I think Panda was a conspiracy.
-
It's just a theory, but I think that Panda was not really an algorithm update but rather a conspiracy.
Google went out of their way to announce that a new algorithm was being rolled out. The word on the street was that content farms would be affected. Low quality sites would be affected. Scrapers would be affected. So, everyone with decent sites sat back and said, "Ah...this will be good...my rankings will increase."
And then, the word started coming in that some really good sites took a massive hit. We've got a lot of theories on what could be causing the hit, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix.
Many of the key factors that have been suggested causes of a site to look bad in Panda's eyes are present on one of my sites, but this site actually increased in rankings after Panda.
So, this is my theory: I think that Google made some random changes that made no sense. They made changes that would cause some scraper sites to go down but they also knew that many decent sites would decline as well.
Why would they do this? The result is fantastic in Google's eyes. They have the whole world of web design doing all they can to create the BEST quality site possible. People are removing duplicate content, reducing ad clutter and generally creating the best site possible. And this, is the goal of Larry Page and Sergey Brin...to make it so that Google gives the user the BEST possible sites to match their query.
I think that a month or so from now there will be a sudden shift in the algo again and many of those decent sites will have their good rankings back again. The site owners will think it's because they put hard work into creating good quality, so they will be happy. And Google will be happy because the web is a better place.
What do you think?
-
hahahaha. I agree with you. First Google manipulates results to see if Bing is copying. Soon after this update comes with all the care that is creating its own content sites optimized for the robots and we can not think of duplicate content. hehehehe
-
Actually I really liked the "content registry" idea.
An library of content where you could register what you have created and, optional, a link to where you want to be considered the main source.
At least it would be 10x more usefull than the google knol idea..
-
I would pay a fee to protect my best content in the Google SERPs.
-
Actually you have a point there... if JC Penny was indeed the catalyst (which I could easily imagine it being) then the time between that and the update would surely mean it would have to have been rushed. I never considered that before.
-
ha ha... I think they did rush this out.... they were quickly trying to pull up their pants after getting embarassed from the JCPenny problem... they needed to bust a few heads quickly...
-
Ha ha, maybe
I think it's something infinitely less planned out and they simply rushed this change out the door without understanding fully what it would do to the SERPs.
Although I do think you're right that in a few months (in what will be claimed to be a second Panda sweep) that things will go back and only the very worst offenders will stay penalised.
-
Yes I like the content registry idea! It would probably be necessary to pay for it as a service though, and to cover dupes that are okay maybe they could just allow dupes as long as they reference back to the source in the registry (for news, quotations, etc... where dupes can't be avoided).
-
Interesting ideas. Thanks for sharing them.
I think that Google is talking a lot about this as a "quality website update"... and that is getting them attention in the media but it is also kicking a lot of webmasters in the butt to clean up their websites.
I think that google should make a "content registry" where I can submit my content and say "this is mine" and then copies or spins of that content will not get traction in the SERPs.
And, I think that they should take a closer look at websites in the Adsense program because the ability to monetize crap and theft is driving lot of bad odor in the SERPs.
-
Haha I like it!!
Well, if it's not what happened, they'll wish they thought of it anyway lol
My view on why other sites got hit is just that they had at least some links coming from sites that got hit... i.e. got 100 backlinks, 10 are from articles on article sites, article sites get hit... lose 10 backlinks (or at least lose some of the value from some of those backlinks)... hence, good site takes a hit too
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
-
What do you think of SearchMetrics' claim that there are no longer universal ranking factors?
I agree that Google's machine learning/AI means that Google is using a more dynamic set of factors to match searcher intent to content, but this claim feels like an overstatement: Let’s be quite clear: Except for important technical standards, there are no longer any specifc factors
Algorithm Updates | | AdamThompson
or benchmark values that are universally valid for all online marketers and SEOs. Instead, there
are different ranking factors for every single industry, or even every single search query. And these
now change continuously. Keyword-relevant content, backlinks, etc. still seem to be ranking factors across pretty much all queries/industries. For example, I can't think of a single industry where it would be a good idea to try to rank for [keyword] without including [keyword] in the visible text of the page. Also, websites that rank without any backlinks are incredibly rare (unheard of for competitive terms). Doubtless some factors change (eg Google may favor webpages with images for a query like "best hairstyle for men" but not for another query), but other factors still seem to apply to all queries (or at least 95%+). Thoughts?0 -
Panda...Should I consolidate...Like this...
I'm torn. Many of our 'niche' ecommerce products rank ok, however I'm concerned that duplicate content is negatively effecting our overall rankings via Panda Algo. Here is an example that can be found through quite a few products on the site. This sub-category page (http://www.ledsupply.com/buckblock-constant-current-led-drivers) in our 'led drivers' --> 'luxdrive drivers' section has three products that are virtually identical with much of the same content on each page, except for their 'output current' - sort of like a shirt selling in different size attributes: S, M, L and XL. I could realistically condense 44 product pages (similar to example above) down to 13 within this sub-category section alone (http://www.ledsupply.com/luxdrive-constant-current-led-drivers). Again, we sell many of these products and rank ok for them, but given the outline for how Panda works I believe this structure could be compromising our overall Panda 'quality score', consequently keeping our traffic from increasing. Has anyone had similar issues and found that its worth the risk to condense product pages by adding attributes? If so, do I make the new pages and just 301 all the old URLs or is there a better way?
Algorithm Updates | | saultienut0 -
Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | mlm12
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page. We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH! I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory). We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links. As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this. We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions. We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow? For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing? For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do? For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed). How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this). What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect? Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.0 -
Did anyone else notice all their keyword rankings go down after the last Panda refresh on January 17th 2013?
Even before January 17th I noticed my keyword ranking slowly going from the top 3 to around 8, 9 and 10. Then between January 15 and January 30th, (SEO MOZ) is not showing the exact date) they all went down to the second page and worse. The rankings dropped for an e-commerce website petsspark.com. They sell a tear stain removal product which is a pretty competitive market. After January i started to notice that Google was starting to rank blogs, forums, overal product review websites and of course amazon, better than me and my competitors. Was anyone else effected by the panda refresh or have any idea what may have gone wrong? Please help ScreenShot2013-04-10at50852PM.png?t=1365628252
Algorithm Updates | | DTOSI1 -
Do you think Google is destroying search?
I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse. I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications. What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query. What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed. In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all. I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying) What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed. One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them. I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page. That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document. Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results. I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing? What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too? I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using site:mysite.com in the search box.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Was I hit by panda or penguin?
My site, graciousbridal.com was hit pretty hard by google at the end of April. I actually noticed our traffic decreasing around February, then towards the end of April, it got really bad. Our sales this may were half of what they were in may 2011. We have never done any black or gray hat seo, wouldn't even know how to. I know in the past we did blog commenting, but changed up our keywords so it wasn't all the same, maybe we didn't change it enough?? We have another very similar site that I'm now wondering if we were penalized because they are too similar. We always have changed up the copy, but they have most of the same products. This second site barely gets traffic or sales and has about half of the items graciousbridal does. But, I'm wondering now if it's to similar and that is why we were penalized. I can't figure out what we did wrong to have this big of a drop. I really need help with this as this is supposed to be our busiest season of the year. Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated..
Algorithm Updates | | Craig2100 -
Did we get hit by Panda? What do we do?
Hello, here's our site: nlpca(dot)com We had a big drop in rankings, going from about 19th to about 43rd for our main keyword and having significant drops in other keywords. This happened roughly 6 weeks ago We thought it was being caused by either: Placing keywords in titles before we had them in the content. or Trying to rank for Utah keywords - we're the NLP Institute of California and we are in both places now, but the site talks about mainly California. We changed both these things, and we're still at the low rankings. Will we move back up? What do we do? Will a backlink campaign be effective at this point?
Algorithm Updates | | BobGW0 -
Content below the fold and Panda Update
Hi I was at the linklove conference and I heard some worrying stories about the way content is formatted on a page being a factor in ehow has avoided being slapped. It was the first time I had heard the expression "below the fold..." I am producing some very sexy SERP's results and other sexier metrics are up too but I am concerened that thefurnituremarket.co.uk has a ton of images on the home page and the nice content is below all of them.. firstly is this content..."below the fold"? secondly I know the site is old but do you think when this panda update hits the UK... were will be penalised for the look of the site.. I know there was talk yesterday at the conference of coming up woth a tool to check this out... my gut says that this will be a factor... sooner rather than later hence I am looking at magento and how we can skin it to look nice and present products better.. I would be really interested to know what exactly is "below the fold" on the furnituremarket.co.uk and some thoughts on the whole ehow formatting issue..
Algorithm Updates | | robertrRSwalters0