STRAP IN- the Next Panda update is here and targets webspam and spinning.

Thanks for highlighting this change Mike. I have just come back from the pub to notice a fairly significant amount of my sites have been dropped waaaay down in the SERPS and i had not done anything to them.

I guess i am now paying the price for submitting spun articles with anchor text back to my sites.

Oh well, onwards and upwards!

Hopefully this algo update also works on the 10+ methods/combos of "negative seo etc" we've seen currently being discussed on this forum and other major IM forums as well.

Wonder if they'll slip some other changes in with this one that they won't release publicly hmm

Pretty much

"While we can't divulge specific signals because we don't want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics."

Sounds like some new secret ingredients are being put into the sauce

Yep...I just linked to this over in the thread below. Fingers crossed that they get it right and kill off lots of my crap competition.

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...nge-today.html

Lost all 1st page rankings on my 10 authority adsense sites today. These did have quality content on them. Had 1000 word articles written by a high end writer, had video and other media on all pages. They were 20-50 pages in length. I did use spun content for backlinks so that's probably what did them in. F__K SEO. Im done.

Forget waiting a few days. The rest of my sites that survived the previous Panda attacks have dropped to where search engine traffic probably won't find them. This has nothing to do with quality of content (I can write well, and did).

Rather, I guess, it has to do with using a system for ranking that worked really well for a while and now does more harm than good. Sh*tballs. Still, Matt Cutts can go...ahh, forget it. I'm sure enough of you hit by this can finish that sentence for me.

Well, time to do things differently.

Yes - although the report said days, Cutts just confirmed by twitter that the algo has now been pushed out.

3%? haha, this one is gonna be bigger than Panda.

Wow...I was always warned about spinning and quality content vs quantity content. Slow and steady and doing it right keeps on winning.

Reading Google's posted examples of what they are looking for though, it seems to me that it would possibly BE EASIER to negatively affect websites by linking to them on spun garbage properties in that manner?

The examples they give, someone could just spin unrelated articles into gibberish and then target their competitors website using optimized anchor text that the "target" site is clearly targeting, posting on tons of properties the same way en masse? Hope it doesn't actually make things worse and easier to go through negative seo processes, because it almost seems like it could based on those two examples and reading further into things lol...

It's like Google says "Oh yeah guys, in the midst of a bunch of other ways people are actively abusing visible loopholes in our link-reliant algo, and doing this now in record numbers, here's two other specific examples that we are currently on a rampage looking for sites with these types of backlink patterns..."

I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing though, so maybe I will be pleasantly surprised with the outcome of all this who knows...

Why is google so public about everything? I think they're spinning their wheels and getting desperate. Engaging in fear tactics more than actual substance.

WTF?

Google makes no sense to me. Several of my authority sites just dropped out of the rankings.

Apparently original and constant content is not the right answer.

Panda hit longer tail search results that article directories and stuff were soaking up. This is hitting highly SEO'd results, ie those with commercia intent. This is going to be extremely negative for search for these terms since what's ranking now is going to be on average quite dated.

I'm guessing this 3% will be as a practical matter the biggest change in search results ever.

3% is a LOT of sites. It may not sound like much initially. But it's HUGE.

Should be a "fun" next couple of days.

ROFL! Search G for "new shoes" -- look who's #1:

Interpretive Simulations - NewShoes - (Intro to Marketing, Marketing Principles)

They have GOT to be kidding. Somebody needs to hit CTRL-Z over at the 'plex.

Hello Ladies & Gentlemen,

My sites took a massive nosedive today. All I can do is smile and laugh, this has happened before, and I will be back.

As long as there is a system, it will be gamed.

When searching for "bicycle wheels", you would expect 100% ecommerce sites that sell the wheels, right?

Search G for "bicycle wheels" and you'll see:

#1 - ecommerce site
#2 - wikipedia entry for "bicycle wheel"
#3 - ecommerce site
#4 - ecommerce site
#5 - A book at Amazon ("The Bicycle Wheel")
#6 - ecommerce site
#7 - ecommerce site for bicycle parts in general (the ranking page has nothing to do wih the wheels though)
#8 - ecommerce page selling bicycle wheel stands -- not bicycle wheels
#9 - ecommerce site
#10 - page out of 1995 (literally) that has articles about bicycle wheels

Very poor results indeed.

Check out Flippa. Lots of auctions are like deer caught in the headlights.

LOL says the guy pushing high PR blog networks...

I dont have many sites but the few I have took a dive, and then came back higher than before. Least thats how it looks. I use unique article rewrites in my backlinks but they are spun.... so oh well. I am just glad I dont have big money sites up yet.


The SEO game is risky... I am gradually taking more time away from SEO and backlinking and placing it all on the front end with keyword research. Now I seriously do keyword research 70-80% of the time and only pick stuff where my page basically goes to the top of google by default.

No big loss.

Sometimes you have to take out the trash.

I had 2 (out of 100) sites that took a dive. Both were (very short, brandable) EMDs. They were also the two highest quality sites I have.

One of them lost impressions. The weirdest thing is that one of them gained 300% impressions since Thursday ... but it was for every non-relevent page on the site. Privacy policy, about, contact us, (other topic) categories, (other topic) tags, and site-map pages which no one is going to want to click through to because they clearly aren't relevant and shouldn't be showing up in the SERPs at all. (Usually I no-index most of these pages, but must have missed it on this site.)

Most of my lower quality sites have increased in rankings/traffic slightly.

It's like Google looked at all my sites and decided to pick the least relevant and/or lowest quality pages to spam the SERPs with.

Google is trying to downplay the "over-optimization update" now, but it seems to be helping sites/pages that don't use keywords much in their backlink profiles and/or onsite. The only problem with that is of course that sometimes keywords are useful to use to address a specific topic ...

This is like a quarantine, the ones you see in the movies.

Google's not just mass exterminating the 'zombies', but even the clean ones with a little bit of red in their eyes from not getting enough sleep.

I'm just trying to pinpoint what is across all my sites that triggers all to drop in the SERPs at once. I'm assume that there has to be a common thing among them in order for all of them to drop off all at once. The only thing I can see so far is all my sites were EMD and that is the most common thing among them. Sites that I had not worked on for a while or did not build backlinks too got hit just like ones that I had been building backlinks.

So if that is the case then it might not be an issue with backlinks, but maybe onsite structure since all of these are EMDs, used the ClickBump theme, and had about 1% kw density for each page that was using it's keyword.

I don't think you have anything to worry about as long as you post high quality and unique content. Blog networks that use only the highest quality hand written content are flourishing right now.

And round and round we go.

But Google doesn't tell the working style.I mean which is effective for improving keyword ranking. Google already said that we judge the off page optimization not you so, how we judge our off page strategies is working good

Yeah, I read about that on a thread at TrafficPlanet.com. That's just pathetic. It's like AltaVista just before it died.

Hopefully the next few days will sort out some of the most egregious mistakes.

Damn Google got me good this time while I kind of survived the other updates (only 1 little drop before but that had purely to do with the deindexing of blog networks) my >50k exact keywords went from top3 to top 50 this night. Although this costs me around 200 euro/month I've already heard much worse stories of mid-sized companies being hurt by this.

As I check the rankings for my site more then anything I have a pretty good picture of the first page printed in my head and it looks a lot different, only #1 and #2 remained stable and they have only very few links (although nr1 is a massive PR6 authority site) and nr2 is there since the beginning of the internet it seems with a few dozen legit links.

Got lost of words when I saw 3 of my 10 websites losing rankings. From page 1 to page 11. I don't what to say but work hard again to take these sites back to their previous position. Sigh.

Some jacked up results that is for sure. Irrelevant. Lots of local businesses not showing up for local searches and irrelevant sites in their place. Sad.

Just checked all my clients sites. All doing well and are still in top positions. Seeing some weird stuff show up that I have never seen before. Angies List being one of those.

Yellow page and directory results are back in full force.

This is gonna be an interesting ride for everyone to say the least. I guess we just sit back, see where we land in the coming days and go from there.

Another lousy example:

Keywords: "cheap purses"

Check these page one results:

High Quality Replica Bags - USA UK Canada Australia Europe UAE

Book Now

Shuffletown | Joe Henry

Two of the three show titles that don't match the actual page titles (the last two), and the two pages have NOTHING to do with the query.

Great update . I wonder why i saw a massive increase in my serps this morning . also all of my competition must have been pushed down
As my pic below shows. this is all you will be doing unless you change your outlook on Seo completely

Yes, quite a few of my sites hit too - im currently building my own blog network (hope google isnt reading this!) so hopefully will be immune in the future - time will tell.

The thing that i find amusing is that googles catchphrase of 'displaying the most relevent results' etc and its mission to return quality content and sites in its search results is sooo way off the mark. SEO is always going to dominate the search results - we just change when google does... Interesting times!

It's a bit early to know the permanent effect on our sites. It always takes a few days - maybe more - for these updates to settle in. Strap in and hold tight.

My new strategy that I just implemented is holding up really well, saw most of my sites go up ironically

Omg. I don't even understand this C&AP. I lost 5 of my sites last year March, I left them till march this year and a reconsideration request got them back in index after rehauling all sites from scratch. This morning.....nada, zilch, all rankings gone. Ok, google I get the f****** HINT. lol Can't believe those guys, they make no sense at all.

I'm already selling my "how to unoptimize your website with one keystroke" e-book ...

All my fresh sites that I have sitting in the que have finally shown up in the serps! No backlinks and no content is king! lol.

Here's another example of poor results

quality backlinks

2nd result is a blank Wordpress site that was created on 18th April.

MY sites have been punished!!

I`m pretty new to this, survived the last panda updates (thrived even!)

Has google messed up here? Are they likely to "undo" some of whats just been done, or do people think this is it now and we have to try to understand whats been done and optimise accordingly?

I have seen an increase in my serps when checking through my rankings today. A lot of the competition ahead of my site were EMD's, which are now ranking below my site for most keywords. Still early, so I will keep an eye on it before coming to a conclusion.

so what does this mean, emd's dont have any value's at all cus its to do with keyword stuffing?

what exactly is keyword stuffing so an article of 500 words with 2% keyword density is keyword stuffing??

There is no way this update will stick. They are ranking irrelevant tag pages of mine lol.

A site a follow that ranks for competitive legal terms using exclusively off topic blog comments is gone. So I'm assuming anchor text not related to page = bad.

Google slap day by day My site ranking go down Page 1 to Page 3
i m make good back link Low obl but google slap once again every time panda update google changes my ranking

i have the same problem, my keywords has been dropped from page one to page 8 and so on, don't know what to do now, adding more unique content and optimizing onsite seo to see if its going to help, after that will do some backlinking

Lets bypass google and launch the 'Warrior Search Engine" - all warriors who invest are guaranteed page one rankings. Matt Cutts blog will NOT be indexed!

I have just checked one of my test sites that has ranked on page 1 for the last 3 years.

It only has about 6 pages of good quality original content.

But it was a keyword rich domain (exact match) and had useful stuff for a visitor.

To get it on to page 1 I set up about 20 web 2.0 properties mainly with 1 or two pages of content. These had a mix of spun and slightly rewritten stuff.

Then over a few month time period I sent out a few Article Marketing Robot blasts and used these to link back to the web 2.0 sites.

These links contained some keyword phrases but I definitely made an effort to mix up the anchor text and even had many plain "click here" type links.

Some of the web properties were randonly linked together and in no way was it a simple link wheel. I did my best to disguise things.

The result today?

My site was hammered from the front page today. It is now ranking at 200 or so instead of 3 or 4.

So clearly google's algorithm has cleverly figured this out and taken action.

A sad day for the little guys...

Sam


P.S. - As mentioned in another thread one of our money sites was chewed up and spat out by panda. No "blackhat" or anything like I mentioned above was done and it also suffered very heavily.

It could be time to get a white-collar job and join the masses again and go and owrk for a Big Brand :-(

I think a viable long-term way forward is to make sites with link bait on them.

Link bait can be anything that makes users link to your site. Content lockers for downloads that only unlock after twitter post or facebook share, funny pictures and anything else that people would share on their own.

Well one thing seems certain, as far as I can tell, EMD's will get you penalized with this update. All my EMD sites are gone. The upside, my internal pages my begin to rank better. Silo structured sites definitely make alot better sense now in light of the new update.

i think google's on weed today.

i notice that the main KW i was rankin high for has disappeared completely from the index BUT all the wordpress tags are still ranking??

Re the soon to be created 'Warrior Search Engine" , when you search for 'google' it will return:

Your search - google - did not match any documents.

Ha, google has really done some prople over with this. Wikipedia is ranking in position number 5 for insurance in the UK! My emd has dropped from first to 7th, although it has been replaced by a one page, small articel emd.

I think a big focus is on spun content as mentioned and link relevance more than ever.

This update is totally SUCK!

Rank #1 for "make money online" keyword

make

One of my larger sites has really been hammered.

Interestingly, its pages with links that have been knocked back the most, pages without links appear pretty stable - some have even improved!

I don't think EMD has anything to do with it. It is a coincidence that most EMDs were made purposely for targeting certain keywords and most of them were built on exact same backlinking strategies most used. The same spun content/article directories etc. However I believe this update is wrong as it has weeded out most of the high quality sites that a reader would really care about reading.

I think this time google has gone way too far in trying to control the spam, most people who create the high quality content that people really want to read and it helps them give what they were looking for ARE the ones who know about SEO and their high quality content are SEOed, from onpage to offpage.

What is the end goal of google? Penalise people get backlinks to get their site up? Or improve the SERPS with better quality for a reader? I think Matt Cuts or whoever is doing this has completely neglected the quality content part and is just focusing on trying to stop people from building links or in short trying to kill the whole IM space. This will kill google as well in the long run because their quality of searches are going down as well.

This will also promote more SEO services now, but the only difference is SEO services will be bought by people against their competitiors than to their own site now. People who give SEO services will still earn, but the wrong way. Way to go google :/

Suggestions....

I think if google really don't want people to do spammy backlinking etc, I think google should just devalue those links rather penalising. Devalue the low quality stuff and reevaluate the site. It does not happen today no matter what say. Once google thinks your site has unnatural backlinking, they destroy your SERPS and send you down 50-100 pages. Will discounting some bad quality links send you so much down? I'm sure you ranked higher than that the first time you created content and it had no backlinks than now when you have a mix of high quality backlinks and low quality. If google just devalues low quality or whatever it considers not effective/unnatural, one could just see some downtake in rankings, not completely out of the whack as we see today.

Push all the sites that have done backlinking/over optimisation and you'll find that all the quality content that a reader wants has disappeared. That will destroy Internet Marketers as well as Google.

There won't be any rollbacks, lol. The update is still in progress, give it a couple days. It's a complex algo and a huge database they have to work with.

If you're seeing your tags pages rank instead of posts, it probably means your articles are over-optimized or keyword stuffed.

The new SEO = Negative SEO....im starting my WSO now...and NSEO biz...looking for a partner...

My site has gone up loads in the SERPs over night.

Another unrelated result for "replica bags"

Current news | politics, business, health, sports

I noticed this site has too many Replica related tags in right sidebar.

I see this site instead --> pack148.net

on Page 1. It has NO where mentioned "replica bags" lol

Are things starting to settle?

I am not seeing anymore shuffling in my niche

I got a feeling (and I predicted this a few months ago) that EMD's are definitely being targeted.

Have a look at the SERPS.

You'll notice deeper URLS listed, where the keywords might appear six directories in.

You'll also note the additional weight given to LSI.

*Some of the urls dont even contain the keyword.

Actually these search results.....they look "old"

Like they did back in 2009/10.

Anyone else finding that?

I have a thin content, EMD site full of uncloaked affiliate links and adsense ads that has remained #1 for many overly optimized keywords.

I have 2 sites full of useful, original content that other sites link to on their own, that were destroyed in the rankings.

My speculation is this has much more to do with the backlink profile, not the onpage content.

The two sites I lost had about 50% web 2.0 links and blog network posts, in addition to high PR links and legitimate editorial links. None of the links came from pages with spun conent. Though many of the web 2.0 links had backlinks from spun content.

Google warns about linking from bad neighborhoods, and at this point I suspect that is coming to mean any kind of low quality blog network(that they've identified) and maybe even web 2.0 properties that have spammy backlink profiles.

Im looking at these search results and Im seeing page after page of big companies filling the top 10 results.

What happened to "ma and pa sites" being able to compete.

What BS.

I was reading through the WF yesterday and saw a thread about this, then I got an email from Jon Leger with some actual examples, then after reading a few more threads on here I see a pattern. It seems like these algo changes lately are really weighing heavy where you get your links from, with little regard about authority, age, content. I agree that it is still all about the links however with a big twist. Many of the links you once believed were good are now crap so we must now hunt down the best links and secure them for link building. Also it seems like GA and WMT aren't helping either so alternatives are needed for them as well.

Heres an interesting search...

Try this one..

Go to Google.com, type in "dog training"

Check the 2nd page.

www.senuke.com

WTF?????

Tell you what, if EMD's hold less weight in the search engines, there's gonna be a LOT of pissed off domainers out there.

Can someone please answer these questions...

I did not follow the last updates this closely, i am sure that some of you did...

1. were any of the updates this bizarre...with the page 1 results etc...
2. Did it take a few days for everything to settle
3. Did you have any sites involved that dropped, then a few days later bounced back?

Love this and other Panda Update

As a web developer i was never in favor of Using Spun Content for link building as its total crap. I read few patents from Google and i know that soon Spun content will be slapped badly and same happens


I am happy none of my Page has lost its ranking and they stepped UP few spots in Google.

Every morning i wake up and find my blog full of scapebox idiotic comments that consumes a lot of my time to trash.

Let these shady tactics to spam this beautiful internet be punished a bit more severely so that we live in a healthy Internet Ecosystem and not in a spun crap.


Thanks Google and i will wait for more such steps

Hows this?

Tim Carter from http://www.AsktheBuilder.com is on the Google Blog complaining that his site has tanked LOL it can't get any better than this.

Here check out his spammy backlinks;

www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/AsktheBuilder.html

I thought I may as well barrel in here like everyone else. I have no explanation really but I have lost roughly half of my 20,000 visits a day traffic starting yesterday late afternoon.

My site is 2600 pages of mostly original or high quality and low distributed PLR. The pages are all high quality in my eyes and my pages are highly keyword optimized. Backlinks are spread across all different kinds although I dropped doing any of the low quality kinda spammy stuff like forum profiles and Pligg backlinks around a year ago.

I never got hit by a panda update, I did get hit by the ads to high (or was it content too low) on the page and my ranks shot right up after I redid my page layout.

As I have moved towards better quality backlinks and more focussed content I have seen my traffic go up over the last year and especially that last couple months so this has really been a reality check for how I need to do better in the social space as well as looking at my link type diversity.

Does anyone really think that this change has to do with content or is it all about backlink sources?

So I'm wondering why didn't my clients' sites get hit at all here when I used the same backlink campaigns as I did for my EMD Adsense sites? 1 is for local service niche keywords and the other is general 2 word keywords that is not localized. Those rankings did not move at all, but all my sites took a dive.

I mean if G was looking at my backlinks then these sites would have been hit as well and not just my own sites. So it may be with something onpage that triggered a drop across all my sites. It's just weird to me that every site gets hit in one big wave unless there is common thing present in all of them.

What do you guys think?

Honestly I don't know wtf is going on.
Same link building strategies - but only few sites effected.
Unique content that passed copyscape, not spunned.

WTF GOOGLE

Did a query on "search engines" and I don't find G in the top 10. Looks like the algo isn't working the way it is intended to be.

thanks for the update

I did english spun content for my dutch website, so obvious my keywords were dutch inside the Englihs article. My site heavily tanked. I am 100% sure that is the exact reason as Matt showed in his blog as it matches 1 on 1.

You think we're panicking, imagine what it's like at Google right now.

"Guys, do a search for 'make money online'. Oh my..What the he11 did we do???"

I read an article today with the theory that those who aren't spending money through Google, will likely to have their sites penalized eventually. Does sound far fetched but is there any truth in it?

No, I didn't spend a dime and my sites are intact.

Kinda goes to show how people aren't building REAL businesses. 95% are living off the 'passive income' dream of putting up a few websites with backlinks, gaming the search engines and thinking that's enough. It obviously aint.

SeoMoz is ranking #16 for keyword "dog snuggies"

Let me knock you out of you seats!
According to my source.. next Algo update will crack on over optimization in a way of having to many high quality back links.
So if you happen to have high ratio of high quality BL in your portfolio.. sorry it is not going to help you getting out of this dry..
Almost everyone will be affected.
The only safe websites for now are those with "under construction" signs, with zero BL.
Just make sure your page title is in line with what you are trying to rank for.
Sit tight and watch competition dropping of the top rankings while your empty page rise to the top of the 2nd page.
That is correct, top of the 2nd page.
The whole 1st page is now reserved to paid customers.

Simply discounting links from blog comments, forums/forum profiles, bookmarking sites, article directories would get the job done for google. Instead they have to complicate it up

I would not panic too much if your site dropped. The results for a "make money online" search on Google lead me to a blank Blogger page in the page 1 #1 position. Assuming Google would not leave a blank page in a number 1 positon, I have to believe that there will be more movement over the next few days.

About half of my sites have taken a hard hit this week. Hoping that things will settle out in the right direction. Most of the ones hit have been locally optimized sites. I think it's also interesting that I have received about 8 coupons for Google Adwords this week in my email. All good for NEW Adwords accounts.
Guess they knew my local sites would be page 50 and beyond.
I really feel frustrated about this update.

So i know the update is still busy but if you ask me it is looking more and more like it is going to stay this way or close to it.

Has anybody tried buying a new domain name and just posting all the old articles on it and remove the old domain ? I remember reading somewhere that someone did this with one of the previous updates and it helped allot.