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A few months ago we asked you to take our poll on the types of sites hurt most by Panda and I wanted to now share those results with you.
We had over 200 responses and affiliate, e-commerce and how to sites were the ones that lead the pack.
Here is a chart showing them broken down by number of responses:
There were 13 other results that mostly were more specific, but overall, here is a nice chart for you.
For more of our Panda coverage, see our Google Panda category.
Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.
Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.
Comments:
Dan Whitehouse
09/29/2011 01:36 pm
Very interesting. Wouldn't have expected to see ecomm up there. Very odd mix there. Great info though.
Mike
09/29/2011 02:14 pm
No real surprises there. Thin affiliate sites cut and paste product information, e-comm sites cut and paste product info, blogs are full of ads and spam comments, wiki sites use info that's available from other sources or just copy off wikipedia so the graph just shows that panda works at fighting scraper sites.
Nick Stamoulis
09/29/2011 02:18 pm
Think about some of the e-commerce sites out there. They all use the same product descriptions (duplicate content) handed out by the manufacturer and have very little other content to fill their pages with. Even if they don't mean to, a lot of them look pretty spammy.
Ron Leal
09/29/2011 04:09 pm
Makes sense. Affiliate sites just scrape or copy same contents from other sites. Most of them are just autoblogging sites as well.
Amit Verma
09/29/2011 05:28 pm
Ha Ha.. How porn sites can be effected with any update?
Ajay Kumar
09/29/2011 05:30 pm
It is so easy for an e-commerce site to change up the product descriptions and yet they still just copy and paste. Do they not know anything about the duplicate content issue?
Ajay Kumar
09/29/2011 05:33 pm
It would be nice to know what "Other" sites were especially since it's number 6 on the list. Any suggestions?
Takeshi
09/29/2011 08:27 pm
Yeah, try doing that with a catalog of 100,000+ products
Michael Martinez
09/29/2011 08:27 pm
Heh! Doesn't anyone see a high correlation between aggressive SEO methods/priorities and the types of sites that were most affected? It's not a scientific survey but the pain is clearly being felt at the end of the spectrum where people are most likely to "optimize" for search. A lot of the quick, cheap content-rich solutions got nailed.
PageRankSEO
09/29/2011 10:41 pm
There is, of course, the standard marketing question -- how does the nature of the question / manner in which it's asked influence the results? Was the size of the sample group large enough? While we may make the assumption that anyone participating in an online survey about how the Google Panda algorithm updates have effected various genres of web sites on Google's SERPs is already sufficiently vetted, is there any correlation in the survey results between the fact that the choices are alphabetical and that the genre 'Affiliates' is the most effected? Just asking.
Mae Loraine Jacobs
09/30/2011 01:52 am
Wow, porn sites have more value than these affiliate websites? But yeah, like a lot of people here, many of these affiliate websites are bordering on spam. Yet it's unfortunate because I know of a different group of marketers who leverage the various online marketing tools to increase profits, build customer base, and develop their own brand. Affiliate marketers who settle for cheap tricks definitely do a lot of disservice to these guys.
Ferry
09/30/2011 08:38 am
What an interesting chart. It’s a lot of ppl that have to rebuild they website or get another job, since it has hit so hard on affiliate and store web sites.
Gareth
09/30/2011 05:44 pm
Makes sense, they said they were going after low content affiliate sites
CuttMats
10/01/2011 09:19 pm
As usual, the sites hit by this will be sites that "compete" with Google's own properties. Panda is simply an excuse by Google to screw sites that exist (and often provide superb information) in areas Google want to muscle in to. Ignore any talk of what's best for users - it's bullshit, Panda exists to further Google's profits and nothing else.
TJ
10/02/2011 03:42 am
If they were looking for quality improvements, Affiliate sites are very poor. Looks like it worked
Sam Michelson
10/02/2011 09:15 am
I don't think this survey is meaningful at all. Your sample is skewed toward people who make money online. Why would it be surprising to see that these people are more likely to notice changes in ecommerce sites? Further - if I was not personally hit by Panda - the chances I would answer the survey are much lower. So people answering it may well be people who are losing money because of having fallen - again skewing the results toward the type of sites where SEO's try to make money (or sites that assist them in that effort).
Mark
10/02/2011 02:02 pm
How narrow minded and naive for those commenting on affiliate sites being of poor quality. Yes, there are many affiliate sites with low quality content but there are also some with excellent content
Karsten Deppert
10/02/2011 05:24 pm
We at Contentor (www.contentor.com) are working with exactly this kind of problem. E-commerce sites can often have many thousands products, and even if you just want 3-4 sentences for each product this results in an huge amount of texts that need to be created. So I understand that it is tempting for retailers to just scrap the material from your manufacturers sites or similar solutions. Our business modell is that by working with part time employees who love writing but don't do it for a living we can get good quality tailormade texts for the lowest possible cost. But it can still be a significent cost if you have really many products (or are selling on mutliple language markets)
Fabio Granata
10/11/2011 03:22 pm
porn is the answer.
Brent Friar
10/11/2011 06:09 pm
In most cases it's not a matter of just changing up the descriptions. One of my old clients was an authorized dealer for ~150 product lines and each of those had from a few dozen to a few thousand products. We ended up only putting the top 20% selling SKUs on the website and we still had over 22,000 products. If we spend 5 minutes per product writing a custom description, it would have taken over 1800 man hours to complete the task. That's a pretty significant expense!
Am i Pretty
03/02/2012 02:16 pm
There are a lot of things in the web change because of panda updates, perhaps it become a way to make the web clean and free from spammers and frauds.