Yes, Google Panda has affected many webpages accross the globe. One could say it has impacted the web like the Manhattan Project the Pacific War during the WWII.

Google Panda – New Trends in Searching the Web

So what really happened? Well, Google decided to bring a better experience for the end-user and provide more accurate and better results to the people surfing and searching the web. Nobody (but them) knows the exact thing they did with their algorithm but it surely did influence many, many web marketers and I don’t think they were ready for such a change. The change that “the world” knows is that they eliminated “farm sites”. Basically the farm sites are pages that are usually a duplicate of an existing web page and host various topics (Yahoo Answers should be most affected, even though I don’t see any negative change). So, if you had a page like that you should have been affected.

Google Dropped My Page – I Lost 60% – 90% of Traffic Over Night

Well, I didn’t and I still got banned in terms of my traffic being down about 60%-90% which of course is major shift in my revenue. I tried several methods to bring my traffic up, but so far no success. I followed other peoples instructions and suggestions but so far nothing worked. I had relatively unique and useful content, but this seamed not to work as Google says they hate Duplicate content (my words, not theirs!). So, to me it seams they are playing a game… To be honest with you, I do not have a Facebook, Twitter or YouTube type of site in terms of being innovative, new and “alone” on the market. I do niche marketing and I’ve found a keyword I though it was great, prosperous. The problem was these sites of mine in this niche marked worked well. And as soon as it worked really, really well, Google dropped me overnight. It looked like they don’t want to give me a break to make an honest buck… Sounds like your story????

What To Do?

What I guess works the best is to clean up your site. Get rid of duplicate content (even though some people believe there is nothing like “duplicate” content and it wouldn’t hurt you). Start with on-site and off-site SEO. Get yourself some backlinks from credible sites… If you’re in a high competative market this is even more important. If not, a bit less, but necessary in any case.

I wish you good luck and hope you make it.

User Bounces in the Post-Panda World

Forget for a moment everything you think you know about Google and how they rank content. Put yourself in the role of a person who is tasked with ranking results. One result gets clicked often, but most of the time the user only stays on the page for a few seconds (if that), returns to the results page, and clicks on another result.

Meanwhile, another result on the same page gets clicked on a lot too, but when users click on that one, they stay on the page longer, and don’t even return to the results page to find another result to click on. Nor do they refine their query. Which page is most likely the one that has the better content for that particular search?

Should bounce rate be a ranking signal?

Well, being a human, you have the luxury of looking at both pages and making that call. Now, pretend you’re not a human. You’re a computer algorithm tasked with ranking the world’s information for the majority of searchers. While you have over 200 signals that can help you determine which one should rank higher, wouldn’t this be one that could help?

This is not exactly bounce rate, but it’s related. In this case, it is the bounce in the direction of back to the SERP, and while there has been a lot of discussion and argument about whether Google uses actual bounce rate as a signal, it seems pretty likely that they are looking at this specific element of it.

SearchMetrics, after releasing data about the Panda winners and losers in the UK, said, “It seems that all the loser sites are sites with a high bounce rate and a less time on site ratio. Price comparison sites are nothing more than a search engine for products. If you click on a product you ‘bounce’ to the merchant. So if you come from Google to ciao.co.uk listing page, than you click on an interesting product with a good price and you leave the page. On Voucher sites it is the same. And on content farms like ehow you read the article and mostly bounce back to Google or you click Adsense.”

“And on the winners are more trusted sources where users browse and look for more information,” the firm added. “Where the time on site is high and the page impressions per visit are also high. Google’s ambition is to give the user the best search experience. That’s why they prefer pages with high trust, good content and sites that showed in the past that users liked them.”

WebmasterWorld Founder Brett Tabke wrote in a recent forum post, discussing what he calls the “Panda metric”, that “Highly successful, high referral, low bounce, quality, and historical pages have seen a solid boost with panda.”

In a recent video from Google’s Matt Cutts, on ranking in 2011, he talks about increasing site speed, and how this can keep users on your site longer (IE: not bouncing), you can increase your ROI. Speed is a ranking signal. We know that. Speed can reduce bounce rate. Even if Google doesn’t use bounce rate directly, there is a strong relationship here.
Google Algorithm Update – Is Bounce Rate a Ranking Signal? Part 2