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Marcus Tober
Marcus Tober 2011/10/01

Google Panda USA Update 2.5

Industry News and Trends Time to read: 4 min

For a short while Google moved its Panda Focus onto the rest of the world and away from the USA. But now it’s gone back to where it all started. And it seems like rather a big update – cause we’ve found some quite some surprising changes in the new Google Panda 2.5 update.

Here are the biggest losers:

Domain SEO Visibility SEO Visibility Lost Lost in %
25.09.2011 02.10.2011
447.586
 100.513 -347.073 -78%
552.925
 213.059 -339.866 -61%
162.759
 11.379 -151.380 -93%
197.936
 48.346 -149.590 -76%
173.596
 54.262 -119.334 -69%
130.870
 22.637 -108.233 -83%
124.618
 19.202 -105.416 -85%
155.522
 65.490 -90.032 -58%
123.707
 42.661 -81.046 -66%
98.848
 24.146 -74.702 -76%
89.854
 15.441 -74.413 -83%
148.875
 75.429 -73.446 -49%
101.178
 33.595 -67.583 -67%
111.587
 49.174 -62.413 -56%
80.166
 25.460 -54.706 -68%
163.390
 113.390 -50.000 -31%
72.306
 25.129 -47.177 -65%
61.558
 18.747 -42.811 -70%
87.048
 45.118 -41.930 -48%
55.642
 15.190 -40.452 -73%
62.227
 26.278 -35.949 -58%
52.015
 18.010 -34.005 -65%
54.307
 20.504 -33.803 -62%
60.028
 27.675 -32.353 -54%
80.590
 50.694 -29.896 -37%
42.777
 13.468 -29.309 -69%
36.240
 7.242 -28.998 -80%
27.881
 6.047 -21.834 -78%
22.848
 1.530 -21.318 -93%
28.503
 8.358 -20.145 -7

 

Take a look for yourself

Thanks to our new Searchmetrics Essentials tool, you can get even more interesting information: by clicking on any of the domains in the list, anyone (even those without a Searchmetrics account) can see all the important SEO KPIs, including the historical view of the SEO visibility of the domain. And if you subscribe for a free trial account (without the need to enter a credit card) you can see even more data.

Some of the sites above have been hit for the first time by a Panda update, while we o found some domains that have already been punished by Panda, got back some visibility and then have dropped again now with this new update 2.5. Next to some (faqs.org, ohinternet.com) drops, it looks like there is a pretty obvious pattern behind the update:

These are pages that got hit by Panda 1, got back some of their visibility with Panda 2.3 and lost this week again with Panda 2.5:

The reasoning behind these interesting changes isopen for discussion. Was Google unhappy with the Panda 2.3 changes? Or is there some “Kickout of Panda Trial” element ie pages that don’t make the expected changes required by Google drop again, just a little later?

These are the winners of the Panda 2.5 update:

Domain SEO Visibility SEO Visibility Win Win in %
25.09.2011 02.10.2011
5.258.325
 5.787.520 529.195 10%
738.030
 924.621 186.591 25%
586.955
 711.785 124.830 21%
1.218.625
 1.320.032 101.407 8%
324.608
 417.576 92.968 29%
248.953
 329.781 80.828 32%
783.956
 861.373 77.417 10%
572.825
 643.087 70.262 12%
692.107
 761.589 69.482 10%
958.356
 1.027.422 69.066 7%
767.931
 835.620 67.689 9%
564.718
 631.089 66.371 12%
198.156
 262.246 64.090 32%
646.698
 708.610 61.912 10%

This is a very interesting Panda Update and one of the biggest learnings this time is probably, that getting back your visibility from a previous Panda update, does not necessarily mean that you are Panda-secure.

And of course learning from the experience of sites like hubpages.com (that belonged to one of the biggest losers from Panda Update 1), which are now gaining visibility, they actually have more than they had before the first Panda update 🙂

What is your opinion on the new Panda 2.5 update?

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Marcus Tober

Marcus Tober

My name is Marcus Tober and I’m the founder of Searchmetrics. Because we really love to analyze all kinds of online data, we can give you more insights than any other company in SEO, SEM and Social Media. It’s not a job, it’s passion.

26 thoughts on “Google Panda USA Update 2.5”

  • Durant Imboden 2011/10/01 at 5:26 pm

    I haven’t performed enough Google searches in the last few days to have strong opinions about the Panda 2.5 update, but for what it’s worth, our site (Europeforvisitors.com, an editorial travel-planning site) doesn’t appear to have been affected either positively or negatively by Panda 2.5–at least, not yet. Maybe Panda 2.5 focused on certain taxonomies or types of sites? (Your list of winners and losers appears to be heavy on newsy sites, as opposed to “evergreen” information sites.)

  • Loser 2011/10/01 at 9:03 pm

    I can’t be the only one who is noticing that all the winners are big corporate, media conglomerates and a lot of the losers are their independently owned, direct competitors.

    A lot of the sites on that losers list do NOT deserve to be there especially some of the ones who it looks like they got penalized once, and then recovered, and then they’re being penalized again?

    What in the world is going on???? Google owes an explanation to some of these really great sites like:

    consumeraffairs.com
    cinemablend.com
    hollyscoop.com
    gamepro.com
    motortrend.com
    blogcritics.org

    Just to name a few.

    This is ridiculous.

  • Durant Imboden 2011/10/01 at 9:40 pm

    The lists would be more illuminating if they showed apples-to-apples comparisons. Knowing that a celebrity-gossip site is down while an e-commerce site is up doesn’t tell us a lot. Also, does “search visibility” take Google News visibility into account? I’d guess that, for many of the news and entertainment sites, visibility in Google News is more important than visibility in general Web search.

  • John Davies 2011/10/02 at 3:16 am

    Forget Google, they don’t know what the heck they’re doing anymore because they have an extremely fragmented approach to search. How many changes a year? (2-3 day average) and how many different “groups or teams” pushing updates? (too many).

    Bing. Clean. Simple. Effective. All things Google USED to be.

  • Jane 2011/10/02 at 6:08 pm

    Fox news is up? Well there’s definitely something amiss with Google’s ‘quality’-meter..

  • Kelly 2011/10/02 at 7:07 pm

    It’s been a wild ride trying to figure out just what google wants.

  • Google Antitrust 2011/10/02 at 7:39 pm

    Google needs the government and some class actions suits to go Antitrust and win! win! win!

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/google-faces-antitrust-glare-on-capitol-hill/2011/09/20/gIQAFUuKjK_story.html

    This is an update that favors Adwords spenders. Something commonly pointed out by Aaron Wall of SEO book. The bigger the spend the better the rankings.

    This update seems to validate the gov’t antitrust issues going on right now, and for once I agree with Capital Hill. Google seems to cook the results. They even remove sites manually because they object to them or feel they are spamming them which is not always the case its their “opinion”, yet they will allow large companies like JC Penny to publicly spam and get away with a 60 day penalty, while they take much heavier hands to other sites and penalize them for years and sometimes multiple occasions because of jealous competitors unjustified and sometimes cooked complaints.

    Google results are by far the worst they are today. You would think wikipedia and amazon own Google. They are a popularity search engine NOT a relative content search engine. Your site must be popular or it simply will not rank for relative content alone.

    We simply do not need corporate spam like this. The Google algorithm is fraudulent and consists of friendly google hand shaking to large corporations with big spends.. Is it really best to show amazon and wikipedia for every search? That is what Google is becoming. They consistently say “Ask yourself this” “does it make sense foe visitors” no it does not make sense to always show amazon and wikipedia especially since wikipedia is not always accurate.

  • Michael Ullman 2011/10/03 at 1:39 am

    The more I look at ‘actuals’ – self-reported ‘actuals’ included – the more I’m beginning to develop a “user experience” picture of Panda, similar to what Rand Fishkin has been promulgating (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-panda-update-changed-seo-best-practices-forever-whiteboard-friday).

    This is why there seems to be such a quandary for those who isolate certain factors and change them (removing ‘low quality’ pages for instance), yet don’t see any correlating improvement.

    Consider this: no change is ‘registered’ until the next Panda iteration, so no one gets any immediate feedback. And if the underlying ‘measuring stick’ is “user experience”, many singular changes aren’t going to impact that in a meaningful way quickly.

    If “user experience” is algorithmically expressed as some summation of bounce rate, time on site, various social signals, etc., combined with some ‘universal user experience’ factors – content “quality” (algorithmically expressed through length, LSI-like relevance scores, etc.), PLUS the ‘improved’ analysis of backlinks, then it will take a combination of the RIGHT changes to turn that scoring around, and the time for those metrics to accumulate.

  • Iulian Lita 2011/10/03 at 10:36 am

    wow.. entrepreneur, thenextweb and technoraty got hit pretty hard… I still don’t understand why youtube and metacafe got this increase in visibility… their rankings got higher because the other results in front of them were penalized? or youtube pages become that relevant now?

  • Brent Nau 2011/10/03 at 3:07 pm

    Has anyone analyzed the analytic programs the sites were using? It would be interesting to see the breakdown of how may win/losers had GA versus other analytic programs. Maybe webmasters are giving away too much data for Google to assist them in knowing how a user interacts with their sites.

  • Helen 2011/10/03 at 3:10 pm

    Big winner, YouTube?

    Wow, what a surprise. A site owned by Google.

    The US government should be going after Google for deliberately trying to boost their own earnings and close down their competitors.

  • Norris Boothe 2011/10/03 at 7:28 pm

    Since I work at GamePro.com, I’m naturally disappointed with the change. I understand that Google is constantly improving it’s algorithm, and I hope that it will swing back to our benefit at some point as they observe the effect of this latest change.

    For those that think this is some evil-Google effort to benefit itself and big media, I think that’s off-base. They really are trying to get people the best results, but some types of content win and others lose out in the process.

    In the video game media space where gamepro.com is located, IGN did very well, but so did smaller video game media sites Gametrailers and G4TV, while another property owned by IGN, 1UP.com did poorly.

    The pattern I’m seeing is that sites with a lot of video greatly improved and sites without much video focus got hit pretty hard. IGN, GameTrailers, G4TV and of course YouTube, TV.com, and metacafe.com are all sites with lots of video (or video-focused sites) that did well. GamePro.com and 1UP.com have much less video focus and took a big hit. That’s the biggest pattern I’m seeing, and that’s likely why YouTube.com has the biggest benefit.

  • Jon Collins 2011/10/04 at 11:08 am

    Google Is Crap Now

    The telling thing on this page is the social media buttons at the top.

    Twitter :  94
    Facebook Shares: 48
    Facebook Likes: 48
    G+: 0

    When I visit good sites, that have those buttons, it is blindingly obvious that G+ just doesn’t cut it, except for Gfanboys.

    Google has changed from the best search engine, to irrelevant crap, in just 12 months.
    This is much like a government that has been in power too long, guided by lobbyists, that can’t see past the end of its own nose, to realize that is has completely lost the plot and alienated its best supporters. Anytime I can avoid a search using google, now, I do it – and I will continue to do that, forever.

    Google thinks it understands “users” but it has zero understanding of how real people use the internet. People rarely hang around on one website now – there is no need to. They can find a great range of things on many sites. Google has lost the plot and they are benefiting themselves, acting the same way that Microsoft did and the way all large for-profit entities do – in their own interest, and to hell with everyone else. Thankfully, they can’t see it and eventually, it will bite them in the ass.

    I agree with Michael Ullman, It is very difficult to tell what causes a site to regain some of its losses.

  • Ami Vider 2011/10/04 at 7:23 pm

    The list here is very limited. So much so, that it is hard to use it for anything. The changes in search results, the curved over time and the type of domains all show that a small change in search algorithm can make or break you day. In the SEO business, both in targeted direct methods to increase rank (and results) and in indirect methods (content, links) we seen to think that Google rank is everything. Sadly, some businesses rely so much on SEO that this is true. But in reality , the time of SEO has come and gone. Just like eBay and Amazon, established businesses need to work on customer loyalty and more customer-centric marketing methods. No business would rely only on advertising for business development. They are leaving most of their clients to the competition.

  • RedHat 2011/10/07 at 2:23 pm

    To google eyes:
    Corportate site with tons of updates is Great.

    Small Blog where the owner posts 1 time per month, gets information from several places to base his theory and information = Hammer.

    Google is changing but not caring about internet users, or to provide users what they want. Instead google is trying to Change how users surf the internet – its a smart act that if is allowed for a long time, will probably stick.

    Personally when I search for some subject in Google I dont like seeing the first 4 or 5 results coming from big sites, mostly because they all share the same opinion in a matter.

    Good Professional Hand-Made Spinned Content – Similar, same information. Thats the way google is going to, and not the way internet users like. All users like finding good sources, true, like CNN or others, but also, home made blogs that include personal opinions, extra information, etc.

    Hope Bing learns from all this, and helps the community giving a big kick in the ass of Google.

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