im seeing an increase in traffic ( 20 %), this is the busiest day of my sites history for google referals.

Its a wordpress based site, One banner ad top centre ( affiliate ) and one adsense ad in the menu area.

Content is 100% unique, zero user generated.4-5 new articles per week.

grimmer wrote:
Does anyone know that those signals are, are those the reviews from review sites?

More than likely they're referring to the "Block all example.com results" feature you see when you click on a search result and then back out.

--
Ryan

[edited by: rlange at 8:13 pm (utc) on Apr 11, 2011]

I got semi-hit on April 6 then returned to normal levels on Sunday. I got hit again today from google.com. The site that I was swapped with, on a major keyword term, has 1 (one) total backlink according to yahoo site explorer. My guess is bounce rate is playing a bigger factor. I am also getting results on a major keyword term like 4 for the first vistor and then 13 for the second vistor same geographical location a minute later.

These changes have been oscillating in and out here on queries using browsers ID'd as English language on machines running English OS's for a few weeks now ..apparently over the weekend they decided to make them sticky..previously they were being served in our night time ..after 22.00 hours..til next morning around 08.00 to 10.00

Queries run using French language systems set to French ID and French as preferred language have been oscillating around the same times and are continuing to do so ..but I think they will stick at what many posters here don't like.

That may explain what crobb305 is seeing ( that adjustments can pay off )..

cwnet's post is IMO of particular relevance..as is Google's reference to using user feedback rolled in ..as I mentioned in another thread ..how does it look to an average surfer ..how do they feel about your site..is more important than how you feel about it ..again the preview tool was a precursor to the user assessment being important ..

You are not the customer ..Google is interested in how the surfer feels and reacts to your site ..and how satisfied the advertisers are ..

Not excusing them ..but it makes sense ..and has done so for a long time ..if we cant survive as we are ..we must either evolve or die.

LMAO...

So i checked again

i'm now being outranked by 3 different single page ebook landing page websites VS my site loaded with quality free content....

So now what do I do? change over all my sites - remove all the quality content and turn them into a SUPER long single page ebook sales page? gimme a f'n break google - u call them better quality??

grimmer - Your quote about feedback signals is from the official Google announcement. I'm including the first two paragraphs of the article.

To confirm answers already posted, the second paragraph contains some comments about the signals. User blocking jumps out, and I've emphasized it in the excerpt below....

High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]
Monday, April 11, 2011 at 12:00 PM

Over a month ago we introduced an algorithmic improvement designed to help people find more high-quality sites in search. Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic.

Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the "long tail" of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change....

This is a big update no doubt. I've dropped between 3 and 8 places on most keywords - and over 90 for another which is the one that hurts most. Not because I'm losing traffic or money as it was only a page 2 sitter anyway, but's a genuinely useful page (no aff links, no ads, and 1 tiny adsense unit) that sits at 109 with pure crud above it. This includes 2 of my competitors who are now in the top 30, who went out of business last month and whose sites are returning 500 errors. Unbelievable.

this again is only for english.

Is google considering only english language when larry page took over?

Don't throw your domain away. Give it time. I have personally witnessed 3-month penalties come and go, all the while people were telling me to get a new domain.

This is very good advice from my own personal experience ~ in the past I did bounce back reasonably quickly from any algo updates (like in a month).

However I'm sorry to say this time that has not proven to be the case ~ went down at Panda and am still down. So those of you who have been hit hard, don't expect a fast recovery (if any). Start tightening your belts NOW and look at other opportunities, for your very survival may be at stake.

.......................

Don't throw your domain away. Give it time. I have personally witnessed 3-month penalties come and go, all the while people were telling me to get a new domain.

This is very good advice from my own personal experience ~ in the past I did bounce back reasonably quickly from any algo updates (like in a month).

However I'm sorry to say this time that has not proven to be the case ~ went down at Panda and am still down. So those of you who have been hit hard, don't expect a fast recovery (if any). Start tightening your belts NOW and look at other opportunities, for your very survival may be at stake.

What's scary is that this seems to be a predetermined time penalty--at the least. No one has come back up, as far as I know, and I doubt no one has improved their site to meet Google's new guidelines. I hoped it was a 30 day one but 60 days are just 2 weeks away.


People have to realize that "throw your name away" is not advice for most serious businesses with good, and very good names. Have some aged domains ready to go is, though.

People have to realize that "throw your name away" is not advice for most serious businesses with good, and very good names. Have some aged domains ready to go is, though.

I agree completely. Hold on to the Pandalized domains, wait and see what happens for at least 3 months. Even the -50 penalties that I have encountered lasted for 3 months. Get a new domain started (to get some age on it, a few links, a little content), but don't throw in the towel. The advantage we have with Panda is that it is algorithmic, not manual. A manual penalty could be an indefinite duration. An algorithmic filtering can mean recovery, depending on what we do with our sites.

@crobb

Amusingly, yesterday I made the first changes to our impacted sites - didn't know Google's schedule. Nothing major though, strictly eliminating some navigation duplication in case they've decided internal links are spammy. Hasn't indexed yet, was tempted to undo the changes, but decided "screw it."

But I wanted to comment that although my sites were severely impacted by Panda, the penalty was unlike any of the minus X penalties I read about here. It was more like a loss of a few positions on most phrases, and when you have a lot of #1 phrases, losing a few positions is 50% down.

I was pretty surprised when I looked at our stats. Our traffic is up around 15% today (week over week), but we normally see an increase this time of year. Regardless, it's our highest traffic day ever, so it looks like we're not going to be Pandalized.

We rolled out a new site design over the weekend, but we don't expect any change in traffic from the design. It's aimed at making the site look more Web 2.0 (whatever that is...). Maybe we should have done a 3.0.

Pandalized

The first time I saw that term used was by Walkman several weeks ago, I think he coined that phrase. It makes so much easier to describe things. lol.

Interesting that we have a Australian Localised version of our site which has the same structure/layout just different content (the content is equal in density to the US site).

AU site has had massive increases in the last 24 hours, US site has been kicked to the curb.

Only main difference is the number of pages (US has 10x more pages), which leads me to believe that larger sites are more prone to being hit since there's a much greater depth of data to penalise?

The results in the UK are looking positively insane.

I'm seeing results on .co.uk from Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and timbuctoo.

This update has blown me freaking away. I would have been happy if a .gov/.edu page had taken our spot for terms but spam and junk sites with Adsense have taken our site without any ads.

Further why am I getting .au ranked as Number#1 when I am located in America? This guy in my niche was ranking 9th all the time with his single sales page. Now he is ranking 1 in search for people in States?

Google says they only rolled out panda on ENGLISH language international versions, so google.fr, se, es haven't changed yet.

This is interesting because I am also seeing some changes on google.de when searching for German phrases with hl=de

Abandon all hope. As someone who has been Pandalized since February all you can do is accept that all your old content is now worthless garbage and move on without worrying about why.

I have noticed that my new content fares better, in fact almost all of my google traffic is coming from new content now. More and more of my older content is just buried, deranked, and killed every single day.

Today was the last nail in the coffin for it.

Google has drawn a line, and said "any content which was on this site before this date is now garbage" and that is that.

I can't figure this out. We got pummeled by US Panda on Feb 24, but non-US G referrals increased starting somewhere around March 24, and have been up ever since.

My anecdotal checking of results show that now non-US Google (e.g. Australia, UK) are showing the same results as US: i.e. our articles are now completely outranked by dupes and scrapers. Panda is indeed global.

WMT reports seem completely inconsistent what we've been seeing on our site.

@Shatner, I was not penalized in any updates but to see 12 sites all getting moved from top positions is something frustrating. I am seeing .au site ranking for terms where my my 12 years old financial site was ranking. Felix Salmon work being penalized and some junk low content getting ranked is just annoying I will never invest in creating good content again, this has given me good lesson.

If there is an upside to this, it's that my referrals from E-How have more than doubled. Sad but true. It's traffic nevertheless.

Just a warning to those with non-US facing sites that have just been pandalized: We went thru our site deleting everything that we thought might be "thin" content (after we got hit by US Panda). Some of it was quite useful stuff with lots of helpful user comments. We deleted the lot in our desperation to get back into the G results.

Nothing worked or helped - so be careful. AS far as we can tell our site ticks all the boxes for G's quality guidelines. Sadly now it is outranked by all the scrapers.

This is interesting because I am also seeing some changes on google.de when searching for German phrases with hl=de

Google don't always tell the entire truth about what they are doing and when and why they are doing it ..they frequently feed alternative serps for certain niches or keywords etc, to an area, or a country for a while. Until they see which they and their searchers /users and their advertisers are the most satisfied with ..see my observations concerning France since panda began.

Taking a step back, is anyone seeing better serps?

I'm not at all, and I just can't see how Google can say this is the way forward...

Taking a step back, is anyone seeing better serps?

Not me, unless you consider E-How and WikiHow better.

@Karma I've never seen Google results this bad. I'm seeing content farms and scraper sites dominating. Google's geo targeting seems totally broken (I'm seeing .co.uk, .ie, .ca, .com.au all over the US results like never before). I'm seeing super thin content articles from Wikipedia and Aboutdotcom outranking quality content like never before. I am officially abandoning all hope with regard to Google's serps. They are either deliberately destroying the results for financial gain (I don't blame them, they are a company afterall), or they are so incompetent and out of touch at this point that the whole world should be laughing at them.

Nice little saying here over here in Australia..."Too many kangaroos loose in the top paddock"...a company guided by too many PhDs with their heads solely focussed on Facebook!

struggling to understand whats happening to my site, in december my site had 600 visits per day and then went up to 2000 per day which indicates google likes and then since 7pm looks like its going to go back down, is this panda update? Looks like i have gone from number 1 to 11 on maqny searches.

For our UK orientated site here in the UK - its some up some down

We are in an odd situation in that we have been slowly rolling out a new design - with any new content being in the new design.

Pages that where originally on the old design are still doing OK - even if now on the new design. New content on the new design is now falling down 30 - 40 positions.

Almost as if someone said sorry - all your content after a certain date is rubbish - or maybe - we manually reviewed some of your pages but not others.

Not worried yet - see how it plays out .

PS . don't dump your sites - I nearly did that about 5 years ago - started to work on a new one but it all came back after 6 months !