Update in the next 5-6 hours.
And it came to us!
It was none other than another minor update to Google’s deadly Panda which is famous for killing a series of websites ever since it was rolled out for the first time in February 2011.
An interesting debate went down in Bruce’s office last week.
Usually, discussions about factors that underlie SEO strategy go on behind closed doors and away from outsiders’ ears, but not this time.
On today’s episode of SEM Synergy, Bruce, Jess and I postulate what could be the target of the Panda Updates, Google’s most public actions to improve the quality of its organic search results. Excerpts from the show follow.
Google is now not the only monopolist on many search markets including the UK, but the mega-corporation is overtaking new markets, crushing the competition with more or less ruthless tactics.
I like the way a Google Panda victim has put it:
“Google Panda is the result of many years of struggle, with Google trying to eliminate go-between services like news aggregators and specialised search engines,” explains Chappaz. “Why? Because Google’s revenues for the broad search platform are slowing down. Google needs to eat in its own ecosystem to keep its revenues flowing.
What can you do about Google entering your market and making everybody go out of business quickly?
Google is getting more and more aggressive in its attempts to grab market share in profitable industries.
So what can you do about it? Just give up? Join Google and work for them as wage slave?
Maybe an alternative exists: here are 30 of the tactics Google uses to overwhelm their competitors. Maybe they can be useful for you too.
So the Panda 2.5 update was pushed out by Google on September 28th and then on October 4/5th, Google promised tweaks and some site's hit, confirmed being back and recovered fully.
SearchMetrics reports that 10 of the 30 sites they reported being hit, saw a 80-90% of their visibility improve. But they also said that other sites did not see an improvement.
I spoke with one of those sites (can't disclose, I am sorry) and they said they saw a recovery on October 7th. They even proved it to me, that they fully recovered.
This is a controversial topic and it will be more so in the near future.
It is clear that Google is a private company, and that it can chose to rank and sort its results any way it wants to, but I think that by now Google is much more than a private service, and it closely resembles a public service or utility, upon which a large number of people depend for their education, work, problem-solving and more.
Under this light, I personally argue that it would be best that the way in which Google results are delivered allows for maximum transparency of how these are calculated OR it should be in the hands and control of the individual users to decide which criteria and filters to apply to their information searches.
This is how I see it.
To balance my view, please find in this article a strong voice defending instead Google commercial position and rights.
Last week, SearchMetrics posted lists of what it found to be the top winners and losers from Google’s recent Panda update iteration (commonly referred to as Panda 2.5).
Now, the firm has released new SEO Visibility data indicating that large portions of the update appear to have rolled back.
“This data shows a large-scale recovery,” says SearchMetrics founder Marcus Tober. “Out of 30 domains featured in last week’s list, 10 could recover 80-90% of their visibility, with another 10 even surpassing their pre-panda 2.5 reach!”
This is in line with a report from DaniWeb that it had quickly recovered after being hit by the Panda update for the second time.
"Google has been on the prowl over recent months in an attempt to clean up its search engine. Before the infamous Google Panda Update there were a number of sites ranking in top positions that were there from low quality link building activities.
Further from Kaleigh’s post in August, 6 months on from the first roll out of the update, we have designed an infographic that outlines what the update has targeted over recent months and we have outlined what elements the algorithm has looked at to decide what is a good quality website and what is a low quality website.
We have also put together a timeline for you so you can see if this matches up with the time your website lost its positions.
If you think your website was hit by Google’s Panda Update then fear not, we have outlined some possible ways in which you can make Panda work for you."
If you are just trying to find out some of the basic facts about the Google Panda algorithm, this simple infographic from Attachmedia.com may be of help.
From the article: "If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I am like, “God, not only is this well written, it’s kind of funny. It’s humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It’s got some history of this part. It has great photos.
Man, I don’t care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page.
If I were interested, I’d be tweeting about this, I’d share it. I’d send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles.
I would love this page.”
That’s what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times?
Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords?"
Robin Good: A basic introductory and well-written article about Google Panda and its reason to be. It summarizes and recaps the basics behind the new Google algo and how web publishers should tackle this new challenge.
From the article intro: "Google’s Panda update has been shaking up the web for better or worse all year, and for the longest time, there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of recovery stories.
Eventually, we started to hear about some – perhaps most notably – that of DaniWeb, which after managing to make a 110% recovery, was hit again (and then recovered again shortly thereafter as Google continued to tweak the update).
Google continues to tweak the update and make additional algorithm changes, and we’re hearing more stories about recoveries from Panda.
SearchMetrics recently reported that various sites it had previously reported as losing search visibility due to Panda had bounced back.
As previously reported, Google's Matt Cutts tweeted out on October 5 to expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than...
"I guess anyone a little bit familiar with Google’s ambitions for faster and useful Internet, would know that after the Panda update the message was clear to all Publishers.
Do not make websites for just the sake of making money.
If you’re not passionate about what you write nor does care about ‘user-experience’ then you have no more room on the Internet."
The reason I decided to write this article is because we all (myself included) looked up to Google as the search engine powerhouse who may still be living on their original reputation of revolutionaries and spam killers while this is no longer the case.
They may still be the best search engine, in terms of search quality but with moves like the Panda update and the state of the algorithm before that I would suspect that Google could be overlapped if a new search engine with new ideas starts-up.
While I would love to see somebody like Blekko do well and maybe even implement solutions like I have suggested, with their current attitude towards search and their current results I can’t see them overtaking Google any time soon.
Still I would love to be proven wrong and I would love for a small search engine with a point to prove to take on Google with these types of queries with a new and creative solution and put some heat on the search giant.
The FairSearch Coalition has sent a 44-pager paper, entitled, “Google’s Transformation From Gateway To Gatekeeper: How Google’s Exclusionary And Anticompetitive Conduct Restricts Innovation And Deceives Consumers,” to all 50 U.S. Attorneys General.
“The paper offers in the greatest detail yet the coalition’s concerns that Google’s business practices that threaten competition and the free markets, deceive consumers, and threaten further innovation and economic growth and new jobs from the technology sector.”
There are five specific areas of concern dealt with in this white paper:
- Deceptive display: Steering users toward its own products by displaying them at the top or in the middle of the results page in ways that suggest to consumers that they are natural search results, rather than links to Google sites in which Google has a direct economic interest.
- Search manipulation: Manipulating its search algorithm to exclude or penalize competing sites, effectively “disappearing” them from the Internet.
- Unauthorized content scraping: Stealing content developed by other websites, such as user reviews, without permission and displaying that content on its own pages, sometimes even without attribution.
- Unfair treatment of advertisers: Manipulating advertisers’ quality scores to inflate ad prices and placing restrictions on its “must buy” ad platform that inhibit customers from using competing platforms.
- Exclusionary conduct in mobile: Buying up companies in the mobile search area that present a nascent competitive threat, and imposing exclusivity restrictions in its Android licensing agreements to maintain and expand its dominance.
The unemployment rate as released on October 7th is at 9.1%, pretty high for U.S. standards. How does that relate to the SEO industry?
Well, it doesn't but it is unusually close to the 9.2% of you who claimed you lost your job because of the Google Panda Update.
We ran a poll a couple weeks ago asking Did You Lose Your Job Because Of Google Panda? and we had 250 responses since then.
Most of you said, no you are doing fine. But 9.2% of you said you lost your job directly related to the Panda update. That is 23 people who said they lost their jobs.
A week ago, we compiled the winners and losers of Panda 2.5 – the fifth iteration of Panda 2 in the US had been the largest of those “smaller” adjustments and hit a lot of sites, prompting some scrutiny and criticism across the net.
Previous updates seemed to be high-confidence decisions – Google generally would not alter the Panda classifications for a couple of weeks.
Panda 2.5 seems to be an exception to that rule – this weeks’ SEO Visibility data shows that large portions of the 2.5 update seem to be rolled back!
Comparing and contrasting ranking data before and after Panda 2.5 yields the following results:
I’m sure that most people reading this are aware of the Panda 2.5 update that ran last Wednesday.
It first came to light when some sites noticed their traffic dropping dramatically, and was confirmed by both Google and Google’s Matt Cutts.
...
So what does this show? Either Google has already backed off this Panda update, which isn’t something that seems to have been noticed or announced, these sites all leaped into action as soon as they heard of this update and quickly fixed all their issues, or there was an issue with the data that week, that’s corrected itself this week.
Whichever happens to be true, the moral of this tale is that you need to make sure you take into account all evidence before jumping to conclusions and panicking.
Just because you read that Panda has hit a certain site because of a couple of data points, or that Google is now favoring a particular type of site, don’t assume that to actually be the case.
So the next time a Panda update comes out, take a deep breath, examine all the data points, and don’t panic.
Love them or hate them, content farms are a reality on today's web.
Thanks to the strength of the search economy, savvy upstart publishers realized that there was money to be made mass-producing search engine-friendly content on the cheap.
But content farming's success may have been its downfall. As the SERPs filled up with articles of dubious value, search engines have fought back. Some went so far as to ban well-known content farms from their indexes.
Banning large, prominent sites is, for obvious reasons, a challenging proposition for Google. But it too has fought back hard against content farms using ts algorithm.
While the verdict is out as to whether it's changes are improving search quality on the world's largest search engine, it appears that some content farmers are adjusting their businesses.
In this illustrated infographic you can learn more about what the Google Panda update really is.
Its timeline, what the Panda likes and how to keep it happy, as well as the consequences of what happens when the Panda strikes and how to find out if you have been hit by it.
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