As someone mentioned, it IS like a great gray penalty,

Yes, it seems like my site had a penalty lifted as well. I haven't worked on it much, so I think it is more of an algo change that no longer deemed my site penalty inducing rather than anything I did to resurrect it.

Anyway, it is cool to have a good little workhorse site back in the serps.

I wonder if they're testing on relatively small sets of data. As I mentioned earlier, I was seeing significant changes on Friday and Saturday, but GA graphs since then are almost in lockstep with graphs from a week or two ago. At the same time, MikeNoLastName and Jane_Doe are reporting big changes. It sure doesn't sound like a full-blown update is in progress (especially with the lack of discussion here or on the search-engine news sites). FWIW, Mozcast is showing 61 degrees for Monday. Unless the Mozcast thermometer has suddenly changed from Fahrenheit to Celsius, Monday's search weather was pretty mild.

We've still had roller coaster traffic the past few days. Friday and Saturday looked good with some hourly fluctuations. Sunday started good but took a nose dive as the day went on until it ended up in the gutter. Monday was "average" most of the day but started a slight uptick in the later evening hours.

This morning I awoke to traffic that was 30% higher than usual - imagine my excitement! Pageviews per user was incredibly strong and it was all due to a strong increase in Google referrals. No major keyword shifts that I could find, just across the board increase in traffic. However, as the day is moving on that number is slowly dropping back to normal levels.

It was fun while it lasted. I guess I won't be writing my "How I Recovered From Panda" post just yet :)

I haven't seen an ounce of change in my stats or rankings in months.
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[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:22 pm (utc) on Jul 16, 2013]
[edit reason] removed niche [/edit]

I started seeing positive changes on Saturday but I can also see that serps aren't stable yet. They kept changing since Saturday - mostly in my favor.

My traffic is still up, hopefully to stay but I now expect anything from Google. There was this little spammy site that started to rank over mine months ago and it disappeared on Saturday-Sunday but today it's back and ranking high above mine and above other better quality sites.

When I was initially hit on June 29 2012, I assumed it was because of one technical mistake I did so I filled reconsideration request via GWT and received an answer that there was no penalty associated with my domain. So I am not sure that it's some kind of penalty or an algo change.

When G says no penalty, I take it to mean no manual penalty or you site hasn't been kicked out of the index altogther by the algo. Other than that, whether you want to call it a lack of ranking point or an across the board penalty is a matter of semantics to me.

@Jane_Doe: agree. We'll see how it goes.

I haven't seen an ounce of change in my stats or rankings in months.

I would largely go along with that (UK service site).
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[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:21 pm (utc) on Jul 16, 2013]
[edit reason] generalized niche [/edit]

Daily traffic from organic google source continues to climb on both sites.

Site 1 is back at the same level as in 2012.

Site 2 is still down a bit from 2012, still about 29% down.

Serp positions still holding today.

Mod's note: Let's keep niche areas generic.

The Google Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com] asks for no mention of specific market niche....

Please avoid mentioning your specific product or market. You are are welcome to use generalized descriptions, such as "widgets", "highly competitive", "local niche market" and so on.

For the purposes of this update thread, a little more specificity, like country and broad areas like ecommerce, information, etc, might be helpful... but anything that looks like it might be posted to attract linking partners will be deleted. Thanks.

No changes here, or any sign of any rolling update

UK - info site

No change here either - Information site, US.

Given the timeframe, I'm thinking the big change is over. Mozcast shows two sets of what look like big changes since late June. Matt said something like the week after July 4th, that would be the 14th at the latest. I suspect Google / Matt might mention something in the next week or two, stating that the new algo is now live.

It's typical for the winners remain silent, so I'm not surprised with the lack of that feedback here.

@BillyS
even though there have been a couple of USA reports I don't see any 'Panda' changes, just the continued march of US brands and mutiple listing of the same domains.

Feedback from Google - thats the past not the present or future ! sorry @reseller

It's typical for the winners remain silent, so I'm not surprised with the lack of that feedback here.

It's also typical for the losers to complain loudly and angrily. We haven't seen much of that yet.

Congratulations to those who have recovered, no changes here (most visitors google uk and google fr)

I was always under the impression that significant changes are not made to the serps between about midday Friday and 9.00 monday (california time) so surprised the reported changes seem to have taken place on a Saturday. Do they now make weekend updates?

It would be useful to know more about the sites affected eg approx traffic levels ( ie is increase from 100 to 150 or 100000 to 150000 visitors) and whether all google regions are affected or just US for example)

Cheers

Massive crawl seems to have started for the site since Monday. Something is brewing.

>It would be useful to know more about the sites affected eg approx traffic levels ( ie is increase from 100 to 150 or 100000 to 150000 visitors) and whether all google regions are affected or just US for example) <

I can only speak for US region. Although I once searched via a proxy server on an Eastern European G and did not see us in relative new positions to our competitors there yet.

The claims at this point are more on keyword SERP positions, more than traffic. Most of the changes WE have seen, are from 500-1000+ (i.e. nowhere) to the top 100. Which we all know are of minimal traffic use below pages 1-3. For example we have seen our top niche keywords which we have tracked for over 3 years, in the last 3 days, go from
A: 1000+ -> 39 b: 22 -> 5 c: 612-> 55 d:1000+ -> 36 e:722 -> 9 f:225-> 25 along with a bunch that went from 30ish to 5-ish in the last 3 days. In addition we have seen a few which jumped up to 20-30 on the first day, continue to climb into the top 10 over the next couple of days.

Again, one would not EXPECT that much additional traffic, on the main keywords with these new placements, but our long-tail seems to have increased as well. Plus considering it took us over 2 years and however many versions of Panda to gradually drop to here, we see this as monumental movement to happen so quickly. Assuming it takes time and database iterations for other backlinking sites and our own internal links to get re-factored back in. I am not expecting an all-at-once recovery.

It's a little early with all the lag-time on the WMTs and such to get a lot of data, but should have more in the next few days. 2 days of data from G-WMT shows an increase in unique visitor traffic from G alone from 150 visitors-per-day last week to just over 500 vpd compared to the same days last week. GWMT shows us appearing in 10K impressions on 7/15 vs 1/3 of that the prior Monday and getting 3X the clicks from them. Our total volume from all sources is substantially more than that as we have moved from a G-centric model to a much more rounded one in the last couple years after losing G's authority-vote in Panda 1.0. Maybe it IS in fact something that WE did (see earlier posts) versus an algorithm change, I never made a claim either way.
I also see new additional related short and long-tail keywords popping up in the top of the WMT queries list, although the traffic does not seem to be what I would expect. I get the exact same search results every time I and my associates try it from many various IPs, computers, etc. but I'm not ruling out that perhaps not EVERYONE is getting the same SERP results, although the increased click-thrus would suggest such.

Thanks for the explanation, I think we are in the same niche although not allowed to mention it. I don't use GWMT very often so not sure how to get all the numbers but I can see our main site (english language version) increased from 60k impressions maximum for any day in the last 6 weeks to 75k impressions on 15/7

Interestingly the change was slightly more marked (from 27k impressions to 35k impressions) in the French version of the same site, on the same date.

Traffic on both versions up a few % (much less than the 25-30% increase in impressions) so nothing to get too excited about, still a long way to go to recover from pre-panda/penguin reductions, but good to see things nudging in the right direction for once.

Still slowly loosing traffic every week - US Information site.

@BillyS, just to add my two cents:

With this latest change, beginning thursday 11 july, we saw an uptic in traffic, folow by massive dip down on saturday till monday.
Thursday starts to look even better, we gained back a lot of keywords that we lost with panda 1. Traffic on thursday was very good with many sales.
Unfortunately Google seems to Switch between two sets of data. One good one very worse. We have lots of foreign traffic and one page views till today.
Some keywords are more worse than before, brands took over the first page of results with Long listing of widgets in a row ( what i never guessed that this is a good UE because it looks a little bit spammy, but it's a brand and brands can do everything ).
At least Amazon is not dominating every query anymore what imo is the best thing that comes along with this update.

Lack of discussion: We are in Germany and i think 70% are on vacation. The rest maybe not interested in Googles super updates anymore.


Sidequestion:

I noticed that with Google payed Shopping almost all offers are very expensive. Most of them are from big brands and are 400% above normal
price levels with enormous shipping costs. Who are your thoughts about this? Are poeple going to buy there or are they looking for alternatives in organic results?
Also i see brands taking over first reslut page complete because they are on organics and have the money to have the highest bid price in google shopping. I sometimes see only on brands in go* shop* and then 2-3 organics results from same brand. Ist realy hard to compete in this way.

@MIW - I'm seeing similar fluctuations. While the seasonal traffic is starting to pick up, overall, since May Day 2010, despite all my thrashing about, traffic has been in a never ending, slow decline.

I am finding good alternative traffic with facebook posts....with over 1,000 page likes and extended reach, it's starting to send meaningful numbers of buyers to my site. Google's watching for fresh meat too!

seen very big changes - clearly Panda recovery. Dramatic change on the 12th and sustained since. Average rank position, # of unique search terms driving to site both improved as well.

Has anyone started naming this yet? Grey Panda?

Panda-lite? Diet Panda? Panda on liposuction?
Depandalization? Pandamonium?

Major improvements here starting on the 12th and leveling off today. Traffic is now about 5% higher than 2012 after being 25% lower all year long.

Panda Cub update :)

I'm still seeing hourly roller coasters. About every 6-12 hours things shift.

For the first time today I saw weird keyword referrals. I track our usual top 20 search referral terms. Every day they are about the same, just shifting positions. For HALF of today (so far) there were terms that aren't usually there. Valid -yes - they landed on pages that satisfied those queries - but not our norm.

Pageviews per user was WAY down during the low period this morning but picked back up as Google referrals picked up through the day. Referrals are again wearing off now this evening and sure enough, pageviews per user are dropping. Is this the "zombie" traffic that others have referred to in the past? This is the first time that I've really noticed this sort of activity on our site.

Also, our gbot spidering is finally down today. Doesn't mean it won't pick back up but we had over a week of intense spidering. Another first.

I can't say whether we've been hit or helped by this update since things keep shifting! Yesterday looked like we'd had a boost, today looks like a bust. Same pattern the days before.

and the location of you Panda Cub people ? need this to ensure not all usa based !

Holly molly.
I had a site that was ranking on page #1.. That was before Panda beat it down like a sick dog last year and I had the "unnatural notice" penalty. It took me from page 1 to a special spot on page 20+.

Just checked US results today and we're now ranking for our two best keywords again at the top of page 2.

Whatever is going on, I am seeing much better results.. (not biased at all :P). Fingers crossed this stays.

Only things I've done so far.
> Uploaded disavow list and Submitted re-inclusion request multiple times (always resulted in a rejection).

No feedback from Google spam team.. Did someone switch the flick and unblock a bunch of gray/legit sites that were crushed in the past 12 months?

@ALL ,

guys please add your location and typ of site (ecom, informational, affiliate ) to your post, that makes us have a better picture of wqhat is going on!

THANX

Noticing a decrease today in the spidering on my site (ecomm, UK)
Started the 4th and reached a peak on the 12th slowly decreasing now and at a low today, the 18th

I'm seeing no change in search traffic, but there's much shuffling in the SERPS. One page in particular has climbed from obscurity (page 15-20) up to the top of page 2 over the last few weeks, and is now fluttering round pages 3 and 4.

Low(-ish) traffic UK based service and e-commerce site.