7 replies to this topic

[Michael_Martinez]

Web Pro News tugged on Google's shoulder and got confirmation that another Panda iteration was released this week:

DaniWeb and the Panda

• February 24, 2011
• April 11, 2011
• May 10, 2011
• June 16, 2011
• July 23, 2011
• August 12, 2011
• September 26, 2011

[iamlost]

The part that is missing, that would enable more focussed discussion, is where the DaniWeb (or other sites affected) changes (gone, dropped, same, up) occurred. Most Panda affected sites did not lose all their G traffic. Dani mentions that she (in the initial hit) lost ~40%. So, which pages? for which terms? etc. That is the sort of analysis that may highlight the algo shadow of what is now targeted.

Of course that requires both a benchmark and a history for pages and terms. Not sure how many sites track that. And few if any are likely to share

Given that DaniWeb had managed to recover (plus some) to beginning of year traffic volume by doing quite a drastic makeover this latest drop is actually quite intriguing. Is it a matter of kind (added, new input) or degree (existing input being cranked up/down)?

Knocking my head against desk... so far my sites seem boringly status quo with regards to Google traffic. Long may it remain so.
Note: there are rhythms to the traffic in volume and quality that are disconcertingly regular but that is a whole other conspiracy theory.

[DonnaFontenot]

No doubt it's pretty difficult to take a huge forum like daniweb's and determine which pages and terms were hit hardest, especially since panda tends to just do a wholesale slaughter sitewide, in which bad pages can cause good pages to suffer as well. If all are suffering, but only some are the cause, it's difficult to see anything at all.

Over on WMW, several people who had also recovered (or at least mostly recovered) also got slammed yet again. So, it wasn't just dani, and it's pretty disheartening. I feel for them.

My recoveries have not yet been re-whacked, but I'm scared. What if this newest Panda iteration just hasn't "flowed through" completely yet? Is the rollout complete? I hope so, but I can't help but worry.

[Michael_Martinez]

I have seen some other data but being under non-disclosure I cannot share.

There will be winners and losers and we just need to find the winners and look at them. Right now I don't have enough data to have any undisclosable hypotheses anyway.

Maybe they're looking more at social sites. Maybe not. Could be that DaniWeb is just experiencing a side effect. AJ Kohn suggested her site may be on the cusp and is slipping in and out of the Panda's good graces when the statistics change. I think he may be right.

[jonbey]

I can report that my search traffic levels recovered to pre-Panda levels for some searches!! Woot!!!

That was last Friday (23rd Sept).

They have now declined and seem to be in a rather bad state. :frustration: :scratchhead: :dramaqueen:

Yesterday (Friday, still today for many of you) was the worse Friday in a while ..... 13th and 26th August were about the same.

I *guess* that it rolled out in US on Friday and then UK and ROW on Wednesday 28th. Or maybe they just totally turned off one ranking factor for a while.

Some keywords still rank OK. Others are off on page 2/3 again (the ones that pay the bills, as opposed to the ones that entertain a few readers).

Edited by jonbey, 30 September 2011 - 08:12 PM.

[Acorn]

I was hit badly by the first Panda update but could understand why.
At that time my site consisted of many similar pages, a lot of images, very little written content and probably too much Adsense. It took time but I corrected this and slowly slowly my site is returning to pre Panda times. What annoys me is that everything on my site is original yet I still see sites with all copied content outranking me.

[jonbey]

I really think that the "too much adsense" is, possibly, a red herring. Maybe if it really does screw up the user experience. I now have maxed out my adsense (I went to an adsense seminar thing and thought I would give it a go, "nothing ventured") and traffic has improved.

Still down about 50% though ... maybe not quite that much. Was done a lot more after the Sept update!

[Acorn]

I had someone from the Adsense team in Dublin look at my site and advised me on optimising it to earn more. I took their advice and it worked but in the end I decided that it spoilt the look of my pages and returned to my old format.
There is a lot of advice floating about that too many ads can affect SEO but it does contradict the advice given out by Adsense help. I think that common sense comes into play here as you do not want to make your webpages look like one big advert and discourage visitors.
The problem is that my pandalised site did not recover quickly so it was impossible to tell what if anything helped it recover but I like to think that it gives a better user experience and my bounce rate has definitely dropped.