After a couple of weeks’ worth of head-scratching over Google’s latest generation Panda update, the situation is becoming clearer.
Less speculation, more observation: here’s a quick run-down of some of the real-life implications of the Big G’s best practice-led blockbuster, gleaned from a bunch of blogs, articles and forums all over the lovely interweb.
What does Google Panda 4 really mean?
- Some sites have made dramatic recoveries from previous Panda related-ranking hits.Others have lost as much as 70% of their organic search traffic.
- The Google Panda 4 roll out seems to have kicked in around 17th May. The most volatility was recorded between the 24th – 28th of May.
- Although Panda updates can take up to about 10 days to roll out, Matt Cutts acknowledged that this one rolled out faster than usual.
- Some sites which have suffered badly seem to include a lot of syndicated content. Suffering sites using syndicated content haven’t brought the cross domain canonical tag into play to show the original source of the content.
- According to some reports, removing questionable content from Google’s index and significantly reducing the number of indexed URLs can be beneficial post-Panda 4.
- Some sites including content copied wholesale from other sites have suffered.
- Sites with poor engagement have also been adversely affected.
- Some sites with only few pages, which were ranking for a broad range of keywords, have been hit, even though the content was good.
- Sites with plenty of user interaction, revealed by the number of shares and comments they’ve attracted, have come out better post-Panda 4.
- Sites presenting thin or automated content have suffered.
- Sites with clear navigation and unique content did well.
- Simply re-writing non-unique content to make it unique might not be enough. But it might help to regularly update facts, figures, statistics and other time-sensitive information.
I completely forgot to note down the sources of this lot. Duh, sorry… I’m really busy writing copy at the moment and took my eye off the ball. But I hope it proves useful anyway. If you have any extra insights, leave a comment.
