What About Google Panda Update 22?
-
Maybe I haven't found the threads or whatever but I haven't seen lots of posts about the latest Google Panda update from November 21-22 on SEOmoz.
Panda 22 is not even listed here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
Until November 21st, Google killed 3 of 5 websites I own through their Panda updates (never got hit by Penguin updates as I got only original content), accounting for about 25% of my income.
Fortunately, the 2 remaining websites gained more traffic throughout the summer of 2012 so my income almost got back to 100% even though I got the "Unnatural Links" warning in Google Webmaster Tools in July.
Since then, I did a huge link cleanup and according to the Link Detox Tool (from another SEO service), the number of "toxic links" went from about 350 to 50. Back link reports is as follow:
- 8% (52) Toxic Links;
- 57% (382) Suspicious Links;
- 35% (235) Healthy Links;
Out of the 382 suspicious, most of them are coming from the same domain and they are all directories to which my website has been submitted automatically (not using any specific keyword anchor). On the opposite, healthy links are coming from different domains so I like to think they have a stronger impact than suspicious links.
That said, my two remaining websites were still doing well until November 21 where it got hit by the Panda. Now traffic has dropped by 55% and income has dropped by 75% (yes I'll have to look for a job within a year if I don't fix this).
(I want to add that none of my websites are "thin websites". One has over 1500 pages of content and the other has about 500 pages. All websites have content added 3 to 5 times a week.)
What I don't get is that all my "money keywords" are still ranked in the top 10 results on Google according to multiple tools / services I use, yet the impressions dropped from 50% to 75% for those keywords?!?
I have a feeling that this time it's not only a drop in ranking. There's a drop in impressions caused by something else. Is it caused by emphasis on local search? Are they showing more ads and less organic results?
But here's the "funny part":
For the last 5 years, I was never able to advertise my website on Google Adwords. Each time, I got a quality score of about 4/10 only to see it drop to 1/10 within a few hours of launching the campaign.
On November 22nd, I build new PPC campaigns based on the exact same PPC campaigns I had the past (same keywords, same ads, same landing pages).
Guess what?
Now the quality score is between 7/10 and 10/10 (most of them have 10/10) for the exact same PPC campaign!
What a "coincidence" huh?
-
Hi, I'm looking into a similar fall experienced across several of our sites since Nov 21. From what I can gather, Panda is all about 'quality quality' and some of the signals used to indicate 'quality' are bouncerate, time on site, browse rate, CTR from search, rather than whether the content is well written.
I've identified that some of our pages have high bounce rates and maybe that is part of the reason we have seemingly been hit. Perhaps reducing bounce rates, improving on site clicks, improving browse rates etc will allow your site to bounce back. Personally, I'm still scratching my head wondering whether Panda really is to blame for our fall but improving 'quality' and the user experience certainly has to be one of our main goals.
-
Another thing I don't get is that some pages are ranking higher than before for their main keyword, yet their traffic has dropped 50% - 75%...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings. When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now. The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored. If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
22 Pages 7 Indexed
So I submitted my sitemap to Google twice this week the first time everything was just peachy, but when I went back to do it again Google only indexed 7 out of 22. The website is www.theinboundspot.com. My MOZ Campaign shows no issues and Google Webmaster shows none. Should I just resubmit it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theinboundspot1 -
Google does not favour php websites?
Hi there. An SEO company recently told me that google does not favour php development? This seems rather sketchy, I have not read that google doesn't favour this anywhere, did I just miss that part of SEO or are these guys blowing a little smoke?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital1 -
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Internal structure update
How often does google update the internal linking structure of a website ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Bing/Yahoo! Updates
On March 27th I noticed a huge rankings drop across the board on a client site in Bing and Yahoo! After some research, I found this article on SEOroundtable (it also links back to a Webmaster World discussion). For this particular site we're talking a few dozen of keywords dropping off the first page, or even from the first page dropping out of the top 50. The only thing not affected were brand keywords. The site was recently relaunched, and has a fairly weak backlink profile right now. It doesn't use keywords in the domain (which was one of the things identified in the SEOroundtable article). Has anyone else noticed changes? If so, what do you attribute them to and how are you combating them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BedeFahey0 -
Are there new updates in Google Panda? Please help review my website...
My site have significantly went down in google ranking today. Is there a recent update with regards to google panda? Also, please help me review my website for possible errors so I may apply the necessary changes for my site to recover. Here is my url: http://www.homeescapade.com Thanks and God Bless
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trigun0