It’s been two years since Google unleashed the Panda update. How the time flies.
As you probably know, the update was designed to promote higher quality content from sites in Google’s search results. Google laid out some unofficial guidelines for what it means by “quality,” and victims of the update strived to recover from the huge drop in search visibility suffered as a result from the update, by following these guidelines as best as possible. Few have been successful.
Some have had to rethink their entire business models. Smart content providers found ways to diversify their web traffic better as to not have to rely as much on Google. Demand Media’s site eHow has been the prime example of this. While it did go through a massive quality clean-up initiative to get back in Google’s good graces, it has also largely expanded its social media strategies, and increased partnerships, and the site is in as good of shape as ever, based on recent earnings calls from the company (which is now separating its content business from its registrar business).
Demand Media ranked as a top 20 U.S. web property throughout last year, and was ranked at number 13 in January, according to comScore. The company reached over 125 million unique visitors worldwide in January, and eHow itself was ranked number 12 in the U.S. with 62 million unique visitors in January.
Not everyone has been as successful as Demand Media. Matt McGee at Search Engine Land has put together a couple of articles (apparently the first two in an ongoing series) looking at Panda victims two years later. He finds, citing Searchmetrics data (which has been questionable at times in the past, for the record), that none of 22 victims from the original Panda update, as listed by Searchmetrics, has returned to pre-Panda visibility, and that only two have improved compared to their post-Panda visibility.
MotorTrend.com, which was hit by the original update for some reason, has managed to bounce back, and McGee calls it the “true Panda recovery” in terms of search visibility. Today, he says (again, citing Searchmetrics data), it appears to have better visibility than it had pre-Panda.
For sites like EzineArticles, HubPages, and the like, no such luck. He says that even eHow’s visibility is down 63% from pre-Panda levels.
But again, the Demand Media strategy is not as reliant on Google as it was pre-Panda. And that’s probably the best thing to take away from the whole thing. ChaCha, another Panda victim, has adopted a similar approach, as CEO Scott Jones recently described to us.
Last year was all about Penguin, though Google continued to push Panda refreshes on a regular basis. Panda was kind of in the background as the Internet was already accustomed to it. Still, it’s Panda that tends to rear its head more often than Penguin.
Google has been pushing out a major update early in each of the past couple years. We’re still wondering if they have a 2013 counterpart to Panda and Penguin in store. We’re also still waiting for Google to release months worth of its “search quality highlights”.
Google announced the launch of its latest known Panda refresh a little over a month ago. The company said it affected 1.2% of English queries.
Have Google’s results gotten better since it first launched Panda? Has quality gone up? Let us know what you think.
Photo: Ken Bohn, San Diego Zoo (via National Geographic)