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Google Panda Update in Germany – Winners and Losers

Author: Marcus Tober

Google finally updated the German index yesterday. They communicated in their German and English  Google-Webmaster-Central Blog that the changes are now in place for every language except Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

As expected, the algorithm change was aimed mainly to article directories, content aggregators and people search engines. But the panda is still up to its reputation to provide surprises.

What made it challenging for us is the fact that they issued the update on the day that my company moved into a new office in Berlin and I happened to be away on vacation in the USA. But anyway, I took a break in the middle of the desert in Arizona to check the figures, winners and losers.

The Panda update should improve the quality of the search results by lowering rankings for poor quality websites (e.g. content farms, pages without relevance to the user). Any improvements that google have made will be visible in the next few days and will reveal their true impact over the next few weeks.

We have already showed the impact of the rollout of Google Panda USA and Google Panda UK, so we now want to show who lost and who gained from the changes following the Panda update in Germany.

We are showing the winners and losers in total and percentage figures. This shows very clearly who has lost visibility and who has remained stable. Although there is no guarantee that the victims of the Panda update will lose traffic we expect never the less a significant impact for many of them. More Information about this topic can be found here:

Here are the losers of the Panda update in Germany

Domain current last week total changes percentages
ciao.de 368.622 894.543 -525.921 -58,79
gutefrage.net 406.256 917.259 -511.003 -55,71
dooyoo.de 229.923 664.184 -434.261 -65,38
ladenzeile.de 193.213 378.296 -185.083 -48,93
wer-weiss-was.de 94.397 252.009 -157.612 -62,54
helpster.de 31.501 153.962 -122.461 -79,54
wikio.de 18.341 117.008 -98.667 -84,33
yopi.de 34.004 132.605 -98.601 -74,36
cosmiq.de 22.301 109.773 -87.472 -79,68
suite101.de 37.145 117.452 -80.307 -68,37
preisroboter.de 82.219 159.571 -77.352 -48,47
webutation.net 12.381 88.527 -76.146 -86,01
testberichte.de 466.214 537.224 -71.010 -13,22
onlinestreet.de 11.056 79.755 -68.699 -86,14
meingutscheincode.de 61.614 128.058 -66.444 -51,89
gutscheinwurst.de 4.225 70.651 -66.426 -94,02
kelkoo.de 28.266 94.215 -65.949 -70,00
yasni.de 50.478 114.795 -64.317 -56,03
uni-protokolle.de 38.547 101.356 -62.809 -61,97
gutegutscheine.de 12.541 69.813 -57.272 -82,04
infoverzeichnis.org 24.476 80.521 -56.045 -69,60
geizkragen.de 34.036 89.694 -55.658 -62,05
99vips.de 47.894 103.549 -55.655 -53,75
123people.de 14.305 67.871 -53.566 -78,92
anleiter.de 8.903 61.933 -53.030 -85,62
brothersoft.com 21.727 73.380 -51.653 -70,39
whoswho.de 55.088 106.658 -51.570 -48,35
shopping.com 60.463 109.775 -49.312 -44,92
kununu.com 4.371 51.108 -46.737 -91,45
hotfrog.de 21.217 65.031 -43.814 -67,37
experto.de 13.526 57.251 -43.725 -76,37
staedte-info.net 12.420 55.429 -43.009 -77,59
gutscheinrausch.de 2.738 43.522 -40.784 -93,71
getestet.de 11.612 51.822 -40.210 -77,59
pointoo.de 27.612 67.537 -39.925 -59,12
pcfreunde.de 20.985 59.557 -38.572 -64,76
tarif-angebote.de 32.150 70.233 -38.083 -54,22
rss-nachrichten.de 15.126 52.293 -37.167 -71,07
musik-base.de 3.610 39.993 -36.383 -90,97
webnews.de 14.907 51.045 -36.138 -70,80
fan-lexikon.de 11.947 47.488 -35.541 -74,84
misterinfo.com 19.032 53.900 -34.868 -64,69
wissen.de 25.362 60.107 -34.745 -57,81
preisgenau.de 8.188 42.305 -34.117 -80,65
dsl-magazin.de 20.147 53.979 -33.832 -62,68
tecchannel.de 20.708 53.136 -32.428 -61,03
jobisjob.de 13.892 46.237 -32.345 -69,95
produkt-pfadfinder.de 9.980 41.115 -31.135 -75,73
talkteria.de 16.986 47.414 -30.428 -64,18
worldlingo.com 17.309 47.149 -29.840 -63,29
gesundheit.de 31.148 60.289 -29.141 -48,34
hausgarten.net 41.093 70.157 -29.064 -41,43
freeware-download.com 11.867 40.909 -29.042 -70,99
top-dsl.com 12.038 39.814 -27.776 -69,76
akademie.de 17.222 44.355 -27.133 -61,17
enzyklo.de 4.313 31.054 -26.741 -86,11
profischnell.com 1.499 27.199 -25.700 -94,49
stylicon.de 23.913 49.064 -25.151 -51,26
film-zeit.de 2.604 27.171 -24.567 -90,42
studis-online.de 30.298 54.487 -24.189 -44,39
facebook-trends.de 614 24.486 -23.872 -97,49
dr-gumpert.de 32.996 56.659 -23.663 -41,76
tomshardware.de 12.133 35.443 -23.310 -65,77

The directories, content farms and pages focusing on tips and tricks have already been identified as possible targets of the Panda update. They are similar in construction to pages that have already been impacted by the previous Panda updates in the US and in the UK but other, rather unexpected losers, show how hard it is to predict the impact of such a huge change.

In the US, Google tweaked the Panda rollout after 4 weeks to make it more effective, it will be interesting to see how and if they need to further update their algorithm in Germany.

We will update the article once we find new information, figures or movers and shakers.

And these are the winners of the Panda update in Germany:

Domain current  last week total changes percentages
golem.de 563.259 464.469 98.790 21,27
facebook.com 1.640.023 1.565.891 74.132 4,73
focus.de 851.593 795.956 55.637 6,99
chip.de 1.579.791 1.534.232 45.559 2,97
stern.de 454.905 410.303 44.602 10,87
android.com 133.126 93.511 39.615 42,36
blogspot.com 387.541 349.080 38.461 11,02
apple.com 1.130.609 1.092.790 37.819 3,46
yahoo.com 910.058 875.223 34.835 3,98
heise.de 714.850 680.905 33.945 4,99
welt.de 579.972 547.563 32.409 5,92
kino.de 211.334 180.456 30.878 17,11
dhd24.com 347.143 316.667 30.476 9,62
spiegel.de 1.223.662 1.194.520 29.142 2,44
songtexte.com 62.929 34.257 28.672 83,70
androidpit.de 223.669 196.355 27.314 13,91
meinestadt.de 515.224 489.784 25.440 5,19
zdnet.de 162.443 137.179 25.264 18,42
webauto.de 40.060 17.210 22.850 132,77
webwiki.de 128.522 105.981 22.541 21,27

It is very interesting that media and newspapers are the winners in this Panda update. This is similar to the situation in the US and UK, where pages like techcrunch.com or msn.com got better positions in Google post Panda.

However, many of these winners are not necessarily preferred by the Panda algorithm, but they benefit from the fact that the losers in the SERPS before have gone.

The data I analysed can of course also be found in our Searchmetrics Suite to check for yourself.

We are at the moment monitoring more countries and will soon post information about how the Panda update impacted the rest of the Google world.

SEO analysis from everywhere

And just to show that you can do detailed SEO analysis from everywhere, here are some pictures from my working day, sitting in the shadow of a tree in the Arizonan desert.

What are your experiences with the german panda update? Do you see any impact on your projects yet?