What About Google Panda Update 22?

[sbrault74]

Maybe I haven't found the threads or whatever but I haven't seen lots of posts about the latest Google Panda update from November 21-22 on SEOmoz.

Panda 22 is not even listed here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Until November 21st, Google killed 3 of 5 websites I own through their Panda updates (never got hit by Penguin updates as I got only original content), accounting for about 25% of my income.

Fortunately, the 2 remaining websites gained more traffic throughout the summer of 2012 so my income almost got back to 100% even though I got the "Unnatural Links" warning in Google Webmaster Tools in July.

Since then, I did a huge link cleanup and according to the Link Detox Tool (from another SEO service), the number of "toxic links" went from about 350 to 50. Back link reports is as follow:

• 8% (52) Toxic Links;
• 57% (382) Suspicious Links;
• 35% (235) Healthy Links;

Out of the 382 suspicious, most of them are coming from the same domain and they are all directories to which my website has been submitted automatically (not using any specific keyword anchor). On the opposite, healthy links are coming from different domains so I like to think they have a stronger impact than suspicious links.

That said, my two remaining websites were still doing well until November 21 where it got hit by the Panda. Now traffic has dropped by 55% and income has dropped by 75% (yes I'll have to look for a job within a year if I don't fix this).

(I want to add that none of my websites are "thin websites". One has over 1500 pages of content and the other has about 500 pages. All websites have content added 3 to 5 times a week.)

What I don't get is that all my "money keywords" are still ranked in the top 10 results on Google according to multiple tools / services I use, yet the impressions dropped from 50% to 75% for those keywords?!?

I have a feeling that this time it's not only a drop in ranking. There's a drop in impressions caused by something else. Is it caused by emphasis on local search? Are they showing more ads and less organic results?

But here's the "funny part":

For the last 5 years, I was never able to advertise my website on Google Adwords. Each time, I got a quality score of about 4/10 only to see it drop to 1/10 within a few hours of launching the campaign.

On November 22nd, I build new PPC campaigns based on the exact same PPC campaigns I had the past (same keywords, same ads, same landing pages).

Guess what?

Now the quality score is between 7/10 and 10/10 (most of them have 10/10) for the exact same PPC campaign!

What a "coincidence" huh?

[sbrault74]

Another thing I don't get is that some pages are ranking higher than before for their main keyword, yet their traffic has dropped 50% - 75%...

[simon_realbuzz]

Hi, I'm looking into a similar fall experienced across several of our sites since Nov 21. From what I can gather, Panda is all about 'quality quality' and some of the signals used to indicate 'quality' are bouncerate, time on site, browse rate, CTR from search, rather than whether the content is well written.

I've identified that some of our pages have high bounce rates and maybe that is part of the reason we have seemingly been hit. Perhaps reducing bounce rates, improving on site clicks, improving browse rates etc will allow your site to bounce back. Personally, I'm still scratching my head wondering whether Panda really is to blame for our fall but improving 'quality' and the user experience certainly has to be one of our main goals.