5/1/2012 marked a large drop in total indexed pages. On April 29 it was 2,500 indexed. May 1st it dropped to less than half and is now at 966 indexed. No wonder sales suck.

It looks like this drop was due to Penguin (4/24/2012), not Panda (4/2011).

I just looked at my stats: 50% of G referrers come from page 5,7,9 and 10 (#52,#76,#91 and #101). Never seen visitors come from pages so "deep".

It's because G SERPs nowadays in places are showing so much garbage on the first few pages that it takes a person going to pages 5,7,9 and 10 to find what they're looking for. ;]

As per this update; we only made any some slight navigational changes to our site last month, and our site hasn't moved in the SERPs. Rankings are still there, however traffic is still dismal; so frustrating.

Is anyone taking into consideration the method of reporting visits as a possible cause of traffic dips and spikes with no conversion?

What I mean is that I've noticed in some cases, Statcounter is counting, say, 3 visits from the same visitor as 3 unique visitors. This usually happens on iOS 6 or the new version of Safari (and probably other SSL sources, but just haven't taken the time to notice). I've also noticed that GA tends to under report the same visits.

@ diberry - but are those deep searchers converting? It almost seems like there's a robot doing the digging rather than a human. I can't imagine a human going through that much trouble.

No, but none of my Google traffic EVER converted much on this particular domain, even when Google ranked me #1 for all sorts of things. G performs much better on my other sites, so it's just something about this one - I've never figured it out. So I don't know if it's bots or real searchers in these cases.

@ diberry - but are those deep searchers converting? It almost seems like there's a robot doing the digging rather than a human. I can't imagine a human going through that much trouble.

They seems real visitors (a lot of pageviews and interaction).
But... conversions = 0 (zero).

Zero conversions, zero sales/signups. I've fired a webmaster due to income losses. I hope to recover soon or I have to fire also the second... :(

I've started making mainly design changes to our site, it's been somewhat of a slow process over the last month as this is the time of year when all of our manufacturers release new products and we have to get them in the database to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.

Most of our changes so far have been to our product pages... Mainly taking out a lot of tables and using css and divs. Really cleaned it up visually in my opinion. We added breadcrumbs and schema tags and some html5 markup. Once the core pages are cleaned up menus are next. Not that the navigation is going to change that much, but css and ajax will be fun to play with and the thought of HTML5 and it's ability to display well on mobile devices will at least keep us from having to maintain two sets of code. (crossing fingers) I just dont want to push the new technology to quickly.. the bleeding edge is not where I want to be.

We've started to see some improvement in traffic and sales are picking up. Maybe google likes it better or maybe customers do. There's no real way to tell.

I just hope that Google doesn't slam us for adding large volumes of products... we are ecommerce and new widgets come out all the time. Unfortunately they also get discontinued a lot as well... normally I'd love to just delete those items from the database, but the sales team gets calls from customers looking for those products and if they cant easily see that it is no longer available then they spend too much time trying to hunt something down that's long gone... we do put a no index tag on those product pages.

Just hoping that Google really likes leaner cleaner layouts.

@ diberry - but are those deep searchers converting? It almost seems like there's a robot doing the digging rather than a human. I can't imagine a human going through that much trouble.

Some do convert, some not.

Just hoping that Google really likes leaner cleaner layouts.

I told this in a message before. I think panda is looking at html coding styles.

I just hope that Google doesn't slam us for adding large volumes of products... we are ecommerce and new widgets come out all the time. Unfortunately they also get discontinued a lot as well... normally I'd love to just delete those items from the database, but the sales team gets calls from customers looking for those products and if they cant easily see that it is no longer available then they spend too much time trying to hunt something down that's long gone... we do put a no index tag on those product pages.

We add a 100 products a week. No issue so far. But traffic remains constant. You should have think with 100 products a week there should be a little more traffic, but no, what we see is that keys are rotating between the different product categories.

->Does it work with "no index tag" by EOL -products?
We 404 them, but google still tries to crawl them even after 6 month now. I just put a 410- gone on that pages.
But google still uses an old not anymore existing page that had some links on it to crawl my page.

>@MikeNoLastName,
Can you describe the link that you removed from the navigation bar? Was it a keyword phrase that the page that you linked to is trying to rank for? Was it a url link? <

None of the above actually it was a page that we realized we were wasting PR juice on and didn't really need to RANK for at all. It was strictly there for the convenience of the user. It was linked along the lines of "widget maintenance" where widget would be a primary keyword for our site. It was linked twice on some of the pages with the other term being literally "freebies" because there were also links to a number of places you could get free stuff dealing with widgets, many of them local and national government sites. The other issue MAY have been that the page was on one of our other 2 closely related widget domains, which however is actually doing somewhat better than this one.
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As far as Indexed vs. Not Selected, we have ~2500 selected vs ~250 not-indexed and we still got majorly pandalized for all but 1 or 2 search terms.

Another thing I'm noticing on WMT is a lot of erroneous reports of URL Errors - Not found where the linked from turns out not to even link us, or where the "link" is merely a listed text URL (NO actual link)!
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But G still LOVES scraping our photos of pretty much unrelated content with titles NOT containing our key words, to the extent that 75% of our visitors supposedly comes from them. Photos like "Joe Celebrity" (with his widget) or "plains of the Serengeti" (where a widget was spotted). You can't put "widget" into the title and description of every photo or you wind up getting over-optimized penalized! What to do?

We add a 100 products a week. No issue so far. But traffic remains constant. You should have think with 100 products a week there should be a little more traffic, but no, what we see is that keys are rotating between the different product categories.

This phenomenon is seen pretty much across the board, unless you run a well VC funded site. My annual "sine wave" pattern continues to evolve into a flat line. Throttling perhaps?

Throttling perhaps?

That's exactly what I'm thinking. No wonder many of our competitors have multiple sites... I guess in hopes of getting an overall average between them to equal out to what they used to have.

You should have think with 100 products a week there should be a little more traffic, but no, what we see is that keys are rotating between the different product categories.

@Martin Ice Web
You'd think with new products we'd be seeing a bit more traffic as well, but it's appearing to be the opposite.... at least for now.

I'm wondering if Google is having to digest our new page layout... hopefully we got it right the first time around... we designed for our customers first and foremost. I wonder if we've been put into some sort of sandbox for a bit..... traffic is way off, conversions way off... down nearly 20%

My website traffic increased by 30% on Nov 6, this is still over 2/3 less than it was a year ago but every little bit helps. I've been adding new pages and updating others last few months, otherwise not much else is new.

I'm glad to hear the success stories! As far as my efforts..

[webmasterworld.com...]

The new navigation cannibalized total page views. That’s the only reason I can come up with, or the fact related page links are no longer seen at the bottom of each page, but above the fold in the left side navigation. No changes in traffic with the most recent Panda. Only time will tell, but I have a feeling it’s good night Irene.

I've been seeing a tiny bit of movement on one of my sites since yesterday. I don't believe this site was hit by Panda (it was definitely hit by Penguin), but I just wanted to check here first to see if anyone else is seeing any movement.

(The movements are: a slow crawl from the third page to the bottom of the second for a competitive term, plus high rankings on some long tail phrases that are better matched to my pages than a lot of my Google traffic is.)

One of our hotel travel sites saw impressions drop by 50%; as a result click throughs are down too. This appeared to happen 6th Nov.

It would appear some of our 'better' pages are still ranking; but the low quality pages we know of have been hit.

Once these low quality pages are improved do I have to wait for a Google Panda update, or will the pages re-appear once the improvement has been made and indexed ?

good luck with your hotel travel site. Hasnt Google handed this niche to tripadvisor?

Neildt, if traffic dropped significantly on the 6th November it's a Panda hit and you will have to wait for another Panda refresh to see if your changes are the right ones.

Sounds like the quality bar in the travel sector is pretty high. Lots of stories of travel sites suffering.

Having just tried to book a holiday online I can vouch for how poor many of the travel sites are at helping me find what I want. Some have great search functionality but a limited range of holidays, some had the holidays I was after but terrible search. I bought from the one with the holiday I wanted but terrible search, however I phoned them up and made them do the work for me. Not a great user experience from the website point of view (and this is one of the biggest travel brands in the world!) but great customer service over the phone.

quality bar? i think you mean brand bar.

Panda Nov 5th (#21) average of 18% increase across 5 blogs.

Every Panda or Penguin update has increased traffic.

The biggest winners are the blogs with average post lengths over 2000 words and lots of internal linking

post lengths over 2000 words and lots of internal linking

Size might be OK - but quality of content is King. Google wants to see popularity of content, and not artificially driven. It wants real good content, linked to by real good authorities. Reputation rocks.

I am seeing in the forums where SEO "gurus" are proclaiming the "add the blog" feature. Maybe it's just a wave of wannabee Panda breakers, who knows. Recoveries remain either thin or hidden from view from lot's of "no tell" SEO's or "can't do" SEO's. Coming up with sensational content and UI is not an SEO's domain - it's a design and marketers job. Not too many designers and marketers here i suspect.

Nothing personal - btw - I was just generalising. [ I'm no SEO and I'm certainly waiting for the magic bullet re Panda - it's been a hard slog ].

Size might be OK - but quality of content is King. Google wants to see popularity of content, and not artificially driven. It wants real good content, linked to by real good authorities. Reputation rocks.

You might be talking about bing but not google, sincs panda/penguin in april i wouldn´t trust only one information site that google spills out in first 10 spots.

Reputation Rocks

In reference to "user ratings" in germany was just a big article that more than 30% of this are fakes. U can buy 100 positive "user comments" for your online shop with 50 bucks. If google relies on this then good night.

I just wonder how many times do we need to update our on page according to all these changes.

Natalia

[edited by: engine at 10:54 am (utc) on Nov 15, 2012]
[edit reason] No sig files, thanks, See WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

If google relies on this then good night.

I don't think they will - if they do, then it's only temporary while they settle things down.

is there an update going on right now, because i am observing changes

Either Panda 21 still rolling out or Panda 22 is in pipeline because too much traffic change is there since 14 Nov.