Google Penalty World

"What Google Panda has done is made social media connections a bigger part of their SEO algorithm; in other words, the more connections a person has, the more likely some of their material they have read or recommended will show up in the person's search engine results page.

...

For example, Craig is looking for information on vacuum cleaner repairs, they do a Google search for the term "vacuum cleaner repairs."

If Craig is not logged in to Google, or does not have many connections, Google will present him with the most objective posts that rely on the typical search engine optimization techniques. He will most likely be presented with the best optimized site about vacuum cleaner repairs.

But, if Craig is active on social networks like Twitter, is connected to a lot of people on Google+, and even has someone in his Google Contacts list, Stacy, who has a keen interest in vacuum cleaner repair shops, then anything Stacy has said about vacuum repair is going to appear on Craig's search engine results.

If Stacy has left a comment on a vacuum repair page, or shared a vacuum repair blog post, or even written a vacuum repair blog post herself, then her results will show up on Craig's page."

early today, Matt Cutts tweeted:

Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).

Panda doesn’t constantly run. It’s a special algorithm that Google processes content through on a periodic basis. Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update explains much more about this.

What Cutts is saying isn’t that Panda “flux” will be happening during the next few weeks but rather to expect another Panda Update (Panda 2.6), a minor one compared to some past ones, to happen in the next few weeks.

That fits in with the regular cycle we’ve come to know, which so far has been this:

Google has confirmed that the latest iteration of its Panda algorithm update is live. Based on our tracking of the algorithm changes, this is Panda Update 2.5.

Pierre Chappaz is not well known in the United States. The activities of this French (now living in Switzerland) entrepreneur are mostly known in Europe.

He’s the founder of Kelkoo, one of the oldest search engines for shopping, and he helped the RSS aggregator Netvibes grow up. Last week, Pierre Chappaz killed his last project, Wikio and Wikio Experts, a news aggregator and a content farm built on the model of Demand Media.

Wikio is a Google Panda victim, as Google’s new algorithm was conceived to kick out content farms and news aggregators from search results. After Panda’s arrival, most content farms tried to adapt, some trying to cheat around Google’s new rules. Chappaz didn’t.

He’s a pragmatic entrepreneur and, by the way, an adept of Zen meditation. He focuses on what is essential.

Less than one month after the release of the new algorithm in Europe, he announced that he was changing his group’s core activity for more sustainable models.

At the same time, he raised $25 million and renamed the group eBuzzing, specializing in social video advertising.

Here’s why and how he reacted so quickly:

Has Google’s Panda update affected your traffic and sales?

If it has, you’re in good company, if it hasn’t, someday it will.

In this video, SEO Expert Leslie Rohde cuts through the guesses and disinformation to teach us how Panda works and what changes we need to make in our sites to not suffer the negative penalties assigned by Panda – penalties that can hurt your rankings, resulting in reduced traffic and sales.

DaniWeb, which has been an ongoing sub-plot of the Panda storyline throughout the year, due to its victimization and full recovery, was hit again by the most recent update.

Horowitz and her team have of course been doing some investigating themselves, and documenting this a bit in a Google support forum. In it, she writes:

So, everyone, thanks to DaniWeb’s handy dandy systems administrator, we have come to a conclusion. Our ‘time on site’ statistic decreased by 75% at 1 pm on August 11th, and has been holding steady at the reduced number, as a result of Google Analytics rolling out their new session management feature.

There have been MANY reports across the web of the bounce rate and time on site being inaccurate every since August 11th, especially when multiple 301 redirects are involved (which we use heavily).

As a result, we have been hit by Panda. Or so I gather.

Now, this is not confirmed, but could a Google Analytics change, and inaccurate data on Google’s part be responsible for sites losing over half of their traffic? If so, that’s not cool.

Google recently rolled out version 2.5 of its tweaks to the search ranking algorithm - codenamed Panda - to improve the quality of search results for users.

Panda suppresses the impact of content farms and other low-quality sites that game the system.

New data from Searchmetrics show that consumeraffairs.com, savings.com and prnewswire.com were among the biggest losers.

Consumer sites like Motor Trend and technology blogs The Next Web and Technorati also lost significant ground since the update.

The biggest winner in Google's Panda update? YouTube, Google's own Web property.

As you may know, Google launched its latest iteration of the Panda update early last week. The company confirmed this for us on Friday.

Shortly after that, SearchMetrics compiled lists of the top winners and losers. Some were surprising (as usual), and some weren’t.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises was the placement of Hubpages on those lists. Panda enthusiasts probably recall HubPages getting hit pretty hard by the Panda update, as the company hardly let us forget.

CEO Paul Edmondson was very vocal about the whole thing in the aftermath of the Panda massacre. Now, HubPages has made the top winners list.

Google has confirmed to WebProNews that an iteration of the controversial Panda update was launched this week.

When asked directly if this occurred, a Google spokesperson told us, “yes,” then offered the following canned statement:

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

While Google did not say a specific day, one webmaster reported that her site was hit on Wednesday, September 28th.

That was Dani Horowtiz, who runs Daniweb, a Panda victim we’ve discussed several times before, as the site had managed a 110% Panda recovery before getting hit this week.

If you’ve followed the Google Panda update saga throughout the year, you may recall Dani Horowitz’s story.

She runs an IT discussion community called Daniweb, and it was hit hard by the Panda update, but she made a lot of changes, and gradually started to build back some Google cred.

We interviewed in May, and she talked about the kinds of things that she was doing that was helping her get back some of her lost traffic: