Google Panda Updates
If you’re expecting me to tell you what you need to do to get out of the “Panda Pen”, you can move on right now 
. If you want to learn a little about the way I’m thinking about Panda read on :
Everything I write from here, is pure guess work and what would I do if I was Google. I have had this rattling around my head for a while now, but just haven’t got round to writing it up.
We all know that a Google engineer Navneet Panda developed something that 80% of the time made you feel better about the results Google were showing, and Amit Singhal posed the 23 questions to ask yourself about your site.
The question is why? What was the Goal? To rid from the index all the bad sites, content farms etc; I honestly don’t think so, and this is why :
When you look at some of the questions Amit posted :
Would you trust the information presented in this article?
Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
They made me think slightly different, “WOULD THIS SITE MAKE ME FEEL HAPPY”. If I had searched for a VW Campervan engine, did the sites I visited make me feel happy? Could I either buy the engine of my dreams or fix a broken engine? Let’s face facts “VW campervan engine” isn’t going to give Google much clue to what is making me sad or happy on that query.
So I propose this Panda update feels more to me like Google AI than a Google update. The first run was most probably built on human data Q+A’s and common sense, the next iterations could come from areas inside the Plex (spam engineers) but also more machine learning. What did the first wave of Panda Victims all have in common? Over affiliated content? Slow websites? Hosted on free hosting accounts?
I don’t know, I haven’t got access to the data that Google have, but I can ask myself one simple question, will my site make people happy when they find it in Google? Is my site fast enough not to make people hit that back button before it loads? Is my site working for or against browsers for blind people or mobile users? Does my site work in all browsers?
Of course there are technical components to Panda but I think they have been well document already, Think Content, Think Links.
Dave Dugdale 568 days ago
http://www.learningdslrvideo.com“Think Content, Think Links”. I find myself not worrying about SEO lately even though Google totally slammed me back in Feb. I started another site and decided to go after subscribers and not traffic this time.
Mansoor Siddique 568 days ago
http://www.mansoorsiddique.com/I have to say editorial content, is definitely a factor. The fact that most people choose to syndicate the content they publish on their sites is not helpful either. More over I personally believe that google is giving more and more weighting on social factors like facebook likes and google +1 etc
Most people who failed after panda were done becuase they relied on bad links and cheap content.
clickdan 568 days ago
well
my 30 adsence sites are 18-30% bounce rate , rank 1-4 on there KW , got some facebooks natural likes, did 2-8 links every day to etch site, today all my net went from page 1 to page 5
so my visitors were happy on my sites (since 3-4 min in site per a visitor, so i dont agree with this
if a visitor stay 3min+ = happy? or he needs to be 10min ?
bobby taylor 568 days ago
http://www.ibrunswick.comContent, quality links, social networks.. all key factors
David Naylor 568 days ago
@clickdan how can you measure happiness by time spent without say what the site is about … life examples :
2 mins in natwest bank I’m happy or 20 in natwest bank makes me sad
2 mins in OXO tower makes me sad ( no table ) 3 hours makes me happy
if someone is spending 3 mins on your site what are they going reading or clicking around trying to find what they are looking for..
btw Adsenses sites tend to leave me sad, the key is it shouldn’t be an adsense site! in should be a site about a subject which is supported by ads,
Dave
find freesom 568 days ago
http://shawnozbun.comIt’s all about the quality of your content. I’m thinking for the future everyone is going to have to learn social media to compete.
clickdan 568 days ago
Hi Dave
i wish we could know,
Content is high quality on my sites,, for example i got web 16% bounce rate, only 1 ads in the blogroll, 1000 visitors a day, daily 100 back to the site by direct way, and 90% bye search results, i saw those 100 as a “happy” visitors.
how can google count the happy visitors? i think the only way is by bounce rate, but ofc i am wrong
Marios Alexandrou 567 days ago
http://infolific.com/technology/internet/seo/Drawing a conclusion from one site isn’t necessarily a good idea, but I worked on one site hit by Panda that had a pretty strong community as measured by the number of comments left. People were asking comments (suggesting trust) and people were replying to comments (suggesting engagement). Combined I would argue that the site made people happy. Panda hit it regardless.
Andy Harris 567 days ago
http://www.custwin.co.ukIt may be a bit of a ‘wishful thinking’ idea and it’d not be particularly popular with SEO people, but in my view, the whole concept of websites being (partially) judged by what links to them is way past its sell-by date. If it’s of interest, I did a blog that covered a bit about this – bit of a long blog so feel free to skip down to the ‘Time for change’ part towards the end – http://www.custwin.co.uk/custwin-blog/2011/09/google%e2%80%99s-definition-of-%e2%80%98quality%e2%80%99/
Steve Ollington 565 days ago
Panda just isn’t fully evolved yet. If you have a qaulity site and it hits you it’s just because Panda is still learning and is going to make mistakes along the way… it will keep the same goal in mind but it’s bound to screw up, I don’t think Google are claiming it’s perfected yet or they wouldn’t be rolling out new updates for it, it probably won’t ever be perfect… but that’s no reason for them not to aim for perfection
Christoph C. Cemper 564 days ago
http://http.//www.cemper.comHi Dave,
great post & discussion. Just the recent Panda 2.5 update in the US leaves me wondering, what Google considers happy.
Non-Adsense site, informational with a minimum link exposure to a merchant, but very well conversion rate dropped 50-70 positions on everything – even the exact match domain name – after being in the top ranks along with Wikipedia & Merchant sites itself.
Paul mentioned this recent update to be a “carnage” for affiliates. Is that a common denominator. Obviously visitors were happy with that site, bookmarked etc and even converted well.
best, Christoph
Ralf Schwoebel 564 days ago
http://www.tradebit.com/This time the 2.5er hit us pretty bad and I am in the same state you are in. Good post Dave!
J Pat 564 days ago
J PatGoogle took a big swing and missed on the October 13, 2011 Panda update. The so called Panda 2.5.2 punished a lot of good sites and rewarded terrible sites. One particular keyword I was number one for 8 years and I am now 33 and both number one and number two are held by sites that return error messages. I am guessing they have a pretty high bounce rate – say 100%!
Dean 564 days ago
I feel a lot of the Panda updates were about getting Google in place for it’s own affiliate sales. And to demote SME so that they are only able to survive through buying adwords as they will not be in the results unless they are a major brand; and yes Amazon/ebay etc. are well known firms, but does that give them the rights to be the only companies that show up in the SERPS for most products? Such are Google’s ‘big boys’ only morals nowadays.
I have a feeling that Google will soon be slapped by an anti-competition action.
Another thing is that they are using CJ as an example of what a spammy redirect is for their army of raters (see recent Google raters guidelines), this means that a site owner can be labelled as a spam site under panda for displaying any advert that is not a direct link.
Arron Wall’s recent post also hit on the local travel/hotel industry, where he demonstrated that having a site that offered unique and useful content should still be labelled as spam if it is acting as an hotel affiliate!
Happiness? It’s all about the bottom line.
Arjun Sandhu 563 days ago
http://www.arjunsandhu.comLike most of us here, I cannot pin-point to any one thing that Panda is targeting, but I know that in my network of a few hundred sites, the sites that have survived Panda have high “brand keyword” traffic, and in some cases very low or bad quality content. Surprisingly, these sites are retaining their rankings for some very competitive keywords.
My 2 cents.
Alex 484 days ago
With time I began to understand that Panda project is a nice thing. From one side it made adverse effect on marketing, but from another it made bloggers and site owners to improve their web content. Therefore the users will enjoy quality content without facing shallow information.