Has Panda 3.4 March 23rd changed its target?

[SteveLar]

I have several sites which were all hit hard by Google Panda in the affiliate marketing space. Up until now my main business sites have stayed largely untouched and well ranked. That is until March 23rd when I noticed big falls in some highly competitive keywords - one of my sites taking a 25% traffic reduction from Google organic and the other getting hit by 40%.

These site have no Adsense and no paid advertising and no link selling and no Black Hat SEO like BMR, so my question is has anyone else seen their business site hit on or around 23rd March? At the same time I have noticed searches for popular keywords are returning many more results and even some big names seem to have dropped in the rankings too.

Over the last few months I have been trying to take action to reduce my site's bounce rate and UX, but obviously this wasn't enough.

Anyone else been hit by Panda 3.4? I am trying to ascertain which types of sites got hit and whether I can find commonality and causes.

[Dr-Pete]

Google claimed Panda 3.4 was rolling out on 3/23, but they didn't really provide much in the way of details, and "chatter" has been pretty light. I didn't see any major movements in monitored keywords or major changes in any clients, honestly.

They started their link-network crackdown in late March, too, although the timeline of that is unclear (it seems to be ongoing, as far as I can tell). If you're not engaging in that kind of back-link building, then it's unlikely you'd be affected. That ones a lot more black-and-white than Panda, in most cases.

Beyond aggressive advertising, major Panda factors still seem to be:

• Large-scale "thin" content
• Massive duplicate content (internal or cross-site)
• Bad user signals (dwell time and CTR, probably)

Most Panda recovery cases I've seen have involved major culling of indexed content - getting rid of anything thin or duplicated and pulling back to the most valuable content. Finding that and dealing with it effectively is a tough job, though, and usually requires adjustments along the way.

I'm not seeing any suggestions that the Panda updates have fundamentally changed the basic Panda "philosophy". I think Google is just tweaking the parameters as they go.

[SteveLar]

Thank you Egol. I think you're absolutely right. I am seeing big changes here too in the google.co.uk SERP. I don't think they've settled either as searching using Firefox gives different SERP results to IE and Chrome. A big brand training company appears to have knocked us down a few places in the SERP. I am seeing a traffic hit of 24% so this is going to hurt.

[EGOL]

There was a big change in Google that rolled out on the morning of March 23rd....  I think that it is an algo change and not related to Panda - but that's just me guessin'

One of my sites (large info site with adsense and small store) moved up one or two positions for most keywords and another of my sites (small retail site with many articles and adsense) moved down one or two positions for most keywords.

So, my sites didn't move much.  However, in my SERPs I have seen lots of other moves.  Mostly big brands moving up, surprisingly a few trash sites moving up, and the typical retail sites dropping a couple positions as amazon, ebay, wiki and about move up.