Im seeing some movement for my main keyword

Me too: it just dropped another 25 pages.

Just as an aside while we wait for the proverbial to hit the fan, I swear in the last couple of days the font size of the organic SERPS has gone up by a tiny amount. It looks very slightly different?

@Wilberforce, @themaninthejar

"To calculate average position, we take into account the top ranking URL from your site for a particular query. For example, if Jane’s query returns your site as the #1 and #2 result, and David’s query returns your site in positions #2 and #7, your average top position would be 1.5."

Not quite sure what to make of that...

I understand what this means - that if one query returns the same site as a two (or more) separate results, they will take only the top result of this query for their average calc.

So in their example, Jane searches for "widget" and www.example.com/about-widget is #1 and below this there is www.example.com/widget-cost at #2, then from this query they will only take position #1 towards average.

David also searches for "widget" and he gets www.example.com/widget-cost at #2 and www.example.com/widget-photos at #7. From this query they only take position #2 towards average.

Then average ranking would be calculated as #1 + #2 / 2 = 1.5 (assuming they use aritmetic average).

However, I observed that if you have for example 4 photos above the first organic ranking then the organic ranking would be recorded by Google as #5. The same is if you get mega sitelinks. The "second" organic listing is recorded by Google as position #8 (Google counts first listing + its 6 mega links as first 7 positions).

I swear in the last couple of days the font size of the organic SERPS has gone up by a tiny amount. It looks very slightly different?

Your getting "Google eyed" staring at the results so much its messing your vision.

Font size hasn't changed.

I get different font sizes based on the browser I'm using. Could be a setting on my end or Google. Haven't bothered to check, but there's a definite difference from one to the other.

LOL seoskunk. That would have happened a long, long time ago. Something is just slightly different. It might not even be the size, it might be the kerning.

Font size hasn't changed.

It certainly has for me and I have screen shots to prove it:-))

What difference it would make I have to wonder or are they trying to make things easier cross-resolutions?

Yes, they have changed the font size -- I noticed as well. As far as I can tell, only the URL in the SERPs is affected. It looks like it's been bolded, maybe? Or maybe the URL keyword highlighting is just a darker shade of green?

Looks stretched to me. I remember starting to see that last week sometime. Maybe earlier, but somewhere thereabouts.

is there an update happening? we're down maybe 40% or so since few hours ago.

Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of this patch, right about March 6 I've been posting missing keyword pictures. But yesterday 1 keyword came back.

I spoke with my internet marketer friend, and he told me basically that when google releases a patch he's hit with it from page 1 to 5, and he doesn't do anything about it, and it eventually "crawls" back up to page 2 and sometimes page 1.

I read many of your stories, and having that gloom fear that google will lurk in the background deploying patches and re-indexing instead of 1 big release is extremely unstable for people who depend on page 1 to live.

I guess I can be very negative about this patch, even though I'm still learning the ropes, but what I am starting to do now is building an email list for people to subscribe to, so that even though google releases patches that can shake websites, I'll still have my mailing list and market through there.

I guess if some of your keywords are being hauled back on the top 10 pages, and the patch is still being rolled out, maybe the keywords can push higher as the patch reaches its climax.

One can only hope, goodnight!

I am baffled by these updates. You hire journalists from Contently paying $3000 - $4000 per white paper they research and write for you to make sure users and Google are happy.

BUT BANG a new update comes and all the traffic is gone.

I am frustrated with Google. It is like trying to please a women who just wouldn't get pleased no matter what you do for her.

All our investment is gone in vain once again. We had hardly 12-13 backlinks and mainly from newspaper sites (forbes, CNN etc).

I just don't get how my site can get hit by this update.

FOR LOVE OF GOD I WAS GETTING 100 visitors a day not 10million visitors and they were all for long tail. Now we are back to 20 visitors a day with this new update.

How I am supposed to take that $4000 out of my pocket and pay to these journalists to create top notch content when every next update is as ridiculous as the old one.

I could understand if I was raking $50k-$100k a day (Google not liking the fact that I was making money) however I have no Adsense, no Ads. Just an informative site to get our brand name out there.

< moved from another location >


Hello,

We have noticed Google Panda updated last night because my website affected approx. 30% traffic drop as per Google Analytics.

However, previously Matt Cutts announced that Panda algorithm will update on today or March 18th.
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:15 am (utc) on Mar 15, 2013]

Not seeing any movement on 3 Panda impacted sites of ours.

Yesterday we saw a hughe drop and it seems like it continues this day. Up to now we see -44% less traffic. This traffic is untargeted. Bounce rate is thorught the roof. And it looks like we have an -30 penalty.
It begann point 5pm yesterday CET. Hope that this is only a glitch.
My guess is that the testing in the last weeks between two different sets has been the allready inplementeed panda in main algo. The one was bad ever. Yesterday they switched to the panda set fully.

ecom, germany

Seeing some horrible results for some key terms in our niche... not all have changed (yet maybe?), but those that did are even worse than before. I didn't think it was possible, but it looks like it is if they stay this way.

I'm seeing minor drops in my ecommerce sector. Oddly enough, the listings that bumped everyone down page one for many keywords are from Wikipedia and Amazon. I'm not really surprised about this as Google has a relationship with both.

Seeing changes here today in the UK.

I have seen that font size change on and off over the last few weeks. Seems to be there all the time now.

My main keyword took a slight nit, down 3 places. Im still on the first page tho, not too bad.

I have a site that was hit by Panda last April. In one way or another, it's been impacted by every refresh or update since. But nothing last night or today. I'm taking that to mean I'm either fully recovered, or it hasn't happened yet.

Very big ranking drops, last night, in sites that had fully recovered in Jan 22 Panda.

As usual we saw some big drops in traffic across a small subset of sites - the strange thing is, and this seems to have happened before on a Panda update, we noticed the traffic drops one week before the official announcement. So we actually saw the drops around the 7th, same as previous Panda runs we saw drops 7 days before the official date. Seems like it runs for a whole week at least, and only is officially announced / admitted at (or towards) the end of the run..?

@ethought:
I have a 10% traffic increase since the 8-9th March, so i feel too that the changes started a week before(i posted several times about this).

informational site, USA

Is anyone seeing movement on forum sites?

I've been seeing a lot of shuffling going on lately on one of my larger forums.

we noticed the traffic drops one week before the official announcement. So we actually saw the drops around the 7th, same as previous Panda runs we saw drops 7 days before the official date.

That seems pretty characteristic of all these Panda updates, with a big spike in visits the day before (Lots of visits across the board on my sites March 6th). I wonder if this will continue to be noticeable as it becomes less of a big, separate update.

Any US based sites seeing significant movement this morning?

Not so far.

Heard the BBC got slapped with an unnatural links notice though.

(!)

Heard the BBC got slapped with an unnatural links notice though

I just can't quite get my head around the fact that the BBC has a WMT account.

Whyever not? They presumably have people working on their site all the time.

BBC - Priceless

I was checking one of my pages - +999 penalty on it.

My site page was at position 997 and at position 998 and 999 were 2 BBC pages (quite relevant to the search query)

I think they got hit with the EMD as the keyword was in their page URL

Dodgy BBC SEO huh? - Well done G!