Comments on: Is Panda Crushing your Website

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:38:00 +0000

I think google is on the decline as far as relevant search results. There are too many results from crappy sites like ehow, answers.com, and yahoo answers.

By: thebloggernet

thebloggernet — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 02:35:53 +0000

Some of my sites were hit by the panda update..but still i am ranking high on search engines so I am happy with the new update…

By: Judith @ social media management

Judith @ social media management — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 21:58:34 +0000

Google has trying their best to give a reliable and good information to the user’s or the people. If you do nothing wrong to your site I guess it wouldn’t be affected what ever updates they will be launched soon.

By: Lyndon Antcliff

Lyndon Antcliff — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:18:01 +0000

@ James Hind.

Yes it is a scammy advert, but shock horror, being scammy does not effect its success.

If an advert runs and runs for months and is on lots of sites it’s probably sucking in more cash than an Apple store on iPhone launch day +1

That advert, based on the fact it has generated interest from the Feds must have been hugely successful.

And it does something very simple, it gives people what they want.
In fact, doesn’t all good marketing do that.

By: James Hind

James Hind — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:48:48 +0000

Where does the 10-17% click through statistic come from?

I highly doubt the CTR rate for such a scammy looking advert like the acai berry one gets a significantly better CTR than the average.

By: James Breckenridge

James Breckenridge — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:46:02 +0000

I think you could take this slightly differently. When Google refer to content I think their definition is vastly different to that of most SEO's/industry types. Content is everything on the page, could be a widget|article|image|video|product and maybe all that matters to Panda is the user stays engaged with that 'content' or page. Sadly Panda falls down for sites like news and fora and not so much for content farms (ironically) as you are far more likely to return to the search results from a news site or forum than you are from a content farm (unless it is really really bad).

By: Richard Giles

Richard Giles — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:43:51 +0000

Great post.

I understand about the dodgy ads pointing to “acai berry” rubbish. Can Google actually see this though? There would be *many* sites that would get penalised for publishing ads that point to shady stuff.

The article in question is fairly large though and seems to cover a fair bit. About.com has been about for years – I’d be surprised if Panda would affect this site purely due to it’s size and reputation (even though Panda has seemed ruthless).

I like your “SEO trick” point though – I never thought of that.

Richard

By: Geoff Jackson

Geoff Jackson — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:25:03 +0000

It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure Google will be doing everything they can to tighten up their spam defence further still and I wouldn’t be surprised to see those sites serving dodgy/spam ads in a bid to deter users from ‘bouncing’ to be hit by a future algo update.