31 replies to this topic

[Jill]

Agree completely with Michael on that one. Panda is tons of different things and not the same for every site. For every site that got burned due to Panda, there are other sites doing practically the same thing that is now doing better.

It's kinda crazy. Perhaps a trick to mess with SEO's heads?

[shimlad]

The hotels already have reviews on the individual hotel pages. i am really struggling to think of any content that would be useful to users for those pages, that is not already on the site elsewhere.

[chrishirst]

Is that an attempt at sarcasm 1.0 Chris?

Moi? Sarcastic? As if!

[Jill]

The hotels already have reviews on the individual hotel pages.

Unique ones, or reviews that are on other sites already?

i am really struggling to think of any content that would be useful to users for those pages, that is not already on the site elsewhere.

What makes you think you need to add anything additional then?

[OldWelshGuy]

I have spent a lot of time on this, and it appears that the Uk gets different stuff to the US etc, so it is nigh on impossible to compare US sites, so i am sticking to |UK ones.

I have still noticed that sites with large chunks of sitewide content and uniform across site linking (navigation only) have suffered. (again as Michael said, there are exceptions) I have found that these exceptions have by and large had some really nice links to them.

THAT SAID. I have seen a site that has lniks from well known TV on topic sites (HUGE authority), links from the UK quality press, all editorial links, and the site has been kicked in the teeth, it is a 10 year old site with unique content, 100% natural link building as in genuine press releases and all natural editorial links etc. BOOM kicked right in the teeth. But by and large, internal linking appears to have a pattern forming. I believe as already said, that we have another 'sandbox' that being not a single element, but a combination of elements that result in a loss of trust, that then impacts further on the various elements within the algo.

[shimlad]

I link my 4 websites together from the footer, each site has over 50,000 pages indexed.

Are you suggesting that perhaps these site wide links may be detrimental? i do it because it feels natural to link them, keeps our corporate brand together and is easy for our staff to flick between sites.

However im now wondering whether it might be worth removing these.

[Michael Martinez]

I link a small network of Websites together with sitewide links but it's clear to anyone who pays attention that I own the sites and they are all working together. Some major retail site operators do this as well.

If you're transparent and only interlinking a small number of Websites, you should be fine. Google employees (and I think Bing employees as well) have said as much through the years.

There is a difference between creating 5 Websites that are each substantially unique (and putting your stamp of ownership on them in your footers) and 50 Websites that are created for the sole purpose of making someone some money (and interlinking them for the sake of "SEO").

Don't be afraid to tell people you have other Websites. But if you're running 50 Websites, sitewide footer links are probably not the way to tell people about them. The best method for that large a collection is to have a single corporate "parent" site that provides guidance to visitors about the sub-sites or brands it operates.

[OldWelshGuy]

I link my 4 websites together from the footer, each site has over 50,000 pages indexed.

Are you suggesting that perhaps these site wide links may be detrimental? i do it because it feels natural to link them, keeps our corporate brand together and is easy for our staff to flick between sites.

However im now wondering whether it might be worth removing these.

if that was for me, then no I certainly wasn't suggesting that, and I wouldn't change it if it makes sense to do it that way.

[shimlad]

if anyone hasnt seen this video, i thought it was really good at explaining what Panda is about.

http://www.seomoz.or...iteboard-friday

[petri]

I have a (500 + pages) business site with around 30 visits a day and I haven't seen any negative effects of the Panda. Or any other updates during the years. If anything, I've got better results.

[Marchy]

This weird thing happened to me around June 12th (which I think is before the Panda update) My visitors went down of 50%. WE are a helpline and our calls and emails that we receive now have increased of about 10%.

Now our calls and emails are suppose to be decreasing at this time of the year. Our content is visited by a lot of students also so maybe it is a big factor because it happens around the end of the school year.

Our site increased for all our major keywords due to a redirect I did from another site that I had. (Thx to Jill for the suggestion of the redirection. Our statistic went to the roof).

It is all contrary facts but our business conversion is so good which I do not complain LOL.

[copywriter]

I seriously think (with the Panda Quality Raters) that we've moved from optimization to full-scale personalization. So what happens next year when the Quality Raters change and new people are surveyed? Will we get Panda 3.0 that now upgrades previously downgraded sites and vise versa?

[Jill]

I should think that Google Quality Raters would all be in sync so it shouldn't make a difference who's doing the rating. Good is good. Bad is bad.

[copywriter]

Really? That kinda surprises me coming from you. Maybe we have a different idea of who the Google Quality Raters are. I'm thinking, if you sent these same sites back through a year from now, many of them would pass that have been rejected now. Especially ecommerce sites. They seem to be getting hit pretty hard.

Yes, I know that product pages typically don't have tons of content and that many times manufacturer-provided content is used (which I've always preach against), but a lot of resellers are getting ditched from the rankings. While most need to revamp their product pages, for many (like Overstock.com - just pulling an example out of the air) it wouldn't matter much.

They have limited quantities of thousands and thousands of products. By the time they got the copy written and up and sold out of product, the next Panda Dance (or indexing or whatever they are going to refer to it as) would have come and gone. No time for improvements to be made before those products are no longer on the site at all.

I'm actually in favor of the overall Panda quality idea, but some of the implementation makes me question the viability.

[Michael Martinez]

I think the quality raters don't have to agree so much as create a collective grading scale that can be arbitrarily sliced in two: the "high quality sites" are up here and the "low quality sites" are down there.

So if we simplify the idea considerably and say that each quality rater was only allowed to vote "yea" or "nay", there would be a random distribution of sites up and down the scale, some with relatively few "nay" votes, some with relatively few "yea" votes, and most with a mix of "yea" and "nay" votes distributed around an average.

That doesn't mean Google would have to draw the line at the 50% point (half on top and half on bottom) but wherever they drew the line would be the target for the Panda algorithm to match with its own determinations.