Google Panda 4.0 update - Good for Small businesses?

[MattAntonino]

Not so far, no.

In fact, from our early analysis, small biz is hurting. A search for "Melbourne pizza" shows 4-5 news articles and only the local block of businesses.

Other searches show more directories than ever and a lot more gumtree/craigslist.

[Silkstream]

We're in the UK and 2 of our ecommerce sites that had been suffering have seen improvements this morning. One of them particularly has improved in rankings massively for many, many queries.

Also noticed that some queries are dropping forum threads as results.

[PeteW]

Great article, and very much on time. Thanks for sharing. I have checked some of our sites and at the moment I cannot see any changes or major drops. We seem to be doing it right so far

It would be good to review the traffic in a week. Please get in touch with us on @<a class="view_profile profile_link js-avatar_tip ss_tip tip_left" data-tip="View 's Profile" data-sstip_class="twt_avatar_tip" data-screen-name="FingoMarketing">FingoMarketing </a>

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

We've seen one of our sites jump from low 40's to 11 overnight after months of being low.

We're UK based as well, more a directory style site then e-commerce.

[David-Kley]

After looking hard at rankings after every algo update, we always see strange results while Google is still "rolling it out". I wouldn't take much to heart while they get the algo in place. It would be better to let things stablilze, then go back and see what rankings changed. I think the week of the update is the worst time to analyze what is going on.

From Matt Cutts blog:
https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985

"Google is rolling out our Panda 4.0 update starting today." Rolling out, starting today are the things that stand out to me from that statement, meaning "its not done yet" lol

I will say that we have seen our rankings improve, with multiple links now showing on the front page for our main keywords. Whereas authorship was not displaying, it now is, combined with our schema reviews.

[FRL]

Thanks for your input guys. We have noticed in many communities that most of webmasters/SEOs have seen improvements in their rankings so far from the update.

eBay has seen drop  in rankings. I wonder if this has something to do with their study last year showing that paid search don't work for brand terms :|. haha

[Silkstream]

Oh yes - the site i mentioned that had recovered massively is also now displaying the product and review schema, that wasn't previously displaying - even though rich snippets testing said it was all fine. I hadn't considered that the two could be linked. Duh, thanks.

[Silkstream]

Have you seen this? Ouch. http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2014/05/21/panda-update-4-0-winners-and-losers-google-usa/

[David-Kley]

Yeah, I always thought it was funny when Google's snippet tester would show it was clearly working, and then you see the link on a SERP, and guess what? No snippet, no authorship lol.

Best of luck, looks like things are stabilizing a bit for you.

[Colman]

One of our sites had issues previously, bad links. We went through the disavow procedure months ago, but no change in rank until yesterday - up about 28 spots, broke the #50 barrier, all since the update.