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I know this poll does not apply to all our readers but I know that 40% were impacted by Panda - so the 40% of you who read this site, please take my poll below.
The question is simple, did you recover at all from the Google Panda update if your site was hit?
As you the first Panda update was in February, Google rolled it out globally in April and on that roll out, some people said they saw incremental returns. Then Panda 3.0 2.1 was released in May and I've seen some that said they were doing better since April that they dropped again in May.
So my question to you is if you were hit by Panda, are you now seeing any improvements? I know it may be hard to know if your site was hit by Panda or something else but try to be objective.
Please have your friends take the poll and retweet it and post it on Facebok. I would love a few hundred responses, which I will publish in two weeks.
Our ongoing coverage and stories on the Content Farmer/Panda update:
- Were You "Pandalized"?
- Google Panda Updates Search Results Manually
- Panda 3.0
- Google's Second Attempt At Panda Relief Advice
- Google's Panda Update Hopes To Curate An Apple-Like Web
- eHow Hit Hard By Google Panda Update
- Incremental Returns After Latest Google Panda Update
- Many Webmasters Devastated: Google Panda Rolled Out Worldwide
- Google Update Underway? Farmer/Panda Hits Again?
- Google Smacks Down Webmaster Over Panda Update
- Google Mocking Those Impacted By Farmer/Panda Update?
- Is Google Rolling Out A Farmer / Panda Update?
- Status Check: Google Panda / Farmer Rebounds & UK Migration
- Coming Soon: Panda/Farmer Update At Google UK
- Being Rescued From The Google Panda / Farmer Update
- When To Use 404, NoIndex & 301 Redirects In Farmer/Panda Fix
- 40% Of SEOs Say Farmer/Panda Hurt Their Sites In Google
- Google: Remove Low Quality Content If You Were Impacted By Farmer/Panda
- I'm Hit! Get Your Google Rankings Back After Farmer/Panda
- How to Regain Your Rankings After the Farmer Update
- SEOs Chew On Wired's Interview With Cutts & Singhal On Farmer Update
- What's Your Name? Farmer Or Panda?
- Was Google Too Hasty with the Farmer Update? SEO's Discuss Good & Bad
- Google Accidentally Label Your Site As A Content Farm? Get Help Here
- Shocking: Google To Tweak Content Farm Algorithm
- Poll: Were You Impacted By The Google Farmer Update?
- Google Farmer Update Support Groups
- Google's Farmer Update Live: 12% Of Google's Results Forever Changed
- Google Warns Of "Big Changes Here Very Shortly"
- Correction: Google's Scraper Algorithm Now Live, Not Content Farms
- Google's Content Farm Algorithm Harm You? Categorize Your Site To Fix It.
- Confirmed: Google's Content Farm Algorithm Live! Sites Are Dropping!
- Google's Next Target: Content Farms & On Page Spam
Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
@JoeHobot
05/25/2011 12:31 pm
My site http://www.mwd.com was 60-70% impacted by Panda update, but recently I did some cleanup and instead using all in one seo- I use now Yoast SEO plugin. There is bunch of things I did, and my traffic is now up 40% if you need more info you know where to find me Sincerely, @joehobot:disqus
Steve
05/25/2011 12:45 pm
My blog actually got better! http://stevecreek.com/
Faust1
05/25/2011 01:52 pm
there is a strange problem with our sute, i am sure its not panda but dont know what else it is. the index page is removed from google and there is no penalty, can anyone suggest what could be the reason: http://www.reginout.com
Rick Bucich
05/25/2011 03:50 pm
@fausti1:disqus I don't know if this is the issue or not but you have a .exe download link very high in the code on your home page. If Google suspects there is any security vulnerability for users the page might drop from the index. Suggest moving the download link to an interior page. FYI: You also have some code after the head but before the body
Guest
05/25/2011 04:52 pm
Barry Barry Barry...Panda 1.0 seems to be the worst. Add a question for that. Some have come out of that BUT not all ups and downs are Pandas
Barry Schwartz
05/25/2011 04:53 pm
I think I did ask that. Panda 1 came out, people would not have come out of that until Panda 2.0 or 2.1.
Fraser Cain
05/25/2011 05:07 pm
My site fully recovered, in fact, it's having its best results ever. The moment Panda 1.0 was released, and my site was in the Sistrex top 100 hardest hit sites, I took immediate action. - merged and purged about 1500 articles on my site which were low quality, too short, or too similar to other articles on site - rewrote hundreds of more articles which I felt had room for improvement - added references, images, infographics, and related links to articles to make them a better resource - removed all advertising, except for Adsense This work is still ongoing, but my stats recovered with Panda 2, and got even better with Panda 2.1. I've never done any linkbuilding, so I'm not sure if that had an impact.
Keith Brown
05/25/2011 05:13 pm
"- removed all advertising, except for Adsense" I'm sure Google loved that :)
Guest
05/25/2011 05:21 pm
Nah. But Fraser's site is a PR8 or 9 and he has over 60K rss readers. Google acts even manually for those sites, see Cult of Mac, Digital something.
Guest
05/25/2011 05:46 pm
When did that happen Joe, weren't you complaining on Daniweb just last week how you (supposedly) fired 27 or so writers after losing 75% of traffic. Looking at your site I guess you use the term 'our writers' loosely ;)
Donscon
05/25/2011 06:03 pm
Which website are you referring to?
Fraser Cain
05/25/2011 07:06 pm
I didn't want to advertise. But I'm sure if you Google my name, you'll find my site.
Fraser Cain
05/25/2011 07:07 pm
Or hated it. Who knows. Google is a mystery.
Guest
05/25/2011 07:57 pm
Ok, say I was hit on Panda 2.1. I came out. John does the same. Kevin was hit on 2.0 and is back up...so you have three that came out of Panda, but which one? A conspiracy theory says that maybe, just maybe there was a timed penalty for Panda 1.0 since it hit the 'worst' sites. Some have come out of it but everyone I know had a very popular site and make a big stink on Google support forums. So Google may have manually intervened or coded it so what hit their sites is removed as a reason to penalize. But we're speculating, this is all what we can do, if we think our sites are fixed.
@JoeHobot
05/25/2011 08:01 pm
Guest: Last week is past :) For past few days, more precisely friday or so, the traffic jumped after my cleanup about which you can read on page 89 on webmasters forum in google crawling indexing. I let go lots of people and hired only 6 new writers, so yes, I am prud of my writers and mention them all the time :) Btw please login next time its easier to know who I am writing this replay to :)
Stevenson Patrick
05/27/2011 07:26 am
My site actually did better after the panda update maybe because i dont have duplicate content. http://www.curtainblindsingapore.com I hope the rest will recover soon
gid
05/28/2011 01:59 am
i was untouched by panda in feb but was hit hard on 2.1. I am not sure what google is going for, but on my sites i no longer rank for my keywords which are my URLs. On just about all my sites i went from SERP 1 to 5+ on all my keywords. Many of my sites i have owned SERP 1 for years.
Andem
05/28/2011 10:10 pm
I was hit by Panda 2.0 back in April and my graphs look like some of the others which show Panda 1.0 and Panda 2.1 drops. I've done a load of cleaning up, rewriting content that has been scraped to hell, mostly stuff from 2000-2007, the stuff that really has a lot of strong backlinks. I've removed tag pages and my latest test is blocking Googlebot-image because those visitors are the most useless with the highest bounce rates (95%+). I've seen no relief yet but I'm going to continue experimenting. There has to be a light at the end of this tunnel. I just can't picture some of the sites I see outranking my original remaining where they are, especially eHow which actually sometimes links back to sites like mine but with nofollow.
Eddie Corbano
05/30/2011 07:07 am
Hi Joe, Can you you give me some short tips on what exactly you did (couldn't find that page you're referring to)? I was hit very hard by panda in April, did some popular suggested changes, nothing worked so far (traffic seems to continue to drop even). I have a small site with only original articles, almost no advertising, so it's quite a mystery why we were hit in the first place. Thanks, Eddie
@JoeHobot
05/30/2011 09:04 pm
Eddie: here are some things I did. http://www.mwd.com/2011/04/we-survived-and-fixed-panda-update-problem/
Lior Cohen
06/08/2011 06:29 am
Hi, I'd like to ask a technical question regarding the poll s/w you are using- Why have you selected polldaddy.com and not the freeware wp-polls? What's the difference? Thanks
Webstats Art
06/09/2011 08:22 pm
My site is great after Panda but I hate my site because it does not have enough content yet!
Webstats Art
06/11/2011 08:20 pm
I liked your reply.. I was able to read between the lines.
joeldsouza
08/12/2011 08:11 pm
THe poll results say it all.... Google is crappy!