Many people should now be aware that Google released another Panda update this past week. I have seen many sites dancing up and down in the rankings but this latest release has seriously hurt some people. There are several sites reporting losing 80% of their traffic after the recent algorithm changes. At first it was unclear whether an update had been made, but Matt Cutts from the Google spam team confirmed the event took place sometime during the night on the 13th of October. If you have not checked your webmaster tools recently, you might be interested in seeing how your sites were affected.
Webpages that I have been monitoring have showed all kinds of different reactions to the update. Some pages have been removed from keyword rankings that they used to be amongst the top 10 results. Other pages have improved in the rankings. It is still unclear what new parameters Google is using, however, there are hundreds of webmasters scratching their heads at the moment trying to understand why they were penalized, or why a site of low quality is now ranking well.
It seems that aged domains are ranking particularly well at the moment. As if the age of a domain is being used as a gauge of trust. Google always talks about improving search results for the user, the age of a domain could indicate how useful a page is to the community. A lot of SEO’s believe the quality of content is supposed to determine how well a site ranks, but with the changes that just happened it seems like many low quality pages are ranking well. I think it is best to let the dust settle and see how things look in a week. There are whispers of another Panda update coming around Halloween. If that is really the plan I will reserve judgement until the next algorithm changes.
Anymore news or information regarding this update will be added to this post.
Matt Cutt’s Quotes on the Panda Algorithm:
- If you are providing high quality content that users love, you will be ranking where you expect to rank.
- The algorithm metrics originated in the search quality team and not web-spam, focusing on web quality standards and not penalties.
- There will be no manual site reviews under the Panda algorithm, it is applied to search engine metrics on a much broader scale.
my blog lost around 25% traffic because of the 13th Oct Update.
Today also it doesn’t look good.
It seems like a lot of blogs got hit hard by this last update, even a few of my friends who have 100% unique content, well-written blogs lost serious traffic.. And these are white hat sites. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about this last update placing too much emphasis on “domain age” and way to many younger, but high quality blogs, got dropped from their rankings and replaced by generic, older sites that are no where as specific or on-topic.
This blog however jumped up almost 50% more impressions on the 14th. Its only 8 months old, all unique content though and very well written. Fairly aggressive link-building too
You’re right. Many online blogs got affected with this Panda update. Even the quality blogs, who were never affected by ‘Panda’ till now are receiving up to 90% lower traffic. And as you stated, approximately all have unique and original written content, plus they used to rank higher before this update.
One of my sites, which is a casino related affiliate site, jumped up on to the front page last week for a few good search terms and has been rotating between positions 8 and 11 every few hours, its not an old domain but it is, in my opinion, a good resource for online casino players and compared to a lot of these affiliate sites that spin content, use RSS feeds and are full of links, i think it deserves its spot on the front page, so this update has been good for me. The reason I’m actually commenting here is to ask if anyone else has noticed or can explain the sites on the front page rotating between what looks like blocks of results, what i mean, the top 3 are rotating positions hourly, and the next block of 4 are doing the same, and then the blocks seen to get bigger further down the rankings
Google has been rotating the top 5 spots on their search verticals a lot recently. I just believe its some sort of new algorithm change which focuses on averaging out top spot time to see more user based results. Giving each site a bit of “lime light” in first place to see what their metrics are that affect user quality/satisfaction. I.E. a high bounce rate at #1 spot, shows that site does not fulfill the users request. The site with the lowest bounce rate at the #1 spot, is providing the highest user satisfaction and results.
If this is the case then it will be very interesting to keep an eye on some of the big key terms/phrases and see the movers and shakers, so to speak. Anyways SEO is gonna be dead when Google ssl rolls out for real
if you believe that
Yeah, this update will certainly help some bloggers and webmasters. We have already seen that sometimes Google shows off results which has been indexed a long time back. It will provide great benefits to the blogs which always provide fresh content!
Google has just ruined 3 years of my work, I am honestly going to quit my online ventures. I am not interested any more…
What a hell of life this is…
Well, if the algorithm updates have affected your site(s) that badly, I am going to assume that you did some black hat, scraped content, or had useless/low content spammed with ads. Those were the primary targets for Panda. You can remove a lot of the ads and outbound links, tidy up your content and such then resubmit your site to Google. This has worked for a number of larger authority sites that got penalized due to having a ridiculous amount advertisements.
If you have made money online before, than it should be much easier for you to rebuild and start anew this time. Possibly plan better for the current trends and future of Google algorithm, outsource content writing if you need unique pages/posts, think of smart white hat ways of getting back links, viral link-bait? Either way, you can definitely get back there quickly, you have the tools and skills just get back in there.