Google Panda 3.3 Out

[usaonlinecasino]

Recent stats shows that traffic did not change much, but keywords spread for more especially for some long words combinations. It means that main keywords dropped, which is in consistence with the drop of performance. I want to know if you have the same story.

[Kasinas]

Google started attacking unnatural link building patterns more aggressively. Many Webmaster Tools users got a message about unnatural links.

[itsblitz]

well about 4 weeks ago i woke up to find 3 of my highest ranking sections/categories of one of my sites had completely dropped out of google searchs with all posts categorized under these sections also dropped, grabbing whole blocks of text and searching post titles from these category posts confirmed that i had been penalised, what iv been trying to understand these past few weeks is the cause, low quality links? wouldnt cause a severe penalty surely and the categories in question had very few incoming links. What i thought was interesting is it was all the sections that rank highest and had front page on google uk for good keywords and were getting traffic, the only thing i could think of was the way i was redirecting mobile users to a single page on my site for mobile casino bonus offers, the page was set to 'noindex, nofollow' you can read more here http://www.casinoaffiliateprograms.c...-recovery.html
i had been using this method for months without problems, so take what you will from that
so not to derail this thread with my problem, i think one of the big changes with the new update is that google no longer gives such importance or credit to the age of a domain, this could explain why so many new sites are popping up on the front page pf google with pr0, like xecutable mentioned

[casinoplanet]

the only thing i could think of was the way i was redirecting mobile users to a single page on my site for mobile casino bonus offers

I encountered the same problem twice.
Some years ago I installed a redirection script from the mobile to the regular website (95% of my traffic is mobile). It resulted in a massive drop in rankings, so I removed the script. After that, rankings picked up again.

Recently I tried it once more and within a few weeks again a massive drop. After the second removal, rankings increased again.
Although an auto-redirect script is very convinient for visitors, from a SEO pov I won't use it again.

[itsblitz]

Thanks, its good to get some feedback on this as i havent had much luck finding information on this problem, i mean, we are basically tricking the serps by showing a result in google but then mobile users clicking that result get taken to a page which isnt relevant or even close to the page they actually wanted from the google listed result, the only way im now getting around this is to offer a mobile theme version of my site using a wordpress plugin(wptouch pro) but adding cta buttons to the mobile template to get visitors onto the squeeze page, again, sorry if im derailing this thread

[lots0]

itsblitz,

when you say, "tricking" the serps, sounds to me like the cardnial google sin of cloaking...

If google thinks your 'cloaking', showing one page to googlebot and a different page to users... your fried.
google is very good at detecting 'cloaking', thats why you see those visits from the google IP's and servers that do not identify themselves as googlebot.

[itsblitz]

yes cloaking i meant, stupidly enough i never saw it this way till i got penalised, i thought i was offering a great way for mobile users to use my site easily, doh!!! lol

[naveensingh]

Lot of result is changed and many sites has loses there ranking.

thanks
Naveen

[Madabout Media]

Hi xecutable,
We where hit way back in October last year with 2.5 and have been trying everything possiable since to get our pages ranking back in serps. We seem to have gained ranking for our home page but have had an entire section of our site penalised in google. We have updated all the reviews made them more in depth added videos,screenshots etc to keep visitors on the page longer and reduce both bounce rate and exit rate. However am now convinced it could be our news section as we used a cheap article writer and many of the posts if not all arent well written. I have removed over 400 posts and 301'd them to the relevant review and i'm now in the middle of updating the remaining posts making sure they are over 300 words and well formatted and written. Im curious to know what else you have done in order to get the ranking back as we are at a loss

[xecutable]

I did all that you said, and tried to remove as many low quality posts (or what Google considered low quality) as possible. What I did next is, I used seomoz's Open Site Explorer to evaluate the different between the domains that outranked me, and the post itself that was supposed to rank for that keyword.

If I noticed some big difference, for example the competition had built some 20-30 external links to their posts, I did that as well and more.

In addition I watched some Google video where they tell you to make a submission for re-consideration http://support.google.com/webmasters...n&answer=35843

Google will eventually reply if they have put a manual penalty on your site, and why. If there's no manual penalty you will know for sure it's you content quality and/or backlinks.

I had some backlinks from ezinearticles, I figured if they've got slapped, links from them might be now bad neighborhood so I got rid of those too.

I still agree with lots0's theory that links r king when it comes to seo and ranking, and perhaps those updates devalued some of your backlinks and that can be the cause.

Bottom line, I will clean up whatever u have left, submit for reconsideration, check the competition at what level they beat you and try to figure what's going on.

[Madabout Media]

Thanks for your quick response, i only have about 360 or so posts to tidy up now so nearly there . I think you could be on to something with the ezinearticles and links been devalued. Will check out seomoz and see what we can do to get the pages back and will keep you posted on any progress.

Thanks again
Andy

[xecutable]

Great, I encourage anyone that has been hit, to share their progress and resolution for future reference for the rest of the forum webmasters. Just because it didn't happen this time, doesn't mean someone might not cry-out next time and start wondering where to start from.

As for ezine I read that their traffic and keywords dropped drastically. Obviously Google had something in mind, and might be also penalizing everyone associated with them. These r however just my speculations.

[CoopersPick]

I am working on a service that combats this latest update it would involve social factors and such to appease Mr. G. and MC. In the end though if you are offering high quality content that people would want to read or naturally link to than you will never have a problem.

Issue with this is many of you with a bingo site or slots may have a harder time creating enough creative content.

[felku]

I don't know if it is true since I read this on SEO forum, they claim that one of the member site was penalized. Most of the sites kw were hit except one kw targeting one inner page. He claims that he used almost the same kw for all his backlinks and he recover some sports using generic kw like click here or visit us etc. Anyway I don't if this work or is true, I just mentioned in case that someone receive a similar penalty and what to try something.

[justbookies]

yes cloaking i meant, stupidly enough i never saw it this way till i got penalised, i thought i was offering a great way for mobile users to use my site easily, doh!!! lol

This is an interesting point. I think maybe lots of sites are doing this without realising it might be construed as cloaking by google - sending visitors to a mobile site when they use a mobile device. All the big operators are doing this. If you link through to their sites from a mobile it goes to the mobile site. This may be something that could be penalised but it lacks logic. I would call this acceptable cloaking, as someone on a mobile device is getting a more appropriate page for them. Google ties itself up in knots always re-defining the line in the sand between their idea of white hat and black hat seo.

[lots0]

It depends on how you implement the redirects to the mobile pages that matters.

If you try to 'trick' googlebot by using mod_rewrite or some other way of 'hiding' the re-direct... that will be seen as 'cloaking' by google.

However, if your re-directs follow google's guidelines about allowing your mobile landing page re-directs to be cachable, you shouldn't have any problems.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-sp...cs/mobile.html

[itsblitz]

This is an interesting point. I think maybe lots of sites are doing this without realising it might be construed as cloaking by google - sending visitors to a mobile site when they use a mobile device. All the big operators are doing this.

Hi, this is why i brought this point up, i was loving all the mobile traffic getting sent to a great converting mobile page for at least 2 months with no problems, it was only when i was getting alot of mobile traffic hitting sections of my site that were not related to the term they searched for, so i worry about some of these other sites that are using these redirect plugins. I think if the mobile page, which i was redirecting all mobile users to, wasnt 'noindex,nofollow' then maybe i wouldnt have been penalised, it looks very suspicious to google, but the reason i didnt want it index was that i use an exact copy of the page on a few of my other sites, im considering remoeing the noindex,nofollow and trying out the redirect again, but not on my main sites, im not going through all that again
alos on to a point made above about getting over a penalty, change your urls and dont 301 redirect them, ok you wont get the high rank but at least your internal pages will rank for the long tail

[howtoweightlosscouk]

i also have a website is down PR from PR4 to PR0, very sad

[scarfie]

Hi mate - well... I got hit. It looks like a handful of blog network links that we'd dabbled with brought us down. As I said in my other thread, it's my own fault - not as much time on my hands, so I tried some quick tactics. Our rankings hadn't really improved as a result of these tactics, though. Anyway, I do have plenty of good content so I'm not worried, we'll ping back... I've decided to diversify my tactics, though - some new domains, how-to guides, things like that, and I'm going to try and build more of a community so I can avoid being hit by Google again. Guest blogging, and getting guest bloggers, is definitely the way forward.
A side note: why hit the sites that have tried these tactics? Just rank sites according to their usefulness in relation to the searcher query. Hit the spam sites hard, and make links from them count for zero. What's happening now is negative SEO - hitting your competitors with spam links so they get de-indexed. Not a nice world. Thanks Google.

Great, I encourage anyone that has been hit, to share their progress and resolution for future reference for the rest of the forum webmasters. Just because it didn't happen this time, doesn't mean someone might not cry-out next time and start wondering where to start from.

As for ezine I read that their traffic and keywords dropped drastically. Obviously Google had something in mind, and might be also penalizing everyone associated with them. These r however just my speculations.

[bboyspyder]

Panda 3.4 is already out. Google continues bashing on number of blackhat SEO techniques. Good onpage SEO is going to be the thing for the future.

SMO will play a big roll in my oppinion too.