Ok, so this is beginning to piss me off now. It was just announced by Matt Cutts that Google has rolled out Google Panda 2.5.2 and that it probably “won’t have a big impact”. What was called a “minor” update has become a huge pain in the ass for many. Thousands of marketers, bloggers, small business owners, large companies and even brands are complaining. In Matt Cutt’s own words:
Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).
Easy for Matt to say, he works for Google. But what about the thousands of webmasters out there depending on Google to pay their bills? “But will have less impact” my ass. Yeah, it sucks and unfortunately it’s inevitable. All we can do now is pray right?
Errrrr…..no
I’ve never been too religious so I won’t count on that. Anyway, in all seriousness this update seems to be hitting everybody pretty damn hard (I’m about to give you some recovery advice). From what I’ve seen there’s been hundreds upon hundreds of complaints coming from all over the place. Read these complaints:
My 3-year-old site is about sharing the adventure of the renovation of my little house, with emphasis on energy efficiency and downsizing. Traffic has been growing steadily, thanks to all the original content, lots and lots of original photos, how-to’s, interesting stories of the successes and failures. This is an ongoing project; as recently as last Thursday, I uploaded a page with some “Before and After” photos and descriptions.
I have followed all the rules over the years, yet on the morning of October 14 I woke up to an unexplainable 60% drop in traffic. I’ve heard that Google has been adjusting its algorithm or something. I don’t understand how that works but I know that I have not done anything to deserve this huge loss (which of course is translated into a corresponding loss of income from my site).
I would like to hear FROM GOOGLE why my site was singled out for this disaster and what I can do to regain my traffic and my confidence in Google.
Oct. 14, 2011 – mid day, notice huge drop in traffic, a visitor here and there from google maybe every 2 or 3 minutes. Site is over 8 years old; no major changes have been done. Survived many Panda updates/tweaks prior to today, not sure what happened or how to go about fixing it. Any suggestions are welcome.
Right now, the panda seems pretty furious:
That damn panda again, it’s after all of us little guys. From what I’ve heard and experienced, the panda is greatly helping big brands. Since the update, my Adsense and affiliate incomes have both taken a huge hit. Lots of my review sites that were previously ranking #1 for “product name reviews” have been pushed down to #3-#5. For some reason Google decided to fill SEVERAL of the top spots with the brand’s site.
People are searching for 3rd party reviews; they don’t want to be sent over to the brand’s site. That’s 1 aspect of panda that is total bullshit. It’s also greatly favoring authority websites. Just because they have lots of pages and user activity, Google assumes their content is better?… And I thought the Google panda update originated from the content quality department?
Clearly the guys at Google didn’t have their thinking caps on. All I’m saying is that it sucks and I hope the problems will be dealt with very soon… And I’m sure they will be. Although I hear Google are happy with things right now.
Despite the fact that 5+ year old sites with hundreds of pages of high quality content have lost the majority of their traffic. Even when they’re 100% white hat. Google can’t be screwing around like this. How about we start #OccupyGoogle? (Us black and whitehatters who’ve been hit can stage a protest… Muahahaha)
…With all that being said, here are a few tips to recover from the panda update:
- Work On Decreasing Bounce Rate.
- Work On Increasing Avg. Time Spent On Site
- Work On Increasing Avg. Page Views Per Visit
- Get Rid Of Duplicate Content
- Get Rid Of Pages With LITTLE Content
- Get Rid Of All Pages With Little Value (They can affect your good pages)
- Fix Crawl Errors Using Google Webmaster Tools
- Increase User Engagement (Comments, Sharing, Clicking All Over)
- Focus On Social Media (Setup Facebook Page, Dedicated Twitter Account)
- Use Social Media Sharing Icons
- Pump Out Regular High Quality Unique Content
- Listen To Google
- Gain High Quality Backlinks From Authority Sources (Via Guest Blogging etc etc)
- Minimize Ads
- Improve Internal Linking Structure
Helpful Tools:
- http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
- http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
- http://getclicky.com
- http://www.google.com/analytics
Those are some of the best panda recovery tips I can give you right now. Since implementing them I’ve seen a lot of improvements on my 50+ site’s rankings.
At the end of the day Google is screwing the guys who’re building bad artificial backlinks and putting out bad content. To the extent of messing with sites for the sake of a few bits of duplicate content and thin pages. If you’d like to learn more about the Google panda update and how to recover, feel free to checkout Drip Feed Blast’s explanation of the Google panda update.
P.S. What do you think about the Google Panda update? Give me your thoughts and questions in the comments below.
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What do you think?
Just received your update on this issue via email.
From Google’s perspective, they want quality unique articles. Since this was just another recent update, i feel it should recover the original rankings of sites if they were of a high quality. The problem is ‘syndication’ of original articles. Although you get a backlink, it still creates duplicate content issues with Google. I am trying to weed out all duplicate content and only today someone scraped one of my articles (but did link back to the original). I couldn’t risk that and sent a polite email. It was removed in a matter of minutes.
Yep Ata… thanks for the comment. They do want quality unique articles. Since the first panda update, on-page SEO has become a lot more important. It’s not just a dupe content issue, they’re trying to put the better quality unique content on top.
Minus the off-page factors and they’re not doing an amazing job. Sites with great content, totally unique and white hat link profiles are still being hit. So I hope it all gets sorted in regards to that. But yah, good idea to make people remove the content they’ve taken from you. Although this blog is new, I’ve already had several people steal my content.
Jamie´s last [type] ..Top 14 List Of Effective Link Building Software
Yeah, it sucks. My site gets over 2000 visitors a day, was getting. Now its down to 400 visitors a day since the 14th. What the fuck is up with that?
It does suck. Pretty unfair quite frankly. But I don’t think Google gives a shit about the thousands of marketers, businesses and general webmasters who’ve taken an unexpected hit. Doesn’t affect them…. barely. Let’s see how this pans out Jack, I reckon we just have to ride the wave a little longer.
This panda is slowly eating away my online experience. I have been noticing that I get a lot of sites on the first page of Google that redirect me to other sites. Other times, when I click a site I get “Sorry, this content has been removed”. It all started after update 2.5 was released.
Google seems to be going downhill. And oh, now I also get results that catch the my entered keywords from ads displayed at different sites. And my friends are killing me by saying on and on that Google now takes bribes from bigger companies and show only their sites on the first pages.
I say we site owners and bloggers should not depend on Google. Try any other method like Facebook and Twitter for getting traffic. There is just no way to trust Google at all on this matter.
Yep, it sucks. I highly doubt they take bribes, they make plenty of money without bribes. Big companies spend millions on Adwords every month.
I’m just pissed about my Adsense empire. Taking away a full time income has really messed me up. I would love to say stuff Google. But until they go under or another company gains a larger market share, we will have to do everything Google tells us to.
My traffic right now is around 50% search engines, 30% referrals, 10% social media and 10% direct. If Bing or Yahoo came close to the market share Google has, we could focus on pleasing them and actually do OK. We just have to ride the wave.
Jamie´s last [type] ..How To Monetize Your Blog
Great article Jamie! Would you consider search results pages, tag pages and categorie pages on a wordpress blog low quality pages?
Tag pages can be considered low quality and search results definitely can. I don’t index search results or tag pages. Category pages aren’t exactly low quality, if you checkout Silo site structures it’s all about using categories for better SEO. Categories good, tag pages and search results pages not so much. But plenty of people do well indexing them, it depends on how big/authoritative your site is.
Jamie,
Great info. My question about recovery is:
What is considered a good bounce rate to shoot for?
what is considered a good time on page to shoot for?
What is considered a minimum number of words on a page to shoot for?
Good bounce rate: 40% or less, most people get 60-80%+…
Good time: 3-4 minutes or more.
Minimum number of words: 500 words.
Many of the article sites got captured for Google panda update. Also it affected the rankings of most of the sites on search engines. Thank you for posting the recovery methods.
http://www.askthebuilder.com
This is one site that Google held up as being exactly what they wanted, they even featured it as a “model site”, that was until Panda 2.5.2. Then it got smashed and it still hasn’t recovered. If this is the type of site they hit, the rest of us have no hope at all. Traffic drop of 50%.
Seriously, WTF do they want?
I have to disagree somewhat with most comments you make. You use “my 50 + sites” a lot during this post. I’m new to Internet marketing but this suggests some whitehat practises / linking practises that could involve ancho text links…. Whilst its whitehat it’s still over doing it…
Second you justify your top spot on google previously as if that’s where you should be just because you used to be there, what if instead of looking at it as loosing Adsense, you look at it as you earned more in Adsense then perhaps you could have previously had you not have outranked someone that deserved 1st spot but didn’t over optimise ? I’m not denying you may have original content or that your site isnt great I’m just looking at it from the point of view “maybe you shouldn’t have been as high as you were in the results before.
I see a lot of “legit sites also affected by panda” comments on other sites. What is a legit site? Just because “machash” Is a legit tech news site doesn’t mean it doesn’t over Do it on seo and therefore should be move down the list? Many large companies pay for blogstories or try to manipulate google search results. White hat/ or black hat it’s still trying to manually override what should be natural.
Problem is once one webmaster does whitehat seo everyone else has to t the very least do the same to compete which is why I use to rank low for “uk underground rap” I have no real back links, I have a .me tld , haven’t updated my website for months yet I’m now on page one for short searches like “uk rap” whereas before you had to search “uk underground rap music” to see me on page 2.
Explain that? Again I’m not insulting you I’m simply asking you to sit on the fence and ask yourself are you upset you no longer rank well , or annoyed because google got it wrong for this long and corrected it?
First… I can’t help but be a little upset about losing a substantial income because of a loss of rankings. But it’s a game and there are always setbacks.
“linking practises that could involve ancho text links…. Whilst its whitehat it’s still over doing it…”
YOU ALWAYS USE ANCHOR TEXT PERIOD
“legit sites:
By legit sites I mean high quality websites.
You are too new to Internet Marketing to make an educated assumption or judgement… it seems like.
My sites are all high quality like this blog, there was no reason for Google to penalize them.
You have to manipulate if you want to compete in most niches. Unless you’re in a really social niche where you can rank solely from natural links and social signals – it’s impossible to not manipulate.
The fact is it’s almost impossible to rank naturally. In order to compete with the giants, you must manipulate. So if for 3 years a strategy works and you use it to build a business and one day Google changes something which leaves the strategy useless; you should be very pissed off.
It’s very random, there are general rules that apply to all sites when an update hits. Some sites just pass under the radar somehow. This blog here, has like 0 unnatural links. It’s mostly social signals (I have thousands) and syndication and bookmarking.
There are a few article submissions but that should be overridden by the natural stuff. I basically said I wouldn’t do any SEO on this site. Just write good shit, my thoughts, strategies and see what happens. (with a bit more strategy)
This blog got hit badly and lost a huge percentage of its traffic for no reason. They even downgraded it to Page Rank 1, it should have hit 4. Explain that.
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