31 replies to this topic

[shimlad]

A lot of other SEO forums are talking about Panda 2.2, myself i have noticed about a 10% drop in our traffic this week. it would appear to coincide with Panda 2.2. anyone else notice anything?

[Jill]

No.

[OldWelshGuy]

in the UK yes. the last 10 days have sent people spinning around panicking about the end of the world. Just happens to co-incide with the normal lull in online sales at this time of year.

Lots of changes on Google.co.uk however. many people showing eal world examples of lost rankings and traffic across the board.

Mainly I have seen sites that are short of content getting nailed, so ecomm stores mostly. Those with unique content have done Ok .

[Michael Martinez]

Without any confirmation from Google, it's anyone's guess whether what people are seeing is the "Panda 2.2" update.

[OldWelshGuy]

Indeed, and the name of the man wielding the sword that kills you in battle is of little consequence, it is the action itself that matters

I have noticed far more emphasis on personalised localised results in the UK of late. so that might be having a large part in the lost traffic.

[shimlad]

I run 4 websites and in the last 7 days traffic to all of them is down between 10 and 20% compared to previous recent weeks and also the same time last year. Something has definitely changed that is for sure. What has changed, is any ones guess!

[Michael Martinez]

So Google has now confirmed that it's Panda 2.2 (although I now believe we should have called the second release Panda 1.1 instead of Panda 2.0).

And the official "start date" for Panda 2.2 (which should be called Panda 1.3) seems to be June 16.

[Jill]

It will be interesting to see if any of the sites hit by previous versions of Panda now start to do better.

[Michael Martinez]

At first I thought I saw a couple of reports of possible recovery but right now I can't find any current comments (from the past day or 2) where people confirm that their apparent recoveries have been sustained. I'll be looking at some private data later on but don't have much expectation at this point.

[chrishirst]

Panda 2.2 Hmm?


So should I upgrade to Web 2.0 before or after?

[Mooro]

Is that an attempt at sarcasm 1.0 Chris?

I got Pandawhacked, from 11,000 uniques to 6,000 over 2 days, performed a clean up, over a few weeks traffic grew to 12,500 uniques so even better than before then fell to 7,500 one day then 6,000 the next.

After ensuring everything adheres to best practice to still get monumentally kicked back like this has destroyed any search ethics I had. Best practice and guidelines can go screw themselves as far as I'm concerned now.

I'm personally convinced Panda has updated again in the UK, I've also seen a totally unrelated site have traffic halved over 36 hours. 100% original content, copied by thousands of sites, authoritative or so I thought, been online years, loads of ethical, genuine links and it still gets screwed.

Goodbye ethics. I'm going to the dark side now.

[Michael Martinez]

There are a few (unverifiable) claims of recovery in another forum. It's too soon to be sure that these "recoveries" will stick.

Then again, search being the dynamic thing it is, the sites could always tank next week for completely unrelated reasons.

Maybe it's time that people just started to focus on traffic growth again.

[shimlad]

although i have a good site that is useful to users, it doesnt actually require that much content. for example a page with 4 hotel listings in a small town in England doesnt have or need much content. i have a separate page that tells the user about the town in question. However now Panda is making me think the way forward is to add a couple of paragraphs about hotels in said town, in order to beef up the content. Not actually that useful to users, but it will give Panda the content it wants.

[Jill]

Not actually that useful to users, but it will give Panda the content it wants.

Nope. That's not at all what Panda wants. The whole idea of Panda is to give USERS what they want. So if what you add isn't useful to users it won't be useful to Panda either.

How about adding reviews of the hotels? Now THAT would be useful.

[Michael Martinez]

shimlad, I think it would be a mistake to look at the Panda technology as just another simple ranking factor. While I agree with Danny Sullivan's recent article that it is probably generating some sort of ranking factor or signal, I believe it's produced from a complex mix of signals. You can't really say, "Oh, if I do this Panda will punish me or if I do that Panda will reward me" with any reliable precision.

There are some things I believe that *may* lead to a Panda downgrade but I can find exceptions to every example -- it seems to be, however, that sites rack up a lot of Panda attention by doing multiple things that contribute to the poor user experience.

I doubt anyone will ever be able to create "content for Panda" but we'll probably see some "Panda-compliant Website concepts" emerge in the next year, where the whole package will generally prove itself in ways that are hard to measure.