One thing im noticing today will almost a full business day over is not only is traffic 50% down but the traffic im gettin is rubbish, all the keywords that are taking people to my site do not match the page they are hitting. Bizzare.

well, in february , my site gained about 20% then in july another 30% google traffic gain, and now i'm back to the traffic i had in february... Anybody experiencing something like this?

Matt Cutts has either mocked on webmasters by saying that its a minor Update or he is simply a liar.

I have noticed big changes for some major websites in India as well.

1. I read movie reviews online before watching a movie. For Indian movies, the sites which are showing up in the results are all new. None of the established (even big websites) websites which deal with movie reviews only, show up here. I checked 4 pages, almost all results are new.

2. I have noticed that one major financial portal in India (Moneycontrol.com owned by CNBC TV18) is also not ranking for some long keywords. They are doing pretty good in India. I checked their Alexa rank (i know, many people don't believe in it) as well, its showing a drop over the last few days.

Quite the opposite of Cutts, Singhal at Google said this was not a minor update. In other words 10% of websites were affected. I guess when you start adding up the various Panda’s, Google is telling at least 50% of the web to write new content to please them.

Hmm .. running B2B industry news sites, we were hit badly, very badly by the original panda update.

However, traffic suddenly recovered on the 25th July and has improved ever since. Weekly average visitor volumes are close to being back to April levels overall.

The caveat is that our ecommerce research store visitors are still only 1/2 - 3/5 of the April volume though we have seen very small, weekly improvements in the last 2 updates (excluding the terrible last week of Sept changes that hit everything by 80%).

Have we made significant changes? .. not really. We have continued to clean up small things, do more tagging and continue to tweak site performance. But, generally, we see no relation between site changes and Panda. Each site shares common code so we have been able to test radical changes on one site vs non on another. And little effect.

Ho hum .. the mysteries of Google :)

@chalkywhite
I have exactly the same for my own website. Some of the keywords are not even remotely related to the content or the anchor text linking into the pages.

As for the volume of traffic, well I don't actually remember a time when it was this low.
Thankfully our income doesn't depend on the site!

@outland88

"Singhal at Google said this was not a minor update."

Where did you read that?

Thanks.

Wow, what a nightmare. My bounce rate for those few referrals I get is through the roof. I hope the fix this soon, even Adwords ads are more relevant than organic.

Did Google go through their "scientific" test this time around or what?

I see a few top sites (many employees, ad buys etc) on top and then spam. The middle ones with very good sites sites but relying more on SEs /"freeloaders" are gone, maybe Google trying to send a message to improve or whatever they call it internally?

@besnette

1. A complete redesign.
2. Rewrite on about 100 pages.
3. Adjustments to internal and external linking strategy (>20k links).
4. Sprites, image optimization, palatalization of downloads, content delivery network, SQL tune-up, new servers (much faster), image compression, work on speed.
5. New top, bottom, left and right navigations with emphasis on removing non core content.
6. iFrame of all calls-to-action.
7. Rework on sitemaps and directory pages.
8. Integration of Google+, Twitter (already had FB), FB comments and Disqus comments.
9. More youtube integration. More video.
10. Not hyper-linking from reference pages.

and hundreds of other things. We're talking 8 people full-time for 8 months working to make the site better for the users.

Let's wait to see if it holds for a few more days.

Looking at the alexa score for ehow I'm guessing they don't think it was a minor update either.

Anybody experiencing something like this?

Sounds like the classic scraper promotion many were complaining about and now you've been caught.

Sounds like the classic scraper promotion many were complaining about and now you've been caught.

So why would Google consciously promote scrappers for 8 months? Assuming that sites hurt this week are scrappers of course. I don't know, but I'll take your word for it.

@Whitey

We're NOT really trying to optimize our way out of Panda anymore. We're 100% about making a better Website. In this way Panda has been good for us. It has refocused our efforts.

I'm not convinced that we're out of the woods yet. At mid day Monday EST we're running 2.33 times more SEO traffic (~10k session starts) than our trend for the last 8 Monday's up to 1:58pm. We're tracking similar to Friday. We log all session starts and page visits to a SQL server and I've confirmed that the traffic is coming from thousands of search terms and mostly from Google.

Let's wait and see. It looks like most people were hurt by this update. It really makes me sad. Having no control makes me uneasy.

My site was hit with Panda 1 and hasnt recovered with any of the subsequent ones and then over the weekend (starting fri night) has seen a significant improvement in many of the target keywords.

It would be hard to post what i have done over the six months as it would prob be easier to post what i havent done. I will be ecstatic if it is still like this at the end of the week though

@DirigoDev - I am thrilled to see that you recovered, and I hope it sticks. I also really appreciate your thorough list of some of the big things you have done.

Please keep us posted!

So why would Google consciously promote scrappers for 8 months?

No idea whatsoever however menntarra 34 is a self-confessed scraper therefore it fits in nicely with my idea that his demotion is that the Panda may be starting/posssibly continuing, to do what it was originally supposed to do...if only I knew what that were more precisely:-)

The Plex is just loving all our ideas as we try and work things out, I bet they're seeing posts and saying "Hey, you've not got a clue" or equally "Wow, they're homing in rapidly, let's start a book (betting term)."

Through all these Panda updates I have been constructing a new widget site and it has, so far, sailed through them all however it is seriously the best site I have ever built and easily my global trade's best site even though I say it myself.

Trying to keep up the will to add more pages can be extremely frustrating at times though.

One specific site's url channel that has taken a big hit for me in the last few days has been a WordPress blog. Has anyone else experienced that?

plummeting organic traffic aside, we're seeing a 26% increase in adwords cpc since Oct 14 (search network). Not enough time for a trend clearly, but we're seeing the highest cpc rates ever on our adwords buy.

anyone else seeing something similar?

Reseller, the message was in one of the various thread links and might have been in a link from the link. I could have sworn it was a name like Amit Singhal or something like that. Whoever it was made it quite clear they didn’t classify this as a minor update at Google.

The thing best to remember is Cutts said there would be changes in the results for a couple of weeks or it would take that long to settle down.

My interpretation was you'd be a little crazy to pull the trigger with major changes for thirty days. On the other hand I make changes regardless of the holidays if they need doing. I do absolutely nothing for Google. I only do it if it creates more business.

@HuskyPup
Well, to tell everybody the truth , my site is not a BAD scraper... My site is little similar to google, i summarize a lot of stuff about a specific topic, and i make it very easy , and fast to find the content people looking for... So i can say, that my site IS somewhat a search engine. But none of my content is stolen. All my results drive the visitor to the actual content... To tell you the truth, i receive letters day by day from webmasters to include their sites into my search as well... Anyway, so my site is not an unethical scraper. I had to state this to make things clear.

There is nothing "ethical" about using other people's content without their permission obtained in advance..a link to them is not the same as having their permission..scraper sites frequently out rank the sites that they scrape..and it is a lazy and unethical way to run a site..it makes many honest webmasters have to waste their time with DMCAs...There are no "good" scrapers..only content thieves..

That would be Google then.

Its so disheartening when you have scrapper sites out rank you for your hard work.

It's scraper. One p.

That would be Google then.

Anyone can stop Google or any true search engine displaying their pages or snippets or images in cache or serps via robots txt and or htaccess and "no cache"..

robots txt and htaccess and "no cache" cannot stop the "copy and paste" of a scraper thief..

Would be nice if a side effect of Panda was to clean out more of them eventually..:))

@DirigoDev - hope you're still holding. Similar story and tactics on a variation for sites I observe.

The key thing I think is to push this work to the next level. All sites I observe that have done minimal work have slipped in the last update. Those that have worked as hard as yourself ( gee - your team have put a lot of effort in ), have seen dividends.

This update must have been at a big personal cost to a lot of folks - the implications are not good. But I do hope others can have the confidence to win from your experience and generosity of sharing.

For those not out of this, waiting this out is not a good way to go. Take DirigoDev's ( and others ) example of what it takes. And it's still not over - many ongoing improvements are required. But hopefully you'll be stronger for it. Just keep the focus, be positive and share your experiences with as much analysis as possible.

Old site (untouched for years) panda 2.5 > 70% traffic increase on usual
Old site (untouched for years) panda 2.5.1 > traffic reduced to just 20% increase as per panda 2.5

Bread n butter site panda 2.5 30% traffic decrease on usual stats
Bread n butter site panda 2.5.1 25% traffic decrease on usual stats

So since 13th Oct old site has taken a bit of a dive but still well up on 2.5 panda traffic. Bread and butter work hard every day on site, still at 25% less traffic since 2.5. Oct 13th did improve things very slightly (up 5%).

I like the throttle idea as when I look at graphs for my core domain, traffic seems to be down by virtually the same percentage when i compare like for like pre and post panda days. It's almost like an engineer said "and this domain shall no longer receive traffic to these types of pages"

@menntarra 34

If you are using you own wording to describe the content of the sites you are linking to then this isn't necessarily scraping. Depends on how you go about doing it.

If you are lifting exact text from another article/page without prior permission then yes this is scraping and could be also copyright infringement depending on if it would constitute as fair use or not.

[edited by: arubicus at 10:28 pm (utc) on Oct 17, 2011]

"and this domain shall no longer receive traffic to these types of pages"

Absolutely - and it's not the only traffic control applied.

The other element that seems clear to me is the restriction of keyword types and keyword combinations. It's as if an engineer said " you don't get those keywords, unless you are a particular type of site" . Maybe to pass this test you have to be a brand or have a very high " quality score". It's not as simple as traditional SEO any more.

There's more to this Panda than we have been thinking and i think volume keyword verticals have been targeted.

It's as if an engineer said " you don't get those keywords, unless you are a particular type of site"

What part of "decision tree" ( Mr Panda's speciality ) does that not fit ?..This has been blindingly obvious from the start of Panda.

Anyone who has not been thinking that has not been paying attention.

Programmers don't seem to be having problems as much as the marketeers do with Panda..think like a programmer ( that is what "engineer" means in the "Google context" ) and what is going on re a huge number of sites "affected" makes perfect sense..

And stop getting the meaning of "branding" so wrong by taking it so literally..it does not mean that "ford.com" will outrank you for "Model T"..nor that to compete with them for that term that you need to use adwords.

I don't think this particular push is complete, today I'm seeing our main site halfway down the page for the exact name search and its a very unique name so its not subject to real comopetition. We are getting out ranked by our facebook page right now, other volume terms are much the same - down by a few places on each one. We are still out of the index for one competitive term and we had only made it to page 3 but we had been there for a while.