Google Panda Update October 2011

48 Responses to “Google Panda Update October 2011”

1. Derek Blandford says:

   November 1, 2011 at 3:33 pm

   Hey Aidan,

   Great write up. I had several sites affected in the same way as yours. Dropping from #1 or #2 down to # 8 or # 9.

   I think one of the most frustrating things about Google is it’s virtually impossible to actually KNOW why your website dropped. Yes, you can do research, look at metrics, etc., etc. and take an educated guess, but it’s still just that…a guess.

   Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, there will be some oddball site ranking that doesn’t seem to fit the same metrics as the rest of the top 10. Then you start scratching your head again.

   I did have one question. After your sites dropped from #1 to #8 or #9, did they stay there or have they been moving up and down a lot? Mine seem to dance all over the place throughout the day…#2, then #9, then #14, then back to #8, then back to #2, then second page…etc. etc.

   My guess is Google is tweaking constantly still trying to find the best solution. It does make it really hard to determine if any changes you’re making are working when it dances all about.

   These are aged sites so it’s not the “Google Dance” you sometimes hear about with new sites.

   Derek
2. Aidan says:

   November 1, 2011 at 3:34 pm

   Hey Derek, thanks for your insights, I appreciate them!! I agree with you that it’s very hard to nail down exactly what Google is doing and sometimes the best thing we can do is take educated guesses. My rankings that dropped to #8 and #9 have been pretty solid. It’s still early days as this update only happened 16 days ago but they haven’t been moving around so far. I am making a few tweaks to the pages so we’ll wait and see how they turn out…And yes, as you mentioned, the sites in this study are aged sites so if there was movement it wouldn’t be due to the typical dance we often see on new websites.
3. david@SEO Marketing Solutions says:

   November 1, 2011 at 3:56 pm

   Amazing break down here Aidan! I thought it was really interesting that your first case study showed up a .info with a high first page ranking when I was working on a .info for over a year and sniffed page one just one time! I agree that its probably an exception and not the rule!

   David
4. Aidan says:

   November 1, 2011 at 3:57 pm

   Thanks David, you’re welcome. Yes that .info was a real surprise to me too! I still think it was a one-off but it’s pretty strange. The keyword it ranks for is hugely competitive…
5. Karl says:

   November 1, 2011 at 3:58 pm

   Interesting results. Are you still using any autocontent cash ticks? I had some sites that worked really well thanks to Brian’s system and they got hit by panda(some are still ranking ok amazingly!) Quantity of content does not seem to be as important anymore, quality does. I use categories and make the category pages into silos (put a sticky post on the top for the actual SEO optimized page info) as done in autocontent cash themes.
   Regarding pageload times I’m thinking it maybe an idea to get rid of posts on the homepage altogether and just have links to the posts. What do you think? Thanks!
6. Aidan says:

   November 1, 2011 at 3:59 pm

   Hi Karl, no, I’m not using any Auto Content Cash tricks…all my content is always written by a real person. I think you’re 100% right where you say the quantity isn’t as important as the quality. We need to give people good quality and where possible encourage interaction (like I’ve done with the Like button and the comments on this post).

   Regarding load times, I think you just need to play around with it. Try taking posts off the homepage, check the load speed, then try with the posts. Removing posts probably would speed up the load time but themes vary so much it’s hard to give any suggestions, I recommend just testing it out
7. Jay says:

   November 1, 2011 at 4:01 pm

   Thanks Aidan,

   I came to the same conclusion about page load times when a couple of my sites got slammed. I’ll be looking at a caching plugin and maybe a better hosting account moving forwards.
8. Aidan says:

   November 1, 2011 at 4:02 pm

   Good move Jay…smart decision
9. Kelly says:

   November 1, 2011 at 4:18 pm

   Aidan,

   This study could not have come at a better time. I have been puzzled by a sudden drop in my traffic/earnings.

   I plan to reduce my affiliate links too…wish me luck because the sites affected by the decreased earnings support my ‘Rank and Pillage’ projects. Which by the way, I love your course.

   Again, thank you for this study!
10. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 4:19 pm

    Thanks Kelly – glad you found this useful. I think we are all still in a very strong position…remember, only a couple of my websites lost rankings and they dropped from #1 to #8-#10…it’s not that they got slapped or anything…but by focusing on good content it definitely will help.
11. Srinivas says:

    November 1, 2011 at 4:31 pm

    I started out for Halloween couple of months back. My site is in number 4, but it is an exact match domain. I have lot of cloaked links with about 4 pages, but I have not had an impact. The page loads in about 9.06 seconds.

    Srinivas
12. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 4:32 pm

    Hi Srinivas, you might want to add a caching plugin to speed up your load time…you could probably halve it and it may have some positive SEO effect…something to consider Thanks for commenting.
13. Raphaela says:

    November 1, 2011 at 4:45 pm

    Hi Aidan,

    this is really an interesting post, thanks.

    I was wondering if you mean the site “http://www.keywords.de/” which you mentioned in your observations because there doesn’t exist a site with the URL “http://www.keyword.de”, at least not over here in Germany.

    Have a great day

    Raphaela
14. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 4:46 pm

    Hi Raphaela,

    The actual domain name isn’t “keywords.de”….what I meant by that was that the structure of the domain was “keywords.de”, for example:

    - dogtraining.de
    - weightlosstips.de
    - internetmarketingadvice.de

    The above are all examples of “keyword.de”. Does this make more sense? I didn’t want to put the real website names in because that would give up a couple of my niches which I’d rather keep private (for now )

    Thanks for the comments Raphaela, comment again if anything else is unclear.
15. seo warrior says:

    November 1, 2011 at 4:49 pm

    Hey Aiden,

    Quite interesting read. I think we are moving towards subtle affiliate marketing Thank you for your insight.
16. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 4:50 pm

    You’re welcome, thanks for your comment.

    I think you’re right…subtle tweaks definitely won’t hurt.
17. Dave Christensen says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:15 pm

    Hi Aidan -

    In the case of the site I worked on as part of the RAP study, (HalloweenSkullduggery.com), because of the nature of it, it is laden with images -which probably bog it down (in terms of load speed). I don’t know how that could change -the images are fairly important.

    Now that November is here, I can report i had a few thousand visitors but only a 0.12 conversion rate/.

    I’ll have to iron that out before next year.
    Thanks for your report. It is enlightening. Good of you too share the info.

    Dave Christensen
18. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:16 pm

    Hi Dave, thanks for the comment and you’re welcome – glad you’ve found this information useful.

    One way you can get images to load faster is by using a more powerful server (I use a Virtual Private server on Host Gator, thats the next step down from a fully private server and it costs a lot less), another option is to host images on the Amazon AWS servers, thats what we did with the launch of Rank and Pillage, I wouldn’t want to do that every single time for niche sites though if I could avoid it (time consuming to upload them etc).

    About your 0.12 conversion rate, if thats 0.12% then yes, I think something isn’t working as well as it should be. Perhaps the keywords you’re targeting don’t lead to sales? Or perhaps your calls to action need a bit of work? Either way, take a close look at your site and I’m sure you’ll be able to work out The good news is that you got a few thousand visitors…a little tweaking may be all it takes to get due reward next year (or in future projects).
19. Karl says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:18 pm

    Thanks for the reply Aidan – I just use the autocontent cash themes they work great. But some are still ranking number 1! I still think adding content does work though- the more pages the more internal links you get as well which is very important
20. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:19 pm

    Hi again Karl, I agree with you 100%, I think adding new content on a regular basis shows Google that your site is still in use…most big professional sites have minor additions and new pieces of content added frequently. And like you say, internal linking is also useful and a great benefit of adding more posts. The other thing to rememberis that previous Google Panda updates targeted “thin” sites…so I think the comment you make about adding new content is very relevant.
21. Romy says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:32 pm

    So that’s why a few of my sites dropped in rankings. I had a site on #3 for its main keyword and suddenly my traffic dropped form 50 a day to 0 – 5 a day.

    I said to myself this is just temporary and I just need to build more backlinks, which, btw, you didn’t; mention in your analysis.

    But it is clear what Google wants: quality content, and by quality I mean content that really helps your visitor. I think your websites got reviewed by a human person and have been flagged in some way or another. We just need to put more content of higher quality.
22. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:43 pm

    Hey Romy,

    I know I didn’t cover backlinks in the study – it took me a looong time to do the analysis I did without even taking backlinks into account…maybe I’ll add them at some stage. I think continually building backlinks will definitely help you regain they positions you lost, I’m doing more backlinking to the affected pages and I’m sure it’ll help (definitely won’t hurt).

    Quality is the key…and I think Google is now using different methods to measure quality (Big Brother is getting smarter)…for example, do Google robots think a webpage with 40 Facebook Likes and 20 Google +1 shares is more popular than a site without any social signals? I think so…but I’m still testing that theory It’shard to say what impact social signals will have because like link building, they’re also pretty easy to manipulate…
23. Clint Butler says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:45 pm

    I was lucky, pre-Panda I was doing a lot of BH and grey hat stuff for a company replicated site that I actually managed to get onto page 1 of Google for the keywords Website Traffic. After Panda slapped me down, and I really got bored with the affiliate marketing model of making money I moved to more WH SEO techniques on my new site. As such I have enjoyed a steady increase in traffic and rankings from Google. I found unique high quality content and some syndication is getting my site much respect from Google and my new content is indexed and ranking pretty well all around for a site that is just over a month old.
24. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:50 pm

    Thats awesome Clint, and thanks for sharing your experiences.

    White Hat (white hat = legitimate, nothing sneaky) is definitely the way to go. Google is no fool and is always improving it’s algorithm. By staying clean and using White Hat methods you can’t go wrong really and as long as you’re always focusing on quality content, you’ll be onto a winner in the long term.
25. Pat says:

    November 1, 2011 at 5:59 pm

    Yesterday’s post on TechRepublic talked about collateral damage of the Panda update on a serious content-driven site:

    Can Google survive its blind faith in the algorithm?
    (http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/can-google-survive-its-blind-faith-in-the-algorithm/9654?tag=nl.e101)

    “So, Google apparently bagged its big game in the Panda hunt. The problem is that it took months to do it and a lot of algorithm trial-and-error and there was plenty of collateral damage done in the process. It’s as if Google looked at its backyard, spotted a bunch of dandelions, and instead of taking hand trimmers and going out and clipping them, Google decided to build a highly-advanced chainsaw to deal with it. The chainsaw eventually got rid of the dandelions but it also whacked some chunks out of the hedges, put some gashes into the ground, and took out part of the back fence.”

    If the techies are feeling the pinch, it’s no wonder affiliates are suffering. Should we all move to Adsense instead?

    Just kidding…
26. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 6:00 pm

    Hey Pat, I hadn’t seen that article. You know, it’s a funny thing you joke about Adsense, there were a lot of Adsense sites appearing in the top 10 I analyzed….something to think about…
27. Chris says:

    November 1, 2011 at 6:27 pm

    Thanks, Aidan. I’m looking for some clear information on the latest Panda update. One of my strange experiences is having a large, 1999 site with very few affiliate links and lots of quality information drop 60%, while most of my mini-sites (a la Brian Johnson) increased their rankings! I’ll have to take a look at my large site and see where it happened.
28. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 6:28 pm

    Hey Chris, lots of strange things are happening and I think this is going to take some time to settle down…Some of my mini-sites are also doing extremely well which kind of goes against what Google was trying to do with their initial Google Panda update.
29. Tony says:

    November 1, 2011 at 7:22 pm

    Aiden, will be interested to know if you also looked at the post length on each sight am hearing reposrts that 400-500 posts lenght will no longer cut it and we need to be looking at post of 1000+ words.
    Also another way of increasing your load speed is storing all media on Amazon S3, which you can do for pennies on the $.
30. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 7:23 pm

    Hey Tony, while I didn’t really mention it in the analysis, I did see that sites with more content were doing better. Moving forward I think longer articles will be good as long as the quality remains high. The longer an article is, the more time people will stay on the site which is something Google likes…it also usually results in a lower bounce rate but the key is always to ensure the content is high.

    Amazon S3 is a great idea, thats where I host my images and videos on high traffic sites, and yes – it’s a very cheap “pay for what you use” solution. Those interested in Amazon S3 can find out more here: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
31. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 8:19 pm

    Hey Brian, yes…Google has come a looong way and the old school spammy tactics just don’t work anymore. Good on you for creating a way to cloak affiliate links that even Google cna’t pick up, in saying that, if the content on your site is really good, I doubt Google will worry too much about the affiliate links. The #1 ranked website in one of the studies was packed with affiliate links…this surprised me a bit but it goes to show that affiliate links aren’t all bad…

    Build a site people love, and Google will probably love it as well.
32. Karl says:

    November 1, 2011 at 8:55 pm

    Hi Tony I use amazons3 for videos hadn’t thought of it for images though – what do you do setup a CDN?
33. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 8:56 pm

    Karl, just upload the images (I use S3 Fox), set them to be readable by the public, and it should all work fine…thats how I do it.
34. David says:

    November 1, 2011 at 9:09 pm

    Hi Aidan,

    Don’t know if this applies directly to your case study, but is something to think about going forward: Google apparently is hiring more and more people to work as “human site reviewers,” rounding out the work that until now has been done by bots.

    Obviously, a trained human reviewer can make far more sophisticated judgements about site content, quality, etc. and how the site fits in with Google’s aim of enhancing the user experience. And with the billions or trillions of pages on the internet, those that get human scrutiny are the ones ranking in the top ten. So, for authority sites to survive, they’ll have to really BE authority sites, not just junk propped up by a gazillion backlinks.
35. Aidan says:

    November 1, 2011 at 9:10 pm

    Very good point David – thanks for sharing, I agree with you 100%.
36. Brian says:

    November 1, 2011 at 10:18 pm

    Hey Guys;

    I was on a webinar the other night where a guy who had an authority site was able to get his post ranked number one on google in under 5 minutes. Lets face it. Google panda and subsequent updates are aimed at spammers and affiliate marketers who link to products from their websites. I believe that google refers to these affiliate pages as “bridge pages”. Unfortunately, that means that the days of 1 or 2 page affiliate blogs are over. Google wants content “fresh content”. The good news is that google loves sites that curate information like mashable.com. This site gathers news on a topic from all over the web, and posts it on their page with commentary and a link to the original story. These types of authority sites are what you should be building now. I’m not talking about an auto poster or bot. You actually need to read this material and write commentary on them. If your site becomes an authority on a topic, google will show you extra love, and will rank new posts much higher. However, I have also discovered a way to completely shield my affiliate links from google. I mean that the only way that google would be able to find my affiliate links, is if they had a human visited my page. Not ready to share that trick yet, but may in the future. Hope you got something from all of this rant.
37. Nick Johnson says:

    November 2, 2011 at 12:13 pm

    Hi Aidan,
    I have a suspicion that Google is getting hot on load times. I have a number of Halloween Sites that run on Word Press and it seems those with a “cute” halloween theme but a slow load time get a lower ranking than those with a “standard” fast loading theme.

    I also think that google is losing its snobbery over the domain extension espcially under the new domain types allowed under the last WWW convention.

    Regards

    Nick
38. Aidan says:

    November 2, 2011 at 12:36 pm

    Thanks for your feedback Nick
39. Graeme says:

    November 4, 2011 at 10:00 am

    All the keywords that I had done backlinking for got effected. Most where at or near # 1. The site and its keyword went from 1 to 100. What I did notice for all my sites was that where keyword-in domain-name.com was in the top 10, only 1 keyword-in domain-name.com stayed on page 1 the rest where total random when it came to keyword.
    That adsence comment got me thinking, most of the sites in the top 10 for my keyword were adsence sites and google is pushing their new adsense system. I even got an invite after been banned a few years back. I would suspect its all about the money. Google puts the adsences sites on page 1, Google makes more money. I’m now looking at PPV.
40. Aidan says:

    November 4, 2011 at 10:01 am

    Hi Graeme, I’m sorry to hear your website got affected…for what it’s worth, I’m running new tests (surprise, surprise) on my affected domains and as soon as I find a way to reverse what happened I’ll share it with you here. I haven’t really tried PPV seriously so can’t really give a comment about it…
41. Jan says:

    November 5, 2011 at 4:20 am

    I don’t have so many websites, but one of my oldest authority travel site got whacked and I lost 50% of the traffic and hence 50% of my adsense income. It took me a long time to build up that site with long insightful long articles with average 1000 words. And yet it still got slapped by Panda. I notice thin sites can sometime rank better than mine in the similar topic even though I have better information? Now that is very strange.

    I did a little experiment on another new travel site of my mine which uses duplicate content taken from newspapers. I wanted to see whether duplicate content (with some short comment added) would do as well as those articles that I wrote myself. It did well for a short while, and after October there was a sharp decline in web traffic. I wonder how mashable did it…

    Anyway thanks for your insights, I will have to keep in mind your research and apply to my site accordingly.

    I still haven’t really tried the R&P for mini sites due to time constraint. Hope to really give it a try. But the latest Panda update and lower traffic has cause me some frustration and demotivation. Need to pull myself out of this doldrums…
42. Aidan says:

    November 5, 2011 at 4:23 am

    Hi Jan, thanks for the comment.

    One thing that I am 100% sure of is that in the long term, high quality websites will always win. So focus on doing the best you can, build the best websites you can and eventually you will rank at the top. Regarding your Authority Adsense site, I’d try adding new content to it. If you are heavily using Adsense on it you might want to ease up a little as well…
43. Chris says:

    November 14, 2011 at 8:40 pm

    Hi Aidan:

    Thanks for sharing this. As a person who is just beginning to try and get to #1, this is great stuff to think about and try to apply.
44. Colin says:

    November 21, 2011 at 8:47 am

    Thank you Aidan – I’m just starting out on R and P. I’m impressed with your attention to your readers. The results of Panda and Googles ongoing tweeks gives food for thought about what strategy should one employ to give “long term reliable” passive income. People will still find ways to game the system however,I doubt, they will be reliable long term or even medium. Does it mean I have to have more variety in the types of sites and strategies I employ to help smooth out the bumps.
45. Aidan says:

    November 21, 2011 at 10:26 am

    Hi Colin, thanks for your kind comments about Rank and Pillage

    You’re right that there will always be ways to game the system, but as you also mentioned, these will be short term tactics and won’t really work in the long term. I think going for a variety of sites is a really good idea. Diversity always helps in internet marketing. If one thing isn’t working so well, you’ve got other options to fall back on. Relating this to Rank and Pillage, it’s a good idea to build an Authority site and some Adsense sites…while the Adsense might bring you in less earnings in the short term, they might be an extremely good long term earner.
46. Jean Kave says:

    December 10, 2011 at 6:49 pm

    As someone has already wrote, SEO is not “rocket science” but getting it right takes time, especially for newbies. I highly recommend the “SEO Book” by Aaron Wall.Thanks for the advice.
47. Titus says:

    February 9, 2012 at 1:01 am

    Great post – I have around 15 sites and a few of my main ones dropped
    traffic in Oct. and no amount of tweaking worked for me so I have taken
    a novel approach to get my traffic numbers back up – ignore Google altogether!

    I am using other traffic methods… videos, slideshows, articles,
    pdfs, press releases, ppc, twitter, facebook, ezines, linkbuilding…
    We have all become too depended on Google and creating profitable sites
    outside of Google has been quite liberating for me. Any traffic I now do
    get from Google is considered gravy or extra… to what I need to made income
    from the few sites poisoned by Panda.
48. Duchait says:

    April 5, 2012 at 10:18 pm

    thans Aidan,
    i would like to tell one thing that high quality content websites will always win. And for like me new geek who wanna try and get to top on google search, that’s great stuff to implement and think.