i suppose he deserved it, and he didnt seem too bothered by it, but...

he also mentioned that his traffic was going up and so was his sales. so presumably his site was useful to people. more and more people were visiting it, and using it to get what they wanted.

surely that is a good example of positive user behaviour? -- exactly the kind of thing that google is supposed to favour nowadays.

it seems that his rewritten content outweighed the fact that people found it useful.

Interesting read, but just because his site was Pandalized doesn't mean that other sites that have been Pandalized have the same problem as his site.

he also mentioned that his traffic was going up and so was his sales. so presumably his site was useful to people. more and more people were visiting it, and using it to get what they wanted.

Excellent point. Surely when you start making steady conversions from your visitors, your site is useful or has what visitors are looking for - and yet they got slapped.

Of course he got slapped... and with good reason. He states quite openly that the site was just piggy backing on the work of someone else (using the merchants content verbatim) with an affiliate link slapped on the Buy buttons.

No original content, nothing that couldn't be found on the merchants own sites and nothing that adds value to the web environment.

That's like standing in front of Google and poking your tongue at them while at the same time having a big target stapled to your forehead.

Very often google will give a site the benefit of the doubt with it's content. It's awesome. You get some traffic and then use the traffic to get reviews, use the revenue to rewrite the content etc you've got a few months to sort out your dupe content problem then your site can prosper.

But keep pumping out more and more dupe content? Now reviews no rewrites no value adding? Of course your site will get slapped and fail. Not sure why this is news.

he also mentioned that his traffic was going up and so was his sales. so presumably his site was useful to people. more and more people were visiting it, and using it to get what they wanted.

Useful website shouldn't have 90% of its traffic coming from search engines.

Useful website shouldn't have 90% of its traffic coming from search engines.

Why not?
If the search engine is good I would have thought that is entirely reasonable......

Because, over time, a useful site will (presumably) get social mentions, links, direct traffic, etc.

Alexa says [alexa.com...] that he is lying quite a bit about the 3% bounce rate, they say it's 50%. I checked because it seemed very odd to have a 3% bounce rate. I understand that Alexa is not that accurate but 3 and 50 are quite different.

I also laugh at his conclusion: he used feeds (67,000 according to Google), 100% identical and the fact that he got slapped after 5 Pandas is supposed to prove his thesis. Worth noting: He got slapped on Sept 23rd around 4-5 days before Panda, as far as we know.

Very useful sites can have even 99% of traffic from search engines, some sites are just not promotable otherwise.

When 90% of product and buying research is done through the search engines, having 90% of one's traffic from there is entirely reasonable.

3% bounce rate

..typo ... 30% would be good, but not sure of the value in this article. Maybe I'm missing something ( i often do ). Good responses though to it here. Clearly the site lacked the right foundations to get any traction upon which it could scale.

This is exactly the kind of site Google should be slapping down. Glad to see it worked in this case.

Honestly I don't understand why it's so hard to weed sites like this out. It seems like it should be pretty simple.

he also mentioned that his traffic was going up and so was his sales. so presumably his site was useful to people. more and more people were visiting it, and using it to get what they wanted.

No, the visitors had to visit the website in order to get somewhere else. His website was not helpful it was an obstacle, a hurdle people had to overcome to get to where they really wanted to go. Now Google is probably taking his visitors directly to their goal.

No, the visitors had to visit the website in order to get somewhere else.

I can only imagine that people defending these spammy sites have similar sites themselves, otherwise it's crystal clear to most of us that they're redundant sites that shouldn't pollute a search engine index. If people want Groupon content, they should end up on the Groupon web site, not someone simply copying their content (with permission, or not).

Is this actually a Panda slapping or just a run of the mill affiliate site doing some dodgy stuff getting caught?

Regurgitated content + cloaked affiliate links + 60k pages of thin content. Smells more like he pushed the boat out with a crap site - probably annoyed a few competiting sites and got spam reported a bunch of times. The fact that he dodged a few Panda updates is a red herring.

Manual penalty IMO. Nothing to do with Panda.

just because you copy something doesnt mean that its a spammy site.

im reminded of a site that Twitter purchased a while back for millions (i cant remember the exact amount, but it was enough to buy a very, very big boat). all it did was collect together all your favourite tweets into one place. (was it called tweetdeck?)

so all the info was coming straight from twitter. nothing was created. it was just all collected together in one place. and twitter thought it was so great that they bought it out for a small fortune.

now, im not suggesting that his coupon site was as good as that, because that would be silly. i realise that tweetdeck is a lot more professional. but what is the real difference between the two sites? one collects all the tweets into one place, and one collects all the coupons into one place. but one is dismissed as spam, and the other is worth 20 million quid.

probably one depends on Google while the other doesn't...
What is spam to google might not be for Twitter...

He knew the risks going in, and made some money while it lasted. Hard to get worked up about it (since it wasn't MY content he was churning and burning)

If Google had implemented webmaster profiling he'd have risked all of his websites, however many he has, by being naughty on just one. Perhaps that's next?

I own more than one but you can count them on one hand. I'm not sure I'd like to worry about one site taking out the rest, it's too easy for a machine to get it wrong and the effects would be devastating, but for obvious cases like this one... is it time? (is it already happening?)