algorithm-updates

If you’ve read some of my case studies in the past, then you know Panda can be a real pain the neck for large-scale websites. For example, publishers, ecommerce retailers, directories, and other websites that often have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of pages indexed. When sites grow that large, with many … Read more

Oct 17, 2014 was an important date for many SEOs, webmasters, and business owners. Penguin, which we’ve been waiting over an entire year for, started to roll out. Google’s Gary Illyes explained at SMX East that Penguin 3.0 was imminent, that it would be a “delight” for webmasters, that it would be a new algorithm, … Read more

On Tuesday, September 23, Google began rolling out a new Panda update. Pierre Far from Google announced the update on Google+ (on Thursday) and explained that some new signals have been added to Panda (based on user and webmaster feedback). The latter point is worth its own blog post, but that’s the not the focus … Read more

My last blog post explained that Panda is now running in near-real-time and what that means for webmasters and business owners. Well, that was perfect timing as Panda just made another trip around the web as kids head back to school and the NFL kicks in. I’ve seen multiple Panda clients see recovery starting on … Read more

In June of 2013 I wrote about the maturing of Google’s Panda algorithm and how it started to roll out monthly over a ten day period. Google also explained at that time that they wouldn’t be confirming future Panda updates. In my post, I explained how the combination of monthly updates, over ten days, with … Read more

Panda 4.0 arrived in late May with a fury not seen by many previous updates. It was a HUGE update and many sites were decimated by P4.0. Most businesses reaching out to me after the May 20 update saw drops of 50%+, with some losing 80% of their Google organic search traffic overnight. And on … Read more

After Panda 4.0 rolled out, I analyzed many cases of both strong recoveries and severe fresh hits.  Based on analyzing over 40 websites hit by P4.0, I wrote two blog posts detailing my findings.  You can find my initial findings on my blog and then additional P4.0 findings in my Search Engine Watch column. I … Read more

On May 20th, 2014 Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Panda 4.0 was rolling out.  Leading up to that tweet, there was a lot of chatter across the industry about an algorithm update rolling out (based on reports of rankings volatility and traffic gains/losses).  I was also seeing lots of movement across clients that had been … Read more

Summary: Google has rolled out multiple algorithm updates in April that heavily impacted song lyrics and mp3 websites. This post provides more information about those updates, documents specific sites that were hit, and provides some possible problems that the algo targeted. I plan to update this post as I analyze more sites impacted by the … Read more

As a consultant helping a number of companies with Panda recovery, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the March Panda update.  Based on the data I have access to, I was able to pick up and analyze Panda UJan14, UFeb14, and the infamous UFeb14Rev (where Google re-rolled out the algorithm update after mistakenly hammering movie blogs).  Needless … Read more