With the knowledge graph continuing to gain ground, I am surprised to see how many people are not taking advantage of freebase.

wth - where'd my post just go?

I was confused at first too as this thread is titled strangely and the link to the very old post from Google blog mashed in with the recent tweet adds to the problem. But anyway, I'm seeing traffic increase so far.

realmaverick, that really wasn't my point.

Google panda and penguin are news because google wants it to be news. We don't call every other update news because we just consider it regular algo updates made by google..which is what panda and penguin are. penguin and panda are here to stay and panda has now been here for over a year and yet here we are all making a big stink about every refresh like its a major event.

What everyone else has put aside are all the hundreds of other factors that take a part in producing the serp's. We only hear about panda and penguin now so every webmaster who does not rank well is only attributing their failures to these 2 updates when realistically many have nothing to do with panda and penguin. "oh my site lost rankings, must be panda"


This is the exact definition of FUD (fear uncertainty doubt) and google is loving every minute of it.

I have a strong feeling that when google refreshes panda/penguin they are not just refreshing those algo factors, but they are also refreshing the serp's, just like how they used to do before panda/penguin. So natural ranking gains and losses are thrown into the mess and any change is blamed on panda when they might not be the case at all.

I am confused.

Exactly.

The niche I follow had the multi-same or cross domain results cleared in the past 12 hrs, most news and dominant brands demoted(which were irrelevant anyway), .co.uk .com.au and similar demoted in .com finally. That's based on top 20 and the serp in particular look pretty clean so far with small exceptions, but way better than before. One thing that strikes me is that after a little BL research I noticed anchor text power increased similar to 2 years ago.

Another thing I have noticed is a -20 penalty I had 1 month ago which disappeared as of today but few other of my competition got. I wonder what that might be.

[edited by: Donna at 4:46 pm (utc) on Sep 19, 2012]

I sure wish Panda would eliminate some of the junk press releases in the financial sector. At least I am getting more traffic from people jumping to page 2 or 3 to get past them.

I was confused at first too as this thread is titled strangely and the link to the very old post from Google blog mashed in with the recent tweet adds to the problem. But anyway, I'm seeing traffic increase so far.

Brett updated the OP to add "from previous blogpost". When I first logged in this morning, the thread title and that paragraph led me to believe there was a larger update that happened overnight.

Just to clarify, that paragraph is from the first Panda back in February of last year. 11.8% of queries were not affected by this most recent Panda update.

Yes, that bit on the homepage was (and still is) rather misleading... if a drop in forum visits follows, there've probably been some heart attacks.

@crobb , pretty sure something happened overnight

@crobb , pretty sure something happened overnight

Yeah, the small Panda refresh that they announced yesterday. Or possibly other algorithmic tweaks. Donna, did you see changes in your niche besides the -20 that you reported?

pretty sure something happened overnight

It's probably just the flux they are referring to over the next few days.

Exactly.

(I didn't mean I was confused by Google; I was confused by this post)

@crobb like I said , all branches of brand.com( .uk .au etc.) got pushed way back, wikki still holds 2 spots in top 20, but most press stuff are gone with the exception of one and anchor text seems to be tuned up again. The shuffle for 5 main kws I follow seems to be around the 25% in top 20.

Here is the funny thing I just noticed 2 of the kws were competing with play.google which is pushed -20 as of today too.

The current front page 'post highlights' are misleading in the extreme and the alterations to the first post in this thread confusing to the casual viewer without knowledge of the update history - someone might like to clarify them...

I had to do a double take when I read the headline. I knew about the panda refresh from the other day, but agree that the other quote from a year ago was misleading. I nearly had a heart attack in fact until I followed the link and saw the date.

For those who are confused about that original Panda post, whenever there is a refresh, they always point to that original Panda 1.0 article.

For THIS update, 0.7% of queries are/will be affected.

There was a lot of change in some SERP areas in the days preceding the Panda Update. In fact, there have been, pretty much in a row, some major changes which could be taken together and looked at a s one "big" update with several different parts. I think that's what "Bacon" is intended to refer to.

For more information on other, earlier churn the the search rankings, see Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2012 [webmasterworld.com]

The way Google has been operating lately, it seems like Regina Dugan [fedscoop.com...] must have brought over some tactics from DARPA, the same secretive DOD branch that brought the the flying robotic hummingbird and the rather frightening robodog as well as trillions of dollars worth of top secret stuff you and I will never know about.

They seem to be operating less like a company and more like a secretive government. I'm not sure which is a bigger secret Roswell or Google Panda?

BTW - you'd think that a group that can make this: [youtube.com ] might be able to build a better search engine than what they've got now.

I am confused.

Me, too. I get the intent Tedster's referring to, but I find it messy to give a bunch of changes an update name when past named updates were more defined and discrete.

I am confused.

I was on holiday in Florida once and they gave out a hurricane warning for little more than a warm breeze, thats what this feels like. A warm breeze update.

A welcome change to normal updates. Micro surgery of the results not the meat cleaver!

I too am confused by the existence of this thread, we have the standard Google day to day changes, plus the special update to reduce domain domination of the SERPs plus a new iteration of Panda appearing at around the same time.

Giving it a seperate update name and starting a new thread here because of that is really only going to cause more confusion amongst less experienced SEOs.

We have seen way too many changes recently - not to call this a cumulative update and finally give it a name. I saw two big serps that are 100% different since last week- all top ten have changes - that's an update.

Brett, I assume when you say big SERPs you are talking about something which is competitive and has been fairly stable over the past few months.

Have you seen significant brands being affected?

Our company's sites were all hit in a minor way. Minor meaning that we went 1-3 positions down, although the effect on cash won't be minor at all. What I find interesting is that we actually pay for very high quality content from people who write for magazines and sites like examiner. What is also worth noting is that most of our sites are the only affiliate websites left in the top 10 for the highly competitive keywords in the spaces we are targeting. Everyone else has been flushed during the past year or so.

It seems to me that in our case Google is targeting the business model, not the types of content or even link building practices.

What I find interesting is that we actually pay for very high quality content from people who write for magazines and sites like examiner.

It looks like good content is not important. Our main site with great content (well written and frequent updates) lost a few positions with this refresh. One of our old crappy sites (low quality content and not updated since more than a year) gained traffic.

Quality and original content is the best way now..need to recheck content & update them as soon as possible

Quality and original content is the best way now..need to recheck content & update them as soon as possible

This is not entirely true, yet. We've been reporting for months that scrapers are outranking the originals (some of those originals are 8 to 10 years old). Furthermore, brand new websites are ranking with spammy foreign backlinks. In the financial sector, on some competitive phrases, up to 30% of the top 100 serps are spammy press releases designed to send traffic to websites that aren't ranking. This is not quality. Your statement may be true of Google's intent, but their efforts have failed. The number 1 site in my sector in the U.S. was registered just three months ago and ranks entirely on .ru and other foreign backlinks.

We have seen way too many changes recently - not to call this a cumulative update and finally give it a name. I saw two big serps that are 100% different since last week- all top ten have changes - that's an update.

I am seeing old sites of mine that have been 301'd months ago showing up in the serps starting yesterday.

I also see the main site that these were 301'd to drop slightly so will have to wait till they are done stirring the pot to see what this thing will look like. It "appears", at least in my case that the 301's are not included in the sauce while they roll this out. That can make a huge difference to the final results.

I've been battling Panda since June. Revamped the site, the layout - even created a tool to find duplicate phrases and sentences across the whole site.

What I found was that any page that had more than 80% similar content and over 150 words received no traffic.

Strangely, groups of pages with very thin content (too thin for sure!) just 50 words or less and 80%+ duplicated across the site ranked really highly in the serps. Which makes no sense to me at all, since it should have been spotted easily by the white stinky bear. The serps in my industry are dominated by spammers and every panda update seems to push these long term spammers higher! Including the 18th Sept update. I saw only one other site getting whacked out.

Seems I just can't get my site to rank again even with fresh articles and well written content. Talk about mind F***.

You know for once, I really wish Pandas were extinct. I've been to China, they're not cute and they smell. A lot like this algorithm.

What I found was that any page that had more than 80% similar content and over 150 words received no traffic.

Thanks for sharing those numbers - sharp analysis. The idea that Panda needs a certain minimum amount of content to rate a page is definitely something to chew on.

A vocabulary note. Google uses the phrase "thin content" to refer to affiliate content that is basically just reprinted from the parent company's feed with little or no added value. So thin content can still be a lot of words on the page.

They use phrase "shallow content" to refer to content of any length that just doesn't say much that is of real value to the reader. Shallow content is bread and butter of content farms - and all manner of MFA websites.

I'd say what you've identified is simply "short content" and there are all kinds of legitimate reasons for some URLs to have short content. Serving short informational notes in a pop-up window is one obvious example. Sometime a point-of-sale page just doesn't need any "padding" either, so don't risk turning a page into shallow content by adding fluff copy.

[edited by: tedster at 1:47 am (utc) on Sep 21, 2012]

Thanks Tedster - I didn't know that!

The analysis is based on traffic from the last 3 months. I compare sentences and phrases larger than 20 characters across the whole site. It's not a perfect process, but I created it to be quick.

It had occurred to me that Google could be using "semantic analysis" of sentences - which basically means if a sentence has the same meaning, then statistically they are the same. Semantic checking would mean the end of all sites that have multiple pages targeting similar keywords. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to write that =)

I hope Panda isn't using that!

Google could be using "semantic analysis" of sentences

For about a year, that's where I think Google is heading. They are trying to figure out the meaning behind every search and show what could be good for the searcher.
It is called 'semantic analysis' and the main challenge is the accuracy as compared to serving direct information (based on keywords).
While trying to invent this new wheel forgetting that people have different tastes, they leave many dead bodies on the Internet street..