Monday, April 11, 2011 at 12:00 PM
Over a month ago we introduced an algorithmic improvement designed to help peoplefind more high-quality sites in search. Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic.
Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.
Based on our testing, we’ve found the algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality. If you believe your site is high-quality and has been impacted by this change, we encourage you to evaluate the different aspects of your site extensively. Google's quality guidelines provide helpful information about how to improve your site. As sites change, our algorithmic rankings will update to reflect that. In addition, you’re welcome to post in our Webmaster Help Forums. While we aren’t making any manual exceptions, we will consider this feedback as we continue to refine our algorithms.
We will continue testing and refining the change before expanding to additional languages, and we’ll be sure to post an update when we have more to share.
170 comments:
I presume there is some attempt in the algorithm to account for a search level Denial Of Service, by people deliberately out to harm a site by marking it as bad? With the number of trojan infected machines out there I'd have thought it would be relatively easy for bot-herders to instruct machines to carry out certain searches and down-vote.
cool... it will make google will be more get relevance and best result, specially for local.
Thanks for letting us know. Do you have any stats on the % of UK queries affected?
My personal perception is that there are more of these lower quality sites that Panda affected in the US and so the % impact will be smaller in the UK but I'd love to see some data on this if you have it?
Also - for anyone affected I wrote a post about what to do about this update here:
http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/googles-pandafarmer-update-what-to-do-about-it/
Looking good for quality publishers!
I'm off to Bing...atleast they are giving truthfull search results
How Answers.com escaped this update is beyond me.
You aren't making any manual exceptions... But we have to assume that Cult-of-mac was a manual exception.....
Amit,
You should read:
Why Panda is the New Coke
Google has confused social networking with quality.
Morris
Will this change help weed out sites that do nothing but scrape and steal other sites' content? For example, stackoverflow.com has a ton of original content. yet Google often leads me to other sites that simply copy the SO content. Will this change help?
How will this effect sites with good information that simply aren't popular (for political, philosophical, or aesthetic reason)? I could imagine some credible sites getting hammered by the masses even though the site is offering quality information.
Imagine if Galileo had a website which said the Earth wasn't the center of the universe... that site would have been blocked by all sorts of people -- the vast majority -- but the information provided would still have been sound.
And couldn't this system be another tool for the powerful to "game" so as to bury their competitors?
iamaelephant
I see the same thing: quality sites hit and scrapers coming top for their original content.
Those sites have removed (noindex) all pages I can think might be deemed low quality.
Then I see ehow unaffected with untold thousands of useless category pages.
Strange days.
I wrote a Panda Survival Guide here and will update that as new info comes in:
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/google-panda-farmer
I'm seeing huge changes in Google.com SERPS for my US based website. We saw a 20% increase in traffic during the US Panda update.
Why are we seeing a huge drop now from US traffic?
I have to say, I think there is a HUGE conflict of interest here... price comparison sites clearly being hit by the update. Yet there is a Google product that provides this service which has a link at the top of every Google search!!!
This is where all competitors start employing 'block and negative feedback' agencies to manipulate SERPs methinks. Oh dear!
We've noticed the return of the word SCAM to Google Autocomplete. Was this the result of today's update? A week ago SCAM had been removed, but apparently it's back and we're trying to figure out why. Any insight is appreciated:
http://www.seosteve.com/news/google-removes-scam-from-autocomplete.html
when will these update will launch in india?
Search for a telephone number and look at all the garbage you get. A few years ago you only got a few pretty relevant hits. Not anymore.
Yes i am also really really worried we will see, a lot of "smart" people deliberately out to harm a site by marking it as bad.
Thanks Google! Searching for local 'Jersey' websites has always been complicated by references to 'New Jersey'.. Not any more though - the relevant side of the Atlantic Ocean is now taken into account :)
Lets hope some of the quality sites that were innocently tossed out get back into the index soon.
Congratulations
the quality of services has improved very well in Blogger
Thanks
Google News used to offer a diverse system of intelligent news and analysis but it has sadly become just another mouthpiece for monotonous disinfo regurgitated word for word by all the same conformist media sources. If I want regurgitated propaganda from the news wires, I can just turn on CNN!
only shitty sites on first 3 pages at least on adult sites.. i think is the worst change ever
now, google will show relevance result
Not good algorithm. I make a blog with original content and write from my opinion. It's original not plagiarism from other content, and 5 days ago, Google has banned my site. not only 1, all my site has been banned. I don't know why, I don't make a Black Hat or other cloaking SEO method. I don't use any seo service or software.
Stay at this blog, sometimes my blog have copied from other website that using WP Robot plugin. Sh*t, the copied content got better ranking in SE than my post. What's happen? Does Google are fair here? Where is the best algorithms that you say? Not on myself, my friends are have some problems like this.
*sorry for the grammar and spelling mistake, English is not my language.
That is great news! So technically, a total of 14% of US Based Search Results have now been affected.
Since then we’ve
gotten a lot of positive
responses about the change.
What the....?
Are you guys planning to roll out the update to non english queries as well? Please tell me that we can expect is soon!
I can't imagine postivi feedback. This is bad change in algorithm. I can give a live example. Check this query 'Hindi Songs'. The page 1, 2 and 3 have all sites with little or no content. Some of those sites are spam sites with 10+ ads and 100+ link on one page. My site (http://isongz.com/) which has 100% unique content, no outgoing links and and well defined sites which ranked at top for last 3 years has been thrown to page 4. I always though that i was the only who works this hard for his site and i am suffering with a loss of 90% of traffic.
I have faced a lot of problem in keyword ranking for one of the website.
My another website used to rank in top 3; now it is in bottom 3 :(
Need to do some changes
Lets see what happens.
When will Google Place pages be algorithmically penalized? They seem to go against everything Google are trying to filter out with this update (scraped, non-unique content, etc) yet they are right at the top... Or are these pages part of a different algorithm?
Unfortunately, in my primary keyword "ldii" I still find poor content sites, that long / more than two years not updated, abandoned copy content at page 1 of SERP.
i just did a quick research and found that some of the "spam content" website was coming at very high. are you certain this is a positive change?
It's often copy contents appear earlier at Google SERP than the original one. Sometimes the search result really hurts me.
honestly..thnx alot because this new algorithm has given me more views and I am grateful that it is able to see that what I write are always genuine and are of good quality (:
MY Blog sarkarijob.co.cc is worst hit by this update
From India I am the first to suffer from it.My site is completely de-indexed from Google.Previous day I have 4200 UV(3700 Organic)
Worst Hit
Aman, in my opinion the algorythm used to rank music (& lyrics) sites works under different features. Perhaps lots of manual and 'quality' raters involved along with heavy linkbuilding and unnoticed linkschemes. But this is only my guess.
Great! My personalised gifts company with 100% unique content and images is now outranked by a website primarily selling soap and secondary selling personalised gifts from a dropshipper!
Looking forward to the changes. Anything that reduces poor-quality content creation should be welcomed, if it works in practice of course.
Google Panda Update. It is truly a win for brands & companies that chose to invest wisely in their online presence - I welcome the change.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Although I still see the largest low-quality website on the Internet come up in searches; YouTube. Hang on, don't they also have a lot of duplicate content as well!! I wonder how Google deasl with it's own low-quality websites.
Just as Garp said, I'm all for the algorithm change from last month except for incorporating user feedback.
It's too easy to game the system. Whether through some sort of script like that forum spamming stuff, or those people who are able to generate facebook likes.
I hope you guys get rid of it, improve how analytics measures bounce rates and use that as a better signal for quality.
I can easily seeing my competition not playing by the rules and don't think Google needs to be easier to game.
There seems to be a lot of wasted effort in algorithmically blocking the content farms. They will grow-up again.
I am confused by this rollout. The first rollout lead to a large increase in traffic (20 %), but now I see a dramatic drop after the recent rollout (40%) ?
Why would there be 2 such differing results for the same rollout? Not sure how to proceed given the vast differences in results from presumably the same algorithm change?
Hi Everyone,
I have a site that is 100% original content and saw a massive drop in traffic. I did have adsense running "above the fold" and I have some amazon "widgets" in places but I would not consider my site to be bogged with ads.
Adsense, Amazon, and Kontera are my income as this is a branded affiliate blog that is updated 3-4 times per day with original and very helpful content, so I'm wondering how/what is wrong with my site?
http://www.tcgeeks.com
I have he same question as Garp, we got hit by a DOS attack a week ago...and were able to mitigate fairly quickly... post this algorithm change our site dropped 50% in traffic and rankings... and we have lost all of our major rankings.. Is this potentially due to the DOS down votes? We have always followed the google best practices for a good site, do not buy links, serve ads, duplicate content...anything...our site is coffeeforless.com, please help!
Shane,
You have 5-6 ad units on your site, not spammy, but still too many. I would do 1 of these 2 things:
1) Kill Kontera (terrible user experience) AND the lowest adsense unit
2) Kill the bottom 300x250 AND the lowest adsense unit. Replace with related articles to get higher click-through.
I bet your bounce rate is about 80% based on your site format. You will actually make more money doing it this way.
Ryan
ConversionWarfare.com
Gonna be really interesting to see the overall SERPs after we let things settle down.
Thanks Ryan...
I don't see 5-6 as I can only have 3 Adsense Units on a page...I'm really curious about that. I did kill Kontera so that's all gone.
You mentioned removing those ads, but how would that make more money? Just curious?
Thanks again
Any news on when the update will be rolling out in Sweden?
Black Hat SEO - Expected this word will not repeat by implementing this Google Panda algorithm. Happy to welcome this algorithm
This is a good update for everyone, but I think that it is not perfect and many good sites also have been affected.. I think over the time it will be more accurate in its algo. one of my blogger blog ( smsinhindi.com) also been affected having many user content and similar sites are ranking well.
What about non english queries? :)
Interesting developments that will continue to develop. User feedback is tricky as for instance Tripadvisor shows. Companies even offer services to provide a bunch of nice comments.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hoteliers-to-take-their-revenge-on-tripadvisors-critiques-in-court-2076417.html
For those complaining about their rankings: why blaming Google first instead of checking if competitors do a better job? A good ranking is not a lifetime guarantee I think? Internet changes, so you will have to change as well.
this will surely turn down all the Black-hat SEO techniques.
and also force all webmasters to focus on content quality
Mysite has been heavily affected by the new Google Panda algorithm rollout.
Easily lose about 40 percent traffic. Any idea how to recover back the traffic.
It seems that since the Panda algorithm change, Google now considers our site JusttheFlight.co.uk as yet another low quality comparison site, when in fact Just the Fight actually serves, processes and fulfils it's customers in the same way as Ebookers, Opodo and Last Minute.
It's upsetting as we put so much time and effort making sure our customer experience is good, content is unique (and interesting) and that all web standards are strictly adhered to.
60-70% of traffic gone since Monday :-(
One of our websites was badly penalized too, and it's tough to understand why. It's the website of a software program that we develop, http://www.novapdf.com/, on which we posted articles on how to use it that were ranking very good.
Now all is gone and seems strange given that we have a pagerank of 8, a proof that we received a lot of valuable backlinks because others liked our program and subsequently articles. I really hope Google will update the algorithm to be more accurate and avoid penalizing valid websites.
Google, how about polishing your geography before trying too hard? Your Google Places keeps rejecting my store listing saying that Wellington Point, Queensland in not in Australia. "Wrong Country listed" your platform tells me. News flash, America, there's more than one Wellington on the face of the Earth.
So before acting like God, how about cross-referecing with your internal systems, first? Maps seem to get it right.
I am one of those that run a site that I feel I have made a quality one, but it has suffered badly. Almost 5 years of work, traffic dropped to unsustainable levels overnight.
I agrre with Garp the way these viruses are becoming out of control. Don't these virus creators hvae nohting better to do. I guess they would like to spend some nice quality time in prison. http://rsportscool.com/BASEBALL.html"> Baseball Training
Yea freaking nice, i was working on a blog for over 4 years and it got to top page and climbing and puf it went to 500+ spot!? And some shitty tube resutlts are showing that were made in past year, fuck google and linkbuilding and fuck seo U SUCK!
I experience something unfamiliar... some sites copy my webpage with the heading.. and now their site is ranked better than mine
I do not believe for a second that Google has had positive feedback for this. All I have read is negative.
I did some research today on search results for a number of keyword phrases. I compared Bing results directly with Google results.
The upshot? Google's results are all over the place. Pages from 2005 ranked first. First? Pages from tiny blog sites ranking in top ten. Completely irrelevant results for the search phrase. Absolutely NO 'quality' publishers on the first page for ANY of the search terms. Most pages had little content. For one particular keyword phrase, Google returned two pages from a Vietnamese language website. Not even English!!!! What the hell.
For a completely different keyword phrase, ehow.co.uk took up 90 results out of the first 100 that Google presented.
Google. If you are reading this, you have a serious problem. Because for the first time ever, I am seriously considering using Bing, because their results are relevant.
Any news on when the update will be done in Canada?
Google has released advice telling us the way to avoid being punished by the Panda Update is to find and remove low quality content from our websites. It is said that ALL the pages of a site will be punished because of the poor quality of a few pages. What if what Google sees as "low quality" is essential to the site or even user driven? For example I have a bread making website where users ask questions or want to get access to a user manual for a bread machine that is no longer manufactured. Why punish the site that answers these questions and provides pdf copies of the old user manual?
Sure, I could follow the advice being currently spouted - that I should put these pages on a separate domain, or by some SEO hocus pocus make them uncrawlable. But why should I have to do this? First, it wastes my time. Second, it forces me to unnaturally contort the website structure and delve into the dark world of SEO - hasn't Google for years been telling us to just be natural? (Advice I have followed to my own detriment.) Now Google want us to go through all kinds of html contortions because they can't figure out how to determine what is quality from on-page content. Unfortunately, an eleven year old website that has received hundreds of compliments and answered thousands of questions on how to make bread has been relegated to a non-entity.
I suppose I will force myself to do the Kabuki dance which is being forced upon me and restructure the site. But the whole time I will be thinking of the hours wasted and wonder what kind of gyrations I will have to perform in the future because the engineers at Google can not find an accurate way to upgrade the quality of their results!
@Googlers,
Any plans on adding the # of times your site has been 'blocked from my results' to your Webmaster Tools. It would help a GREAT deal in aiding websites like ours in understanding 1) how many times our site is being reuested and 2) if our efforts to reduce those complaints through UX updates are working.
Without this tool, we are forced to update and guess. Makes it hard to know if the changes we are making are actually producing the desired results.
Thanks!
With this recent update I have now officially become a Bing search user. I'm getting Thai and Chinese search results in Google.com. I just searched for a real estate query in the US and am getting Australian results. I have never seen results this poor and irrelevant.
Bye bye Google.
If you look at http://wn.com/ its all other peoples content.
Will 46 million pages indexed how is this still listed with Google?
It's good that Google is continuously updating his search algorithms; due to this user will get better search results.
Thanks Tom to provide some related remedies for this, let me go through you blog right away and see what we can do to change our SEO strategy.
Its completely taken www.deeter.co.uk out of the listings for Level switches, float switches, level sensors, continuous level sensors, 4-20mA level sensors, custom level sensors, water level sensors, liquid level sensors, tank level indicators, panel mounted displays, level controllers, a wireless sensor system, wireless sensor. We make them! How is that right?
I have seen a site that is now coming in top3 in google.co.uk but as i browsed the first two pages, the links were broken. Amazing to see and to believe is this update or degrade.
How do you protect against corruption by competitors? I read an article that brings up a very interesting point: what is to stop companies from hiring people to block competitor's sites? There are people unscrupulous enough to do just that. How can webmasters be sure that Google is returning fair results with the potential for exploitation by dishonorable folks?
I donot understand what kind of quality search upgrade this one!
I found many spammy, pure content farm sites ranking increased.
For example, all machine generated content here.
Very sadly they donot have only 1,
but 3 duplicate services
http://informe.com
http://website.informer.com
http://whois.pho.to
These are alexa 1000 sites
Collections of scraped content from all over the web that form nonsense pages and running Adsense
http://website.informer.com/darker+than+black+megaupload
http://informe.com/hey/hey_soul_sister_akkorde_ukulele/
I donot understand what kind of quality search upgrade this one!
I found many spammy, pure content farm sites ranking increased.
For example, all machine generated content here.
Very sadly they donot have only 1,
but 3 duplicate services
http://informe.com
http://website.informer.com
http://whois.pho.to
These are alexa 1000 sites
Collections of scraped content from all over the web that form nonsense pages and running Adsense
The possible change in algorithm is CTR. I guess!
Now people on AdSense Forums are complaining about 40% revenue/huge CTR drop in effect since April 12. We're losing money, too, now. And all we have is 100% original quality content we've written ourselves.
Nice algorithm indeed.
Well, I hope this algorithm includes as "quality" sites those that have been properly translated and are not the result of machine translation (which is usually crap), that should give me more work... ;)
This is the worse update that Google ever did. I have been around for 15+ years monitoring search results. The results are not even close to what searchers ar looking for.
This will be the big one for google where they will lose many searchers to the growing ( and more correct on searches) Bing.
I dont have any sites myself, and im not affected in any way by this update, but i will change my default searcheninge becourse Google simply doesnt deliver anymore what im looking for.
I wanted to comment on what Mudassar Bashir said.
Please do your homework. I have seen several examples of sites ranking high after the update, that have only automaticly generated ( read spammed) links. This is like google saying: Spam the web with xrumor and the likes and we will reward you for it.
This update does suck bad, and its not focussing on quality content for the end user. Its focussing on webmasters that work hard to gain backlinks. They want to put a hold on that, but they dont see what is happening in the actual search results.
In my own point of view, It will mislead Google search the best results because of some not cool people will try to blacklist sites to there advantage.
Good news for quality websites
OMG I can't believe it. Check for this keyword - songs.pk
and the biggest auto blogger pic50.blogspot.com (who was promoted to page 2 after Panda) is now on page 1. I can't believe it is happening. One of the most disturbing sites which is full of ads, no original content and cleary auto blog is ranking on page 1 for keyword which has more then 1 million searches in a day. Many more such examples at- http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e
which proves that Panda is more of a failure then upgrade
Hello,
Igor Ljubuncic, owner of dedoimedo.com here.
I have been affected by this algorithm change, in a negative way. 50% drop in Google search queries. My original content has been demoted, while harvesting and copycat sites have gone up.
Original content -1, scammers +1.
This is a serious blow to creativity and hard work. The end result is that I see years and years of passionate, loving work simply ignored and snubbed for no good reason. I wonder what the real motivation for the algorithm was. But this is a sad day.
My own example reflects hundreds of other reputable, high-quality sites and makes me wonder what the real value of information is. If you can't trust your search queries, then there's no point in using them.
Regards,
Igor
And the pedestal we've all placed Google on is starting to wobble a bit. When will we figure out that being so reliant on Google is dangerous and self limiting.
why is it trash junk sites like google places and youtube are not penalised? they are full of scraped junk especially places the king of all scrapers.
funny how google sites are deemed as "quality".
google has become a joke. pure hypocrites.
One of my site lost 60% visitor and other gained 80% visitors.
For me it was really what google promised. Low quality site with good SEO is the looser and quality site with almost no SEO is the winner for me.
THANK YOU GOOGLEEEEEE. for making such a good algorithm, now I dont have to work on SEO that much. And SEO will be history soon :)
Hi I have blog called
data-stage-etl-tool.blogspot.com and indexed by google.3 days before i changed url to datastage-etl-tool.blogspot.com and i again submitted new url to google. But still it was not indexed by google. Can any one tell me the reason for that.
I did any thing wrong that changing existing url name to new one by replacing hifun(-)
But same content will be there and I m posting new one every day.
Any one plz suggest me.
help needed. I want to know some detail of my blog.
Actually i have a blog with name
data-stage-etl-tool.blogspot.com
3 days before I have edited url and changed to datastage-etl-tool.blogspot.com and re-submitted to search engines. But still it was not indexed by google. I did any thing wrong . Any one suggest me thanks.
Having been a devotee of Google for many years, I have switch to Bing as a result of this fiasco.
Is Google that naive? For sure sites that are Islamic will be targeted by the "haters". I think then all Muslims worldwide will not use Google for that reason. Surely they have thought this through??
Our education site, all our own content, schools listings, online since 1999, has dropped 50% of its traffic (8000 visitors per day). The real drop didn't hit until about April 11th. We have to fire much of our little staff. :<
pretty much interested in how it will work... great step in the right direction. when would it be available in all languages?
This is cool change and it helps good quality sites get more traffic
The April 11 update is awful - when i search i get results from forums that scrape nntp and from sites republishing the content I'm looking for. The results from sites i know have the answers i seek are on the 4th or 5th page. The same search in bing brings the sites up within the top 5, if not the top result.
I consider google search useless at this point - the "new and improved" algorithm is returning crap results. For once, bing is 1000 times better.
I've never been able to say that Bing had better search results, until this April 11th update.
The march "panda" update was great. This one, not so much.
Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results
this statement from Google is not true. 95% of webmasters are crying for this update. and i am one of them.
This change has been good...only for some of us. Some of us experience loss of rankings and traffic.
Well unfortunatly your new algolorythm does not work. On my site all content is origional - and indeed many sites copy it - some rank higher - other site have less than 200 words on a subject , where I have almost 4000 covering the subject in detail.
Even origional research undertaken by our team and copied has made gains.
We use to rant p1-5 for many phrases - not on page 3-5
This is not working and it looks like the more you copy other peoples materials and have scant, low quality content - the higher you rank - a sad period for google and google search results
Yeah unless you give them tons of revenue your site is trash basically.
You notice all the sites not ranking are sites that have deep pockets and spend tons of cash with google.
The small sites that dont make much are the ones getting hit its googles way of saying pay us or get out which of course is not fair
I am a primary school teacher in a village.Most of my time spend giving education to poor resourceless children.Through fast media, i came to know about blogger.Since 2009, i am doing blogging.Through this blogging i get few dollars per month.pic50.blogspot is my blog,a few days ago google deinxing all of
my pages.In a result all my blog traffic gone to zero.Some one give google wrong information.As a result
google block my blog on its search Why.I do not know what to do ?? Some one help me please
Who give wrong information to google,
Refrences are giving below:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en&start=1880
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html
i nothing do wrong
Some one HELP me PLEASE
Really these changes are not impressive. I notice many of my client websites goes down dramatically. My own website was on first page ranking from last 2 years but now it’s on 2 pages with last ranking. You must have to find out the bugs in your algorithm now. My content are good, links are good still some website with very less content or less relevance are getting the ranking.
YOU MUST HAVE TO THINK TO CHANGE YOUR ALGORITHM NOW….
This update has really killed tech sites. I don't know if all technologies are affected, but its harder to find quality content about microsoft applications that is not on microsoft. I used to use google for all my searches - I mostly do tech searches - and all the searches for microsoft applications bring up microsoft pages first, forums finish out the top 10. I used to find sites by experts in microsoft technology with better content in the top 10. Now its microsoft sites, forums that republish newsgroup posts, and low quality blogs. Bing does much better, with the expert's sites always in the top 5, often ahead of mskb articles.
The problem here is not so much the algorithm change. It is the fact that there is absolutely nothing that can be done to fix a site. For example my bread site. BreadInfo has been on top of the rankings for many years. I have answered thousands of questions about bread, but I lost half my traffic on 11 April. I have tried lots of things to conform with what Google wants, but nothing, NOTHING is acceptable. I have tried deleting supposedly thin content pages. I have never had very many ads - no more than two per page and those usually below the fold. I have squeezed out every possiblility of duplicate content. Frankly, NOTHING works.
This is SOOOOO frustrating.
I am ready to forsake Google altogether, move my ads, etc. I have already transfered my search over to Bing.
Aaron Wall has said in his blog that your policies are creating black hats. I believe it. I myself am getting desperate.
Please, get your act together and reward those of us who are making our sites better. You are destroying a lot of good people out here.
Here is an excellent example of how useless google search is now.
I need the formula to calculate the age of an Outlook contact.
Before April 11, a search like this worked in google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=calculate+the+age+of+a+contact
(water disinfection - WTF does that have to do with age of a contact? Just because it contains the word "contact"? Useless, useless... we're back in the 80's on search results)
Same search in Bing... B-I-N-G-O
http://www.bing.com/search?q=calculate+the+age+of+a+contact
Today I went into my webmaster tools only to find that 75 of my keywords phrases were downgraded and probably drooped by Google. We have spent so much time improving our website this year and are very concerned about not just improving but maintaining the rankings we have gained at utahadvocates. In Utah personal injury attorney websites are very competitive. Please, somehow reward those of us who are making our sites better. This change could potentially destroy many good websites from everyday people just like us who are very concerned about this particular change by Google.
Long term content developers and consumer advocate sites like Npros.com seem to have been penalized, when sites that scrape and repost their content now dominate the SERPS. Most obvious is that WordPress sites that promote dubious marketing programs that have been blocked from advertising via Google Adwords now stack the search results if you search for unbiased info on a particular company.
Why good, long term sites that have been playing by the rules got swept up in this algorithm is something I would have expected Google to anticipate, or at least have a method for re-evaluating. It seems that at leats in one case Matt Cutts intervened somehow on behalf of a Mac site. Someone else suggested that sites using older page or data formats like ASP were unilaterally downgraded. No proof of that yet, but WordPress seems to be the new format of choice for great results in search.
Ive actually seen "niche" sites get dropped from the results only for parked domains to take a higher ranking than these sites... poor update google, why us discountemuboots.com ranking highly all of a sudden.
not impressed this time google
Personally, I do not believe that these updates are achieving what they set out to do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it has been an enormous fail!!
There is far too much reliance on automated processes to assess quality and not enough manual intervention.
Google also seems ignorant to attempts by competitors to harm rival sites and are not prepared to provide any feedback to webmasters as to why sites have been de-indexed.
Spammy sites still reign supreme as their webmasters always seem to be one step ahead of Google. The rest of us "normal" webmasters, who simply want to provide quality content, are relegated to the rubbish heap!!
All this is very important for those who write articles of interest and not copied. In my blog where I write articles for blogspot blog I have noticed an improvement. This means cleaning the web sites of garbage.Welcome Panda !!!!
.. On April 12th our web traffic to healthy.net had dropped appro 50%. We are talking a loss of 4k page visits a day. Our site has approx 15k pages of original and attributed content - much that has been active since 1995.
What has Google done to cause so much traffic loss that they deem so beneficial?
No one to get through to at Google. A company I used to admire, but now just one more mega-company with no ears.
Any help or thoughts are appreciated. Contact me through contact us on healthy.net
Its a good news. i hope that it will help internet users to find best information from Google search.
New Google algorithm is bad because I see more website that contains copied content now apper at the top position in google SERP after the new algorithm applied. I thinks the old algorithm is better
I really think that Google has bitten off my then they can chew with this last Panda update.
Lets take one of my sites http://www.thephonenetwork.co.uk ... I spend a fortune getting all the content rewritten for what is a strong site in the mobile phone sector here in the UK for over 3 years now. Despite the unique content , improved page speed etc the site still dropped 60% - 70% in the last panda update. Rankings are all over the show in different countries when its a UK specific site.
Anyone on here or a Google really going to let us know whats going on? I think there quality guidelines are good in practice but it doesn't seem like they really make much different after the last update.
It seems to me the big G is buying time!
Any ideas or comments anyone?
@Yasar... unfortunately, that is not happening. Well, it is, but only because the users switch to Bing. Quite a few people on technical mailing lists i belong to said they gave up on google in recent weeks because the search results are awful and Bing's are much better and more relevant. I run many searches in both and bing is always better for things i search for. Maybe non-tech searches are better, but i doubt it.. and ehow and other content farms are still coming up on top in many searches - i chuckle when these sites are top in google and 4th or 5th in bing.
One of my articles was copied as it is, now it shows as number 4 in search results and my original article is number 12
seriously if you don't know how to track the original originator of an article then don't do such updates until you understand your work well
This update sucks
The Panda update put a lot of people out of work. I know many people who work or used t o work generating high quality answers and articles for several companies. Now they are jobless. Thanks Google.
how to report a site that is scraping content & getting on top. i dont own any of the site in question - the victim and the victor.
The new Google search algorithm is useless. I am a heavy user of Google search. I search for everything from repair information on a vast array of items to music, to personal ads, to items for sale, to specific websites.
I used to be able to conduct a search with specific keywords and I could find what I was looking for in less than the first 5pages of results. Now I can't find what I need in 100 pages of results. My search techniques have not changed.
Another annoyance is that I used to be able to enter the name of a popular website, such as "ebay" or "SearchTempest" or "Craigslist". The first item in Google search when doing this used to be the site's homepage. Now, the actual homepage doesn't even come up in the results, even pages and pages later in the Google results. Instead, I get results that are irrelevant or "deeper" into the site. For example, instead of getting the ebay homepage, "www.ebay.com" as the first result, I get "www.ebay.com/something/something/something_else.
It's useless! Why wouldn't you think I want the ebay homepage when I type "ebay" in the search. From there I can navigate where I want to go myself.
No website name I type in the search box returns the homepage for the site. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm switching to something else. Enough of these ridiculous, useless changes.
I hope with this "panda", people will do understand how important is for being an orinigal, cince the world needn't a copy one... GREAT WORK!
Dunno, I'm looking at some HORRENDOUS examples of content farms - we're talking 70 blog posts with content and titles that are 90% the same, each one linking the exact same words to the exact same URL.
I sent 70 spam reports last week - it couldn't get any more obvious.
Google needs to fix this - the good guys and the consumers are losing while the spammers and scammers are winning. It's hard to convince my clients to keep taking the high road when the competitors are knocking them into obscurity with paid link campaigns and purely black-hat practices.
This is literally hurting honest business people, and I'm not talking about my business - I'm talking about the honest businesses I work with and for, who simply don't show up for relevant terms because the content farms and the sites that get the paid links come first.
It's sad, frustrating, and enough to make you angry.
Here is another example of how awful google searches are with this new "improved" search engine. I wanted to know if any of the bugs that bug me in Outlook 2010 are fixed in SP1 so I searched for "outlook 2010 sp1" (no quotes). Google results were next to useless, Bing's excellent. This is typical for tech searches.
I have a very legitimate small retail site selling clothing for 10 years. I was on the top 1st page for all my keywords and written up in magazines. I wrote all my original content that scrapers loved to take and use without my OK.
Now google has removed me from the search index and I'm worried I will go under.
I have no paid links or anything bad at all. why do we get hit and many bad clothing sites are up higher???
Очень хорошо, что в Google считают свою миссию ответственной за поддержание работоспособной и здоровой Веб – экосистемы. Это важно! Сайты с уникальным авторским содержанием должны быть ещё более высоко оценены и вознаграждены продвижением вверх в поисковой выдаче Google.
Is Google.com's SERP = Worldwide Result or US Result. This is confusing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_domains
REQUEST FOR A GOOGLE EMPLOYEE:
Please explain why my site which was created for VISITORS with unique content written by experts in the field was decimated so bad by this change?
i think google take great way to future content, i hope spam and etc can easer from google search, thank to google panda. Go go google
I am an owner of a small website that has been up and running for the past 6 years. My traffic flow was great. All of a sudden my traffic has dropped by 80%. 80% is not acceptable. It is not like I changed anything. I use to be in the first or second page of a search, now when people search all the see is the whois.pho.to in front of my url and it takes them there and not to my site. People just click off and don't come. I am totally frustrated as this is my source of income and no one seems to know what is going on. It is sickening. All you see on google search pages now is the first 3-4 lines are ads, a few search sites and then more ads on the bottom. I am not happy at all.
i wish be the best for us...:)
This change was bad for my wifes wholesale clothing business. We went from a about 2 or 3 sales a week to now 1 small sale a month. Never been this bad for years. Also found spun content which we wrote that is unreadable and out ranking us. Thanks google
This change was bad for my wifes wholesale clothing business. We went from a about 2 or 3 sales a week to now 1 small sale a month. Never been this bad for years. Also found spun content which we wrote that is unreadable and out ranking us. Thanks google
Its all very well creating these algorithms to 'improve' quality but the facts are that in many cases the opposite has occurred.
In my own niche, if I was to search for my main keyword, not only does the returned search supply sites which are clearly using black hat tactics, having run credit checks on the majority on the front page, they are actually trading whilst insolvent, some haven't been around long and are very small and unable to match the claims.
Its amazing that Google has allowed a piddly little site to claim that they are the best in the UK! Not only is the quality of their site not as Google is supposed to be looking for but they are promoting companies that supply poor quality product.
Great work Google!!!
Oh do I sound bitter, well yes I am, my site has been around for many years and is continually updated with new information and unique content, the Google tools claim that everything is fine.
With this upgrade they seem to achieved exactly the opposite and helped the 'black-hatters' and will also create problems for people expecting to find the best companies at the highest point on search returns.
According to Google Panda Update, there are quality site stay in Google raking, those site have quality unique content: but still a lot of junk content site stay in ranking: like global-opportunities.net
it come in top in Google.co.in on keyword study in UK
I don't know a lot of other website still comes in ranking.
Why do I have to wade through tons of US specific sites when I ask for sites only from the UK in the search and am using google UK. It is really annoying when I am looking for something in my own country.
it is very good for us who are already worried about content duplication. so i like this. and it will make our searches more better....
How about blogger from Asia but its blog use English language ?
This effect of the visitor ?
cause most of visitor from promote local friends (ie, facebook local friends, and other social site is mot local)
Why does Google persist in letting f'kin engineers make business decisions? All the crap is still there also such as ehow, about.com livestrong, yahoo answers...
All good websites gone from your search engine,and I am getting only torrent results on google search..
Google panda is crappy and spoiling google quality
Es muy bueno mejorar,no se si este es el mejor método..,no se que criterio se tiene para calificar si un sitio es bueno o no..,pueden existir sitios muy vistos que no aporten lo que aportan otros que no son populares..
If Google has hurt a website error, it is more than enough to criticize Google and demand the ouster Panda.
To understand how Panda works and why it was only applied to English in the first place read about "Semantic Vectors".
Google engineers do not seem to have learned from the mistakes they made at the Florida update where there were errors caused by the differences between US and UK English.
Panda is doing great . I can see the changes in the searches. But still many good websites are being hit. Google Panda needs to be foolproof. Waiting for a Better Panda algorithm.
Many specialised sites are still being hit by Panda. Lighting.com has been around since 1998. They launched a brand new site in April and have been hit badly. April and August were bad. I got them at the bottom of page 4 and before they were near the top of page 1.
Other sites which focus on LED and OLED lighting are also being hurt.
Is it time to move search engines if you want industry knowledge?
Panda still hurting good sites for particular industries and technologies.
Lighting.com has been around since 1998. They made the mistake of launching a new site in April and have been hit badly. Now show up at the bottom of page 4.
Other OLED and LED optical sites similar story.
Not there yet I'm afraid.
Yes, if you want to find anything technology, you need to use a different search engine. I don't know what google did last week, but the search quality went in the dumper. To make it worse, ehow and other content farms still made the first page while quality sites didn't.
Yes, if you want to find technology, you can't use google. I don't know what they did last week, but the quality of tech search results fell once again.
Since Panda update Google gives back a lot of garbage!!!
Have u ever used google in German? English pages mixed with German pages and you will not find what you are searching for.
Before Panda Update I found very good results.
The same in the english travel category. I'm searching for travel information about German cities and on each page tripadvisor, which gives no relevant information, no good pictures etc.!
Shame on you Google!!!
Roll back to the old good quality and forget this Panda thing!
Panda is a filter and cannot be thrown out. The fall in quality of Google after panda is not due to panda update, but because panda kicked out so many websites and webpages that to fill that gap google made tons of changes to its algorithms producing bad quality results.
And with an ever increasing load of automation, the most of Google's algorithms are working against each other - a bad design indeed.
I have a number of my own sites that were hit very badly by Google Panda in June, then recovered a lot on 27 Sept, only to be hit again on Ocy 13th. Does your analysis cover on page factors, inbound link analysis etc to help me to try to rectify issues. Be nice to get a new pair of eyes on it.
As GOOGLE says that it will penalize site with duplicate content and i says thats right but i want to know what about the sites whose content will be definitely duplicated as in NEWS site or JOBS site as one JOB listing or NEWS will be repeated over many websites. Will google give benefit to HIGHER PR site even if lower PR sites POSTED that content first. Hows google gonna rank those in search.
Article is great but i like, where visitors, so any way
Thanks,
Asad mrida
I like to think that Google panda has both pros & cons. It would check the actions of spammer, avoid the copying of original content on one hand while on the other hand there are many sites which display same information, news and explain terms that are predefined and universal which may get blocked unknowingly.
I have to say that this has completely killed at least four of my sites. Two of them completely disappeared completely. The worst part is that other sites that scrape my content are on the top now, with my content. I have lost much faith in Google. After years of following all the guidelines set forth by Google my sites are tossed out and my competitors using "my" content have won the indexing game. Its just a shame. Myself and I am sure many thousands of webmasters will evolve, but counting on Google or any single search engine will not be part of the next wave of evolution on the net for webmasters. Our own ally has shot us dead. Forgiven but not forgotten and big changes are on the horizon...
hey - the pirate bay is no longer the first site for "tpb" as keyword - what BS ist this ??? Even Bing gets it better !!
It is very useful information.
Hi Google,
This is really great ans will increase the chance to get more useful sites quickly. Sure the visitors will be happier than before.
Cheers.
Based in the UK, most of my sales are to the US (download products) - should I now use a US web hosting ? if it is based on locale.. mentioning that as since the Panda change however much new high quality info about Photoshop and Illustrator etc I add, my site seems to drift further and further down the listings - before the Panda changes, the site wasn't doing bad - since, totally wiped out.
People with copies of my stuff seem to be doing remarkably well
Our unique web site www.ShopPharmacyCounter.com was in top 3 positions for keywords Phentermine and Adipex for the past 1.5 years and suddenly on March 23, 2012 our positions dropped to 30th. This brought our business to closure. We let go of 6 full time employees, closed office and now I am back in my basement, alone trying to figure out why. NOTE: I never copied content and NEVER used any SEO/SEM techniques other that White Hat.
Page that was indexed for keyword
phentermine - http://www.shoppharmacycounter.com/t-phentermine.aspx
and page that was indexed for keyword
Adipex - http://www.shoppharmacycounter.com/t-Adipex-Medicine.aspx
What's not fare is we always worked on content. We hired researchers to write our content.
Unfortunately, when we signed up as publisher on CJ, to acquire affiliates, affiliates started copying our content and publishing it all over the web (not sure why). For some reason Google gave priority to these affiliates over us and thought that WE COPIED or own content. Also for some reason Google pushed completely spamming sites and placed these sites on our positions for keywords Phentermine and Adipex.
We completely updated our content, but nothing happens. We paid $500 per page to researcher to write even better, more unique content for these pages.
Our every attempt to contact Google was completely unanswered. Google NEVER replied to our demands to look in to it. The only message we received from Google:
Search results clicks for http://www.shoppharmacycounter.com/t-phentermine.aspx have decreased significantly.
Message ID: 593f1ceb2d67. Please include this ID in any messages you post in our Help forum.
Search results clicks for http://www.shoppharmacycounter.com/t-phentermine.aspx have decreased significantly.
Details
Message ID: 593f1ceb2d67. Please include this ID in any messages you post in our Help forum.
I am finding that the market i am in has been affected a lot more than 12% and the results coming back for the search is showing very poor quality by the sites getting the top spots. I can only say users are getting poor results which is very disapointing.
Mister Cutts Matt
My BIG Question (je suis Français)
there would not it be a problem with the sites in “.EU” in the new google algorithm?
My site (billard-cfbl.eu) has dropped since the passage of “.FR” to “.EU”
Big PROBLEM, NO
JEAN Lépine
My blog http://forumofthoughts.blogspot.com had a pagerank of 2 previously but now it's showing as 0. Is that a penalty or panda effect?
Google is now indexing WordPress sitemap.xml, robots.txt and captcha images. Is this not taking indexing a little too far?
I note that keyword searches now contain a lot of irrelevant information.
Would Google like to explain how this brings value to the user search experience.
Also why would they think that it needs to be indexed, or should it be disabled in their algorithm?
Thanks,
Mark.
Thanks for letting us know. Lets hope some of the quality sites that were innocently tossed out get back into the index soon.
HubPages is absolutely NOT a 'content farm'. The quality of their writing and informative Hubs are indisputable.
Laurel H. Rogers
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