Google Panda 4.0 Released: Major Recovery & Traffic Increases Across the Board
Yesterday Google announced that they had rolled out Panda V4.0 via a tweet from Matt Cutts.
Typically Google doesn’t announce new Panda updates, but instead claims that Panda is a rolling update and updates about once per month.
Why this announcement then? Well, because this one’s a big one.
If you’re unfamiliar with Panda, I’d recommend reading this brief synopsis from Search Engine Land.
With every update, there are naturally winners and losers. As an SEO company, we are always in-tune with our client’s rankings and traffic and reach out when major updates like this occur. Typically, the news is either good (a handful of our clients this time), or neutral.
For our personal sites though… Well, this update brought great tidings…
What a Google Panda Recovery Looks Like
Our personal sites were slammed in November of 2012 with one of the Panda updates. 30-40% drop in traffic over night. This was shortly after I quit my full-time job to start this business. The revenue from our sites was our runway money, money that would be used to fund the business as we got off the ground.
Needless to say, plans changed instantaneously.
For a solid 6 months we audited our sites and made them shine… But each Panda update brought no changes, good or bad.
Until Panda 4.0 (launched yesterday, on May 20th… Although we saw changes starting over the weekend).
Here’s what a Panda recovery looks like:
All screenshots taken on the morning of May 21st
Clicky Analytics showing traffic for our Glacier and Bicycle Websites. Glacier shows the last 180 days, while Bikes shows the last 28 days (photo taken in the AM of May 21st)
Keyword changes for Glacier over the last 24 hours. Major recovery.
Keyword changes in Google Panda 4.0 recovery. This shows some of Glacier’s recovered keywords
Keyword changes for our Bikes site in our Google Panda recovery
The last image shows keyword changes for our Bikes site. Notice how there are no changes in the last 24 hours, whereas Glacier (the one above it) shows a massive amount of Daily keyword changes? All keyword changes for our Bikes site came from the 19th to 20th, while Glacier keyword changes came from the 20th to 21st (Google announced the update on the afternoon of the 20th).
It’s important to stress that in the days after a Panda update, results are constantly shifting, so what you see one day after might not hold.
You need to give it time to shake out and see how the cards fall.
Either way, a great day for our network of sites and many of our clients.
Need Help Recovering from Google Panda?
If you need help recovering from Google Panda or Google Penguin, please give us a ring at 303-578-2046, or contact us here and we’ll return your inquiry ASAP.
Be ware of power to give is also power to take away.
What rhyme or reason is there? If you have no control of when this will happen, how it happens, and what happens, then it’s futile, it’s merely a paternalistic lever to jerk folks around.
I have no doubt that the pressure we are putting on Google on various discussion forums led them to, for the first time announce this via Tweeter, and to make it a bit positive. We should be steadfast in looking for alternatives.
Certainly diversify your traffic sources. But I don’t agree with the rest of your statement… You have control to build a great site, develop quality content that can go viral and monetize your visitors effectively. Yes, what Google gives, Google can take away. But Google’s in the game of making money, and to make money they need to provide high quality results to their visitors.
We’ve seen time and time again that high quality content wins in the long run.
You Censored my comment? Where is my response to yours?
One of your comments didn’t make any sense, so I removed it.
Let the readers decide.
Comments that appear machine generated, or make no logical sense, are deleted.
Admit it, you are scared of Google, so you deleted criticisms geared at them, that’s no way to live. Anyway, bye…
I don’t post where comments are censored.
You’re right. We are terrified of Google and censor comments that criticize them out of fear of being penalized.
Geeze.
Precisely, Google is in the game to make money, so how do they make money? Well, one day your site is on top. You get organic traffic and all is great. Next day your site is nowhere to be found. Now you need to spend money with Adwords to keep your business afloat. One day Google says that having good backlinks is key to getting your site up top in the rankings, next day they say “no unnatural links” after you spent tons of time creating guest blog posts, raising awareness in forums by sharing your link, etc… Now you have to go and clean up any links they don’t like. They are the puppeteer and they are always pulling the strings and making every website owner jump through hoops. And all this confusion and changing of algorithms is to increase the number of people that need Adwords. More advertisers on Adwords results in higher bids because of the higher volume of people advertising. If you think anything they do is out of the goodness of their hearts then you are sorely mistaken. Think about it, Google cannot make the world use their search engine more. They can’t increase volume of searches, so what levers do they have to increase their revenue? Increasing what advertisers have to pay, and increasing the likelihood of people clicking on ads. How do they do this last point? Glad you asked.
Look at the search results page above the fold. Take the keyword CARS as an example. There is 1 organic search result website above the fold. ONE! Google has slowly but surely diminished how many organic results are shown above the fold. In it’s place are ads (big surprise) and news articles (which will come from big news sites). How are people supposed to compete against the big boys and against Google at the same time?
I cannot disagree more.
Taking a query, such as ‘Cars’, is too narrow and doesn’t provide the big picture. Cars isn’t going to convert for businesses, nor for independent bloggers.
A better example would be: ‘SUVS Under 30k’… Sure, tons of ads, but that is a query that will drive conversions and traffic. What would a smart blogger do? Write about the best SUVs under 30k… What SHOULD a manufacturer do, such as GMC, which sells the Terrain for under 30k?
Write up a unique article that compares all its features versus the features of other SUVs under 30k. Then they are relevant for a more competitive query. What can they do then? They can drive traffic to it from social sources, related content widgets, and yes, paid google traffic. Long-term, they might rank for ‘suvs under 30k’ or they might not.
But they will rank for other longer tail queries that drive traffic AND conversions from that one article.
I’ve never bought into the conspiracy theory of Google updating their algorithm to drive companies to Adwords. Smart companies know how to get traffic from all sources… Social, SEO and yes, Adwords.
But time and time again, high quality content gets rewarded… Whether it’s social traffic, paid traffic or SEO traffic. You just need to know how to market it effectively 😉
I cannot disagree about your disagreement more 🙂
If we go back to the CARS keyword. The top organic search result is for Cars.com. The top paid Adwords result is for… Cars.com. Why would they spend the money for top Adwords placement for a generic term when they already have the top organic placement? Because it does convert. This is of course one specific example, but my point was to illustrate how much space above the fold Google is giving to organic results.
80% of clicks on organic results go to the first 3 sites listed on average and in the CARS example where there’s only 1 organic result above the fold I’m sure that percentage goes up significantly.
Even in your example of SUVS under 30k the top two organic results are for US News reports and the third result is for AOL.com (coincidentially or not Cars.com is not an advertiser here for this keyword and I’d assume they are more up to speed on converting keywords in this market than either you or I so you can infer what you will from that). There’s also only 76k results for this keyword so from that I can say that not many people find focusing on this keyword as a good idea.
But let’s say you write up a great article, how will it rank? Nobody knows about it. Nobody can find it. I doubt you have a whole site dedicated to SUVs under 30k so you promote it by sharing the link in different places. Then your site/article gets slapped for unnatural links. Now you must pay for Adwords.
Social traffic is great. Speaking of which, do you know why Facebook has changed their Newsfeed algorithm? They will tell you it is because they want to give users more relevant info in their Newsfeed. Not really though. It is because they want you buy ads to feature your page post in peoples’ Newsfeeds. They want to stop giving away organic traffic and start making the majority of people pay for it. Sounds familiar…
Just because a company is paying for traffic for a keyword does not mean that they WANT to be, or even know if they should (or shouldn’t). We have worked with dozens of companies, auditing their Adwords campaigns to ensure they are only buying traffic for keywords that convert.
There’s also the ‘branded’ query aspect of ‘Cars’ for Cars.com.
The 80% statistic isn’t relevant anymore. That was only accounting for organic results and consumer behavior is different when they know there is an organic result (not that they consider it an organic result) vs a paid advertisement.
‘There’s also only 76k results for this keyword so from that I can say that not many people find focusing on this keyword as a good idea.’
–> I can assure you: There’s a lot of money to be made by focusing on this keyword.
‘But let’s say you write up a great article, how will it rank? Nobody knows about it. Nobody can find it. I doubt you have a whole site dedicated to SUVs under 30k so you promote it by sharing the link in different places. Then your site/article gets slapped for unnatural links. Now you must pay for Adwords.’
–> Not if done well. If done well, SEO traffic is just a bonus that naturally comes with time. And you can very easily avoid Adwords and get higher quality traffic for cheaper from other sources.
‘Social traffic is great. Speaking of which, do you know why Facebook has changed their Newsfeed algorithm? They will tell you it is because they want to give users more relevant info in their Newsfeed. Not really though. It is because they want you buy ads to feature your page post in peoples’ Newsfeeds. They want to stop giving away organic traffic and start making the majority of people pay for it. Sounds familiar…’
–> Not referring to a business sharing on their page. Referring to OTHER people sharing it on their walls, their friends commenting and re-sharing. That’s social traffic.
Perry, I am seeing similar results across my sites and could not be happier. I also just added G+ to my sites so that could be helping, but I think it was this last update.
Awesome! Congrats, Brian 🙂
Google and most search engines, are operating an inefficient machine. Most search terms yield millions of results, with less a than a dozen per page. that’s stupid!
So, the correction should not be with the content provider, the onus should be placed squarely on the search engine operator. The consumer loses out by having, often what they are searching for on page 976,965.
I have a design for search engines that will make them interactive, that way, there is no need for SEO.
You come as you are, and the Consumer will make the determination. No articial tuning of websites to attract a top position.
Contact me for further details.
99% of the time I am able to find exactly what I’m looking for on page one. Judging by the success of search engines, I have a feeling most are able to find exactly what they are looking for on page one, too. Before Panda? Not the case though…
Listen to your self, if you and most people can find what you are looking for on page one, then it’s ridiculous to have the extra million pages, right? That’s called inefficiency.
No, it’s called Spam.
“Just because a company is paying for traffic for a keyword does not mean that they WANT to be, or even know if they should (or shouldn’t). We have worked with dozens of companies, auditing their Adwords campaigns to ensure they are only buying traffic for keywords that convert.”
I agree, many small companies or sole proprietors may need help optimizing an Adwords campaign. Companies worth 9 figures or more and are spending 5 or 6 figures daily should be tracking their conversions and have either an in-house or outsourced company that optimizes everything for them. At least I’d guess majority does it this way. Regardless, I very highly doubt Cars.com is in the topspot for keyword CARS because it is a branding play. If they want to brand they can buy a spot during the Superbowl. If you want conversions you get the top Adwords spot on the search results page. For me it logically says they are buying this spot because they recognize how much organic search traffic clicks bleed from the first organic search result (which is where they are) to the top Adwords ad (which is what they are buying).
“The 80% statistic isn’t relevant anymore.”
I think it is. My comment said that the 80% was representative of only organic related clicks. Out of 100 clicks on organic results, 80 of them will go to one of the first three organic results.
“Referring to OTHER people sharing it on their walls”
People on Facebook share mainly two things… #1 things that relate to their personal lives (kids, pets, etc…) #2 things of interest (think of how well ViralNova has done with their clickbait headlines). I don’t see many people share informational types of articles on their wall because there is not much common human interest behind them to go sharing them with others. If you can get an article about SUVS under 30K to go viral through people naturally sharing on Facebook let me know because I will give you a TON of business!!!
Alas, we can agree to disagree. Cheers mate.
‘If you can get an article about SUVS under 30K to go viral through people naturally sharing on Facebook let me know because I will give you a TON of business!!!’
We have 😉