Panda / Farmer update - winners and losers

[toprank4ever]

Just wanted to share this analysis of panda winners/losers I got yesterday in the teliad newsletter...

They had compared the changes in Google ranking visibility (their so called rankingindex) of the top 100 english domains from march to may, during the Panda Update.

The biggest winners:

1. youtube.com: 54.096,74 (+139,8%)
2. facebook.com: 24.167,27 (+124,26%)
3. squidoo.com: 11.467,18 (+63,60%)
4. ehow.co.uk: 6.035,64 (+58,27%)
5. thefreedictionary.com: 5.676 (+38,45%)
6. flickr.com: 12.905,11 (+38,00%)
7. alibaba.com: 7.523,97 (+35,74%)
8. myspace.com: 6.660,76 (+30,86%)
9. nextag.com: 11.453,02 (+30,77%)
10. informe.com: 8.796,46 (+28,89%)

The biggest losers:

1. associatedcontent.com: 9.129,76 (-56,84%)
2. suite101.com: 9.590,36 (-52,82%)
3. wisegeek.com: 3.921,63 (-52,66%)
4. thefind.com: 4.077,09 (-43,76%)
5. findarticles.com: 3.872,02 (-39,98)
6. examiner.com: 3.116,22 (38,69%)
7. ezinearticles.com: 14.712,47 (38,62%)
8. buzzle.com: 7.375,12 (-37,74%)
9. ehow.com: 24.304,51 (-28,26%)
10. brothersoft.com: 3.895,10 (-27,36%)

I notice some big big winners like facebook, flickr and youtube but it´s kind of queer that ranking visibility of ehow in UK had grown nearly 60% but ehow.com lost about 30%!!

Anyone got some ideas about it ...?

[webcosmo]

wasnt that the purpose, making authority sites win over SEO works

[Jayres10]

It was all about google punishing duplicate contents and rewarding authenticity and relevance. This is why google is a great search engine.

[toprank4ever]

It was all about google punishing duplicate contents and rewarding authenticity and relevance. This is why google is a great search engine.

So do you think that ehow.co.uk has great content and instead of ehow.com that has a lot of duplicate content???

Besides of the whole content thing, what are the conclusions you drew after the Panda Update ...??

Brand factors?
User data like rentention or bounce rates?

[scottytruman]

That was weird! Considering that the biggest winners are already winners even before the panda update.

[veryshant]

Its strange to know that ehow.com,ezinearticle becomes losers.May be the duplicate contents be the reason.Any way thanks for sharing such informative statistics.

[hemanthjava]

I still see a lot of SPAM on the net when I search for entertainment or Sports events. Specially a lot of google blogs containing junk content is all over SERP's

[angelica11]

Interesting statistics...Can't say that the web has become a poorer place after the update. It was long overdue.

[stephen1983]

Google panda is one of the most trending topics in SEO this year. As I said in other forums, Google panda is the newest Google algorithm update to minimize irrelevant results in SERPS. It is all about rewarding content rich sites and downgrading sites with duplicate or trashy content. It’s a great step forward

[goldhome]

ezine articles does not have any duplicate content, the issue is the quality of the article, they only take care of the grammatical mistakes and the uniqueness. They never check whether the article has quality.

[AbbeyzSmith]

ezine articles does not have any duplicate content, the issue is the quality of the article, they only take care of the grammatical mistakes and the uniqueness. They never check whether the article has quality.

I do agree with this. I am not sure whether someone has analyzed this or not but we can hardly see any traffic coming from ezine. They have maintained the uniqueness but not the quality anymore.

[wardcosbyson]

I do agree with this. I am not sure whether someone has analyzed this or not but we can hardly see any traffic coming from ezine. They have maintained the uniqueness but not the quality anymore.

I don't really think they have maintained that "uniqueness" you are saying. With almost 400,000 registered "expert authors" its really hard to tell which users upload unique articles. Say for example, try to search there the keywords "anxiety disorder" and you will find hundreds of articles with almost the same content.

[susangirl]

Having a close look at the big winners it seems that most of them are the worst offenders when it comes to stolen content, scrapped content and spam.
Youtube is full of stolen content, scrapped content and spam, so is Facebook, so is myspace, and some of the others.
Actually, the big losers are far more about original content then the winners.

But then if people actually listen to what Google has been saying you would know that Panda has NOTHING to do with Duplicate content....
"Google's Tiffany Oberoi, who is a software engineer working on the search quality team, she was adamant that Panda was "not" about duplicate content"....Redefining Unique Content* - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

The evidence of the winners support this. I actually dont think its an issue, I think what google are saying is its how you Present that content, As such that is why the internets biggest scrapper wikipedia is number 1 on Google.



The biggest winners:

1. youtube.com: 54.096,74 (+139,8%)
2. facebook.com: 24.167,27 (+124,26%)
3. squidoo.com: 11.467,18 (+63,60%)
4. ehow.co.uk: 6.035,64 (+58,27%)
5. thefreedictionary.com: 5.676 (+38,45%)
6. flickr.com: 12.905,11 (+38,00%)
7. alibaba.com: 7.523,97 (+35,74%)
8. myspace.com: 6.660,76 (+30,86%)
9. nextag.com: 11.453,02 (+30,77%)
10. informe.com: 8.796,46 (+28,89%)

The biggest losers:

1. associatedcontent.com: 9.129,76 (-56,84%)
2. suite101.com: 9.590,36 (-52,82%)
3. wisegeek.com: 3.921,63 (-52,66%)
4. thefind.com: 4.077,09 (-43,76%)
5. findarticles.com: 3.872,02 (-39,98)
6. examiner.com: 3.116,22 (38,69%)
7. ezinearticles.com: 14.712,47 (38,62%)
8. buzzle.com: 7.375,12 (-37,74%)
9. ehow.com: 24.304,51 (-28,26%)
10. brothersoft.com: 3.895,10 (-27,36%)

[toprank4ever]

I think what google are saying is its how you Present that content,

I´m not quite sure, what You tried to express... What do mean by talking about the "presentation of the content"?

Do you refer to factors like design, layout, publicity on the web page ...?

[My SEO Pandit]

No. They will check only for unique content. you need to change some part of your existing content.If you submit same article they will not approve.I have tried with this. Its common for all off page submissions becoz of google panda update

[greatar4]

I was reading several posts about how hard article marketing was hit by the recent Google Panda update it seems like lot of sites that used to focus much more on unique content are the one who get hit the hardest. I just can't believe why. Buzzle.com is one of the sites that get hit and they only accept unique content. I was thinking that Goarticles.com which is auto approve would have been among the sites that would get hit instead they make big gain in the recent update.

[toprank4ever]

I think that the problem of scraper sites became a big issue again now in post panda times ...

Just found a statement by M. cutts and he was saying that there will be some changes soon regarding the scraper issue ...whatever that means, but maybe some of these big panda winners should not feel too happy right now...

[eyesea]

I've been keeping my eye on this and all I can say is that despite what Panda may have been hyped to be, promised to be, explained to be I have been less satisfied with the search results I am getting on Google lately. There are some searches that I repeat over time and now won't even take me to what I am looking for.
Also, it is necessary sometimes to duplicate content. You have to make a webpage stand on its own instead of assuming a visitor will read your whole site (rare, less than 1/10 of 1% of the time) so content often has to live several places.
Perhaps in my own ignorance I am misunderstanding the whole issue. It seems to me that Google has lost touch with real users, as evidenced by the fact that they do not dialog with their users. They'd rather handle everything with machines and algorithms.

[susangirl]

I´m not quite sure, what You tried to express... What do mean by talking about the "presentation of the content"?

Do you refer to factors like design, layout, publicity on the web page ...?

Take a look at Wikipedia, its number 1 in the serps all over the place, yet its the biggest scrapper on the internet full of unfactual articles that just represent the views of the editors that control that certain page on Wikipedia, yet that stuffed up page full of bias and scrapped content ranks 1 in google because of presentation. Forget SEO. Think what the reader wants.
One of my websites that got slaughtered in Panda is now ranking Number 1 all over Google. How did I do it? By doing the exact opposite of what everyone is saying.

Its about presentation. The first thing I did was fill my articles full of links to other websites. Yes thats right...the exact opposite of what everyone else is saying. Because those links are references to other high quality articles on the same subject so the user can gain a fast and comprehensive approach to what their seeking. I laid the articles out similar to Wikipedia with a list of references at the bottom of the pages, I now scrape content, I present arguments for and against on the page, and other types of presentation that is identical to wikipedia such as the Table, etc. Thats how I recovered from Panda and now find myself back to number 1.

[toprank4ever]

@Susangirl ...

Very interesting ... if this what you told us is true, it would be the evidence of Google´s incapacity dealing with scraper issues.

I think Wikipedia has some sort of special status at search engines and generally it does not make any sense to compare regular websites with them.

[ULTiMATE]

Take a look at Wikipedia, its number 1 in the serps all over the place, yet its the biggest scrapper on the internet full of unfactual articles that just represent the views of the editors that control that certain page on Wikipedia, yet that stuffed up page full of bias and scrapped content ranks 1 in google because of presentation. Forget SEO. Think what the reader wants.
One of my websites that got slaughtered in Panda is now ranking Number 1 all over Google. How did I do it? By doing the exact opposite of what everyone is saying.

Nonsense.

Wikipedia as an entity does not scrape content. When information from another source is used it should be correctly referenced, and more often than not most Wikipedia pages are of good quality and contain the correct references for all the information contained.

If you're going to say such things then please provide some proof of your claims.

[Stevie D]

Take a look at Wikipedia, its number 1 in the serps all over the place, yet its the biggest scrapper on the internet full of unfactual articles that just represent the views of the editors that control that certain page on Wikipedia, yet that stuffed up page full of bias and scrapped content ranks 1 in google because of presentation.

I disagree. Wikipedia is all manually edited. Sure, there may be some contributors who simply copy and paste content in there, but IMX they're very much a minority.

What is incredibly common is for other websites to scrape content off Wikipedia, reformat it and present it as their own. This may or may not be legal in each case, I haven't checked the terms of the licence or the attributions on each one, but it is (a) misleading to the surfer, who thinks he's getting something from that site, not from Wikipedia, and (b) unhelpful and unnecessary, like almost all scraped content it adds no value whatsoever to the internet.

[susangirl]

Nonsense.

Wikipedia as an entity does not scrape content. When information from another source is used it should be correctly referenced, and more often than not most Wikipedia pages are of good quality and contain the correct references for all the information contained.

If you're going to say such things then please provide some proof of your claims.

Having a reference does not make the article correct. More often then not the reference is in itself of bias. Just one bad reference taints an entire article. In the end, Ive got better things to do then get into a debate about wikiscrapper. There are people who support it, good luck to them, thats their right. But their are others who have a good laugh at the silly junk articles. At my University, wikipedia articles often make the round of Lecturers for a good laugh during morning coffee.

[susangirl]

@Susangirl ...

Very interesting ... if this what you told us is true, it would be the evidence of Google´s incapacity dealing with scraper issues.

I think Wikipedia has some sort of special status at search engines and generally it does not make any sense to compare regular websites with them.

I do not believe Wikipedia has any special status, the only thing that Google is giving special status to are their own websites such as youtube.

I suggest giving it a try, take one of your websites, add a whole pile of references at the bottom of each page and make the layout similar to wikipedia and see what happens. That is the only way you will know. Its working for me is all I can say. The only only problem for me was my content was original, so in effect I had to invent a series of references that actually do not exist. Its a sad situation indeed. But google have got their serps in such a mess since Panda its all you can do. Best of luck.

[ULTiMATE]

Having a reference does not make the article correct.

For the vast majority of factual pages it does. This is a blanket statement that holds no relevance.

More often then not the reference is in itself of bias.

You've yet to provide any proof of your claims. To state "more often than not" would claim that you've read most of the articles on Wikipedia, which leads me to disregard your comment on the subject.

In the end, Ive got better things to do then get into a debate about wikiscrapper. There are people who support it, good luck to them, thats their right.

There is no debate. There is your opinion, and a call for evidence on said opinion. You're on a SEO board, so if you have no interest in backing up your opinion it's safe to say that people will regard it as incorrect. The simple fact that you've stated that your SEO strategy is to scrape content because, as you've incorrectly stated "Wikipedia do it" only further damages your viewpoint.

But their are others who have a good laugh at the silly junk articles. At my University, wikipedia articles often make the round of Lecturers for a good laugh during morning coffee.

You'll be surprised to know that a lot of academics contribute to Wikipedia. It's a great source of information for the layman, and more often than not their articles are free of bias and show facts. It may also interest you to know that Wikipedia is largely supported by a number of colleges and universities as "a good point to start" when researching. Even in top 25 universities (worldwide) Wikipedia is often a cited source in lectures. I should know, I've attended one.

Of course, at a university lecturers will laugh at it, because there are a small subset of students that don't want to do work and will steal stuff from Wikipedia. This does not mean that Wikipedia is a poor source of information. For people looking to learn it is probably the first and best resource available on the Internet.