Google Panda 2.5.2 released October 13th – Verified by Matt Cutts
Did you notice a drop in Google traffic around October 13th? Matt Cutts tweeted that there was a confirmed Panda release on the night of 10/13. This release is called Panda 2.5.2
Many people noticed their site take an even bigger dive, some didn't notice a change at all, and others noticed they appear to have a new penalty.
I'm not too sure what was updated in this version of Panda, but probably a polish of the 2.5 release.
Why do I have a traffic drop after Panda 2.5.2?
I have heard from many people that 2.5.2 seems to be more major than minor. People complain they lost 40-60% of their traffic overnight. They also say their sites are 100% pure original content, original images, original everything, and they are not sure why they were singled out. If you know your site is a good site, and you received a traffic drop from Panda 2.5.2 or any version of Panda, I would look at your backlinks. When Panda rolls out, it devalues sites it deems to be of low value. When a site is devalued, it's outbound links give out less or no SEO value. Your site could have dropped in rank and traffic because many of your inbound links were devalued.
Another thing is many webmasters are getting more careful about their links, especially since Panda has been released. They are doing anything they can to ensure they are within Google's quality guidelines. Many of your links could have also been turned into a nofollow. Nofollow in addition to devalued inbound links would definitely cause you a traffic drop.
Google +1 Improves Rankings – And now you can buy them!
Google has been quick to let people know that if you have your visitors click on the +1, it can help your rankings in Google. Google is tired of seeing Facebook Likes on all these pages, and while some people have said that having Facebook likes can be a direct correlation to higher rankings, it's simply not true. With Google's feverish hate for Facebook, the last thing it wants to do is to encourage people to click on Facebook likes and use Facebook in order to help gain rankings in Google. So what does Google do? They release a competitor to the famouse Facebook like called Google +1. By clicking on the +1 in the search results, or on web pages, you are essentially voting for that page, and therefore Google will rank pages higher based on user interaction. Great idea. Except this is already falling into the hands of spammers.
Introducing Plussem. This company is actually selling +1s! Not only do they sell them extremely cheap (50 for only $9.99), but they have some interesting ways of doing this so it looks natural. The company works with people who have unique Google accounts that are phone verified. Each +1 comes from a real person and not a bot, and the person maually goes to Google search, finds your URL, and clicks on +1. Since these are real people, they all have unique and distinct IP addresses. They don't all do it at once, so it gives it a more natural feel.
Here's a red flag though. Your site has no +1s. Then over a week it gets 50, and then no more +1s again after that. If I was Google, I would flag this as potential spam. This is going to be exploited by spammers, but it's a normal thing nowadays. Google will release rules and algorithms and spammers will just find ways around them.
Would be interesting to see if plussem gets banned. All Google needs to do is to have a spam team that creates an account, and looks at which sites bought this service and ban them. Easy way to get rid of spammers.
Post Panda SEO – How to optimize after Google Panda Update
The Google Panda update has many webmasters scratching their heads. After many years of having a quality website, getting high authority links, and creating unique compelling content, the Google Panda update rolls out, and takes with it half of their organic search traffic. Ouch.
In February 2011, Google launched it's Panda Update. The update was designed to get more quality into their search results by removing websites that they determine - through a series of algorithms - to be high quality. It's named the Panda update after one Google engineer that has the nickname of Panda, and came up with this idea. I'm all for higher quality in the Google search results, but this update missed it's mark. The result was that while it did remove a lot of spam from the Google search results, it also took with it a lot of good sites, and pushed up a lot of bad sites. It's a mess.
There has been lots of discussion around the internet from concerned webmasters on what to do to bring their traffic back. Many of them have tried everything and have not regained their rankings. The point of this post isn't to talk about the Panda update itself, but rather trying to determine what the Panda update was going after, since Google is very secret about it.
After doing a lot of research, and speaking with a lot of people, I am going to try and debunk some myths, and give my opinion on my observations through my sites as well as some customer sites.
Panda Update Myths
I keep hearing things such as The Panda update targeted Adsense sites to such extreme thoughs as the Panda update targeted only sites that have dark backgrounds. The fact is that the update did not target only sites that have Adsense, it also targeted E-Commerce sites. It also didn't target a specific background color - let's be realistic. It's not one specific target that people hope to fix in a second and regain their rankings. It's much deeper than that.
It's a site wide penalty
Wrong. Just because many of your pages were devalued doesn't mean it's site wide. On many sites I work on, lots of terms still rank high even through the site took a 30-50% traffic hit. Take a look at your site and look for how many thin pages you have. I know many people generate tons of thin pages with little to no content so they can rank for long tail. However, how many of these pages actually rank? You're diluting your site with garbage pages.
People forget the rule that the general rule of thumb is the amount of PR you have is proportional to your Google allotment. What this means is that if you have a PR10 site, you can bet that every url on your site will be indexed and cached. If you have a PR1, and 1 million generated pages, you can except only a few thousand of thoses pages to be indexed and ranked. Grow your site proportional to your page rank. People can argue that page rank means nothing, but it's an easy measure for an overview site status.
Panda update was to promote big brands
This isn't true overall. Many of the sites that still rank high are smaller sites that are simply better. Just because you are a brand site doesn't necessarily mean you have what I'm looking for. Many big brands are out of touch with the people, and smaller sites fill that need.
Panda update went against ecommerce sites that used manufacture descriptions
Besides the fact that many manufactures require for you to use their description, I don't agree with this. Build an extra link or two to this product page, and you'll outrank 90% of your competitors. Why rewrite descriptions? It's the same thing just in your words... if you think that in 2011 Google can't figure this out, maybe you should be doing something else 
You have a high bounce rate
This is also a myth. Google doesn't calculate bounce rates for their Panda ranking algorithm, but they do measure how many people click on your link, and then click back to go back to Google search. Bounce rates can't be a measure because think of how many sites could have a high bounce rate... Groupon - People go to the site, check the deal, and leave if it's not interesting to them. CNN - Hit the homepage, scan the news stories, and leave if it's not interesting to them. Does this mean the site is low quality? No.
Article Submission Sites and Press Release Sites
These are some of the hardest hit sites, and rightfully so. Most of the content on these sites is regurgitated garbage. Sure, some sites review articles submitted to make sure they aren't duplicated through other sites, and so forth, but most of the articles are poorly written, offer the user little or no information, and are only done for link backs. Now imagine this... these article sites have gained huge popularity because of one indicator - their page rank. If an articles site has a page rank of 6, it's going to get flooded with people trying to fill it with articles to link back to them. But step back and think of how that article site got to a PR6 in the first place. Do you think CNN linked to it? How about Yahoo News? It got it's PR6 from hundreds of thousands of links from poor quality SEO sites encouraging you to submit articles. So naturally, when Panda rolled out, and devalued all of these junk SEO sites and blogs, it devalued the authority of article submission sites. Therefore, your articles on there, were devalued, and those links pointing to your site were devalued as well. The result? A chain of lowered search results from your site, to article sites, to all these bunk SEO sites.
Press release sites aren't far from it either. Many sites don't even review the Press release being submitted, it's usually bogus or junk. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but that is the minority and not the majority.
User Generated Content
People complained that their sites that are 100% user generated content took a hit, and cried about it since they believe it to be unique content. Sure, I agree it's likely to be unique content. But 90% of it is junk. Take a reviews site or forums site for example. The person asks about a review of a certain product. Of the replies that come in, how many are longer than a sentence? How many are "this tv is great, thumbs up". Same with a forum. Someone asks a question, and have of the replies are "why don't you search?" or "bump". User generated content yes... junk? yes.
But my site has a lot of links from authority sites
Awesome, that's great news for your site! But you still got hit in Panda right? It's because the other links to your site were devalued, still causing some devaluing of your site, so you still took a hit. Imagine if you didn't have those authority links. You'd be laying off staff like Mahalo or some online furniture stores.
So what do I do post Panda SEO?
If you were doing white hat SEO before, and took a hit, and aren't sure what else to do to regain your traffic, go back to the drawing board of building links. Do this in addition to making sure you have:
1) Good site navigation.
2) Compelling content that makes the user want to come back.
3) Nothing black hat or fishy like having H1 tags, and then changing the CSS to make them 12px. You think Google is dumb?
4) NoIndex your thin pages (quantity does not equal quality)
5) Build high quality links to deep inner pages
6) Don't pay for links. It's expensive, and it's a short term gain. When Google finds out you paid, then not only will you get deranked, but the years you spent building your brand is down the tubes.
7) If you are an affiliate site, give a reason to go to your site. Just copying a description and posting a link is short term, and won't last. If you can't come up with a unique idea, then this isn't for you.
Think about it this way. If 1,000,000 sites are doing what you are doing, only 10 can appear on the first page of Google search. The top 10 do something differently to differentiate themselves. Take this advise.
Google Loses 150,000 Gmail Accounts and Emails
Oops.
If you noticed today that your email account with Gmail has no emails, you're not alone. Google estimates that around 150,000 people today on Gmail lost their accounts plus all of their emails, attachments, contacts, chat logs and anything else in their accounts. The Google forums today exploded with people complaining in a panic that all of their information was gone.
While 150,000 accounts sounds like a lot, and it's definitely a lot when you are one of them, Google says that is only 0.08% of the Gmail user base. After investigating for 5 hours, Google said they were aware of the problem, but still have not fixed it. During the time they are investigating it might not allow you to log in.
There are programs out there to backup your Google Mail. I think Gmail backup would be a good idea, and I haven't used any of these services myself, but I think this might be a bit extreme. If anyone has Gmail backups, it would be Google. If there is a temporary problem, as inconvenient as it may be, I would wait, and 100% sure that Google would restore everything back to normal.
Was your account compromised?
Google “Farmer” Update Hurts Many Online Businesses
It looks like Google outdid itself this time. Google announced that they released an update to combat spam by changing their algorithm to detect if a website is a "content farm". A content farm would be a website that releases a lot of content that is identical to content already out there (duplicate content), or slightly changed. It's also a bunch of duplicate content put together to make the content look original in nature. One such site that comes to mind is eHow, which is owned by Demand Media. These guys literally have thousands of writers take other people's content and simply rewrite it into their own words. Google claims these kids of sites fill their result pages with useless junk, and many of their users are complaining.
Many people are also saying that this is targeting Made for Adsense (MFA) sites, since they are usually spam sites that are made to get people from search engines to come to the site and click on the ad. I guess it's relatively safe to say that most content farm sites are designed to make money from Adsense or other types of PPC advertising.
So here's the thing... this algorithm gets changed all of the time, so much so that usually there is no announcement about it, and usually no one gets in a stink about it. However, this one is affecting nearly 12% (11.8% per Google) of all search results. So here is how it works:
Let's say for example the popular article submission site ArticlesBase. Let's say you submitted articles here, and included a link for a link back to your site. After this update from Google, they now determine that ArticlesBase is a content farm and their website is no longer authority, and is now borderline "spam". Once this filter goes into effect, every article you submitted before in the past now doesn't pass as much, or any, link juice PR to your site. Any SERP ranking your site had in the past from ArticlesBase is now gone or severly diminished. If you have an eCommerce site, and released a bunch of articles of products you sell, you can expect that likely your sales will drop off and those pages will now rank lower in Google as well. Bummer huh?
This update is so big, even CNN has released a story about it. Webmaster Forums are blowing up with anger over this update, and I don't blame them one bit. Instead of releasing an algorithm to combat this, Google needs to use their own data and do manual filters.
They have analytics data, adsense data, bounce rate data, SERP data, CTR data and more that they can use to determine this more efficiently. There is even an extension for Google Chrome that lets you submit spam sites. However, Google claims this update didn't take that info effect.
If your site is one of those currently affected, take a breather. I know it's easier said than done, but sit back, relax, and give the update a few days to settle. Google is notorious for releasing overly critical updates that settle over the next few days or few weeks, and loosens their filters.
Here is data from various sources on the top 10 sites that actually gained from this update:
1. Amazon.com
2. eHow.com
3. NexTag.com
4. Wikipedia.com
5. Walmart.com
6. Target.com
7. Etsy.com
8. Answers.Yahoo.com
9. Sears.com
10. bestonlinecoupons.com
Here are the top 10 losers:
1.TheFind.com
2.BizRate.com
3.ShopWiki.com
4.EzineArticles.com
5.HubPages.com
6.Buzzillions.com
7.Shopping.com
8.Suite101.com
9.Kaboodle.com
10.AssociatedContent.com
Has your site been affected by this update? Many people who have original content and all white hat SEO are saying they are going to get together and do mass reinclusion requests to Google for manual reviews of their site. If you do this, please update us and let us know how it goes.