Ahh well, looks like I spoke too soon.
October 14th saw another run of Panda, as far as anyone can tell, and there’s a lot of screaming and running around like headless chickens happening of the Webmaster Forum … seems like it hit a number of people hard
Like us
Yep, after a few months of slow growth we were kicked in the teeth … dropped 35% on one site overnight, dropped probably 50% across all sites … not sure how much longer I can keep this up
Well, as suspected, its a bit of swings and roundabouts when it comes to search engine traffic and changes recently.
In fairness, I’d say that Panda is not currently an issue for us, but in making the Panda smile we have (a) lost our position for certain keywords and (b) made our site convert fewer visitors!
So, now for the next round of tuning aimed at doing these two things
1) regain the ground lost for certain important key phrases
2) improve our conversion rate
Whilst not bring back the Panda frown. Tricky one, made even trickier when you consider that our updates, Google’s scan and the Panda runs all happen asynchronously … and we have monthly and annual changes in traffic anyway. This means that seeing if something has worked is a near impossible thing .. it used to be a little easier s the world stayed roughly the same for long enough to see things stabilise, now this no longer seems to be true.
The shock today was to lose our position in Google for “dirty dancing tickets” and “tickets for dirty dancing” where we have always (for a few years) been in the top half of the first page, not even the Panda upset that. Today, all of a sudden, we are not in the first 10 PAGES of results! This fact was made even more curious when I noticed that in Yahoo we went from nowhere to number 7 and in Bing we went from nowhere to number 1!
Looks like the Panda got a bit of a make-over, or, as Google always put it, was subject to the 500 or so algorithmic changes that they make each year. A recent post or two has made it clear that they have been monitoring the reactions on the Webmaster Forum (where I can be found lurking from time to time) and, despite the fact that most of the Bionic Posters seem to think the problem is 99% the fault of webmasters, Google has clearly made some changes. Good for them.
Of course, it is hard to know what actual effect the Panda changes had this time as my sites have undergone quite massive rebuilds, redesigns and checks since the last time the Panda strolled by but it would seem that we might be on its good side now … depends if its just run or just about to run!
Mind you, though traffic has grown very recently (fingers crossed it keep growing) its still much less than it was and, worse still, the changes in traffic and in the website content that I have had to create to keep the Panda’s interest mean that this traffic is not anywhere near so lucrative …. Still, if I can get good traffic because its a good site I should, hopefully, be able to monetise that again … we shall see
Ok, lots of changes made and now to wait …
Changes made to the website might affect the SERPs reasonably quickly … the Googlebot spider is forever trawling across websites looking for new and changed materials so new items on the site can be indexed pretty quickly … by which I mean the pages will be shoved into the Google database
The Panda, however, does not run all the time. Every now and then (cycle to be determined, somewhere in the 6-8 week frame) Panda comes along and goes through the Google database weeding out what it sees as low quality sites … having done this, it goes to sleep again until the next time.
So in theory you could see a sawtooth waveform on your traffic, slow build up between Panda runs with large drops immediately after a Panda run – if this is the case then you have not yet solved the Panda problem because the best scenario is that you go UP after a Panda run and your competitors (or at least the spammers in your market segment) are the ones going down.
But to know this, you have to wait …..
Meanwhile, our good news is that our Reconsideration Request has been handled and no manual penalties were found on our site …
I have been answering some more questions on Webmaster Forum, and asking a few … I keep seeing people say that links to your site are important (perhaps less than they were) and that if you create great content people will link to it – no, they wont!
Actually, having great content doesn’t mean you will get good links and lots of shares – I know Google thinks it does but its not universally true, it depends on the topic area – if people wont need to come back often then they’re unlikely to link and they wont share unless they want to keep up with your news and think they’re friends might want to keep in touch with you. I shall not be sharing links to recently used funeral services, great sites for those with exotic diseases or indeed a million and one other things. I search for, find and use hundreds of sites each week, the vast majority of them are informative and useful AT THE TIME … I have been doing this pretty well every working day since 1994 … I have actually created public links to, perhaps, a couple of dozen sites in that time … and compared to all the users I know, I’m prolific!
Time for an update. Back in April, when Panda hit non-US English language sites our traffic fell around 86% – hard to give an exact figure as we were just having our best months ever. Over the next few months we saw a very small recovery followed by another drop and then we hit August, traditionally our worst month and, true to form, traffic started declining again.
Our traffic has always fluctuated, that is the nature of tickets/listings websites … it depends on what’s happening, a celeb appearing here, a new concert there, a new tour announced – all these things change our world naturally, spotting underlying trends is therefore pretty tricky.
During all that time we were not idle of course, as you may have read in our other posts. We are now a lot cleaner as far as SEO and robots are concerned, this may be somewhat more confusing for users but that’s the price they have to pay I’m afraid – no point in having the best organised site in the world if no one finds it because Google doesn’t rate it.
I have continued to take part on Google Webmaster Forum, am now a Level 2 (not very impressive really) and have received my first “Best Answer” – an answer based on things I have learned here. The Post.
Basically we have been making sure that we find and fix problems such as
We are still looking at things such as a large scale url re-write project to fix some url issues – meantime we have created our own url shortener to help in the management of archive links
Its a slow process but it seems to be working … there’s a long way to go till we get back to previous traffic and conversion levels but we seem to be moving in the right direction …
The other big change, however is that we try now to not get excited about traffic gains, nor depressed at traffic loses …. traffic has a habit of coming and going organically anyway and changes we make could take weeks to have an effect on our position … no need to overact!
I’m just wondering whether Google’s goal of being able to answer all questions for all people is really either achievable or desirable. I mean I know its desirable to Google but what about the rest of us?
Recent updates to Google’s searches have made it clear that sites providing search or linking are “no longer acceptable”. The declared aim, very laudable it is too, is to remove all of those horrible thin link sites from the results to give cleaner, clearer responses. Indeed, a common phrase now is “why would I want to link to you if you just link elsewhere, why not just go straight ‘elsewhere’ myself” ….
But the question in my head is, can a generic search engine with limited semantic capability really answer topic specific questions? If the answer is “yes” then I suggest that imdb, Wikipedia and a whole range of other sites need to pack up and go home as all of their internal links and all of their data expertise will soon be replaced with simple google search links 
The simple answer, of course, is that Google can never answer all the questions because they don’t know what is inside the users head when they asked it …. I suspect that there are more people searching “panda death” at the moment than ever before but is this concern for our endangered wildlife or worry about Google’s own algorithm updates? Google can not know that, indeed the same person may well mean both things in separate searches on the same day! Of course, the user can expect to get somewhat off-beam results if they use only a few keywords in their search but I would argue that that may well be what we want to be able to do.
If I were standing in a library and I was looking for “giraffe” I have several options ….probably the most likely are
1) Pick up Encyclopedia Britannica (volume “ganges to hyena” or whatever) and get some basic information
2) Pick up a book on animals and get more specific information
3) Select a nice hefty book on African Mammals and get quite detailed information
4) Pick up a book on Wild Animal Veterinary Practices and … well, you get the idea
In search engine terms, (1) is like looking things up on Google, the editor of the encyclopedia didn’t know what context I was looking for (what the heck is a giraffe?, where do giraffes live?, how long do giraffes live? …) so will have filtered all the world’s giraffe knowledge based on what most people are likely to find interesting – just as Google does.
What this “library analogy” shows though is that, depending on what I want, I will select a “search context” before doing the actual search – I do not expect generic tools to do a specific job, I expect them to do the generic job well … as Google increasingly does. But, and its a huge Panda Butt (!) if I want more specific information then I will use a more specific book … in this argument for ‘book’ read ‘search tool’ …
So to answer situation (4) above I need a Veterinary site with a wildlife section where I can search or use the expertly gathered and annotated links that the site author has put together to help me go to http://www.fixing-your-giraffe.com whilst avoiding http://www.giraffe-quackery.com…; However, a general Veterinary site with those characteristics would fall foul of Google’s view of a “good site” as they don’t themselves have the Giraffe articles on!
In other words, it is very important to me to have a search engine (Google) which will actually find other search engines and indeed even high quality link sites!
Google has mistakenly assumed that if I type a question into it then the ONLY good answer is the final answer … this is simply not true … if Google tells me who knows the right answer then that is also a good outcome … unless you are Google and feel that the whole world of human knowledge should be yours to filter as you see fit.
Google has recognised some of this, of course, as they now geo-code results so that you can find things in specific areas and they also have a QDF function that changes how they view the “age” of an article – for some things they think that oldest is best and for others they think that freshest is best – what you think is neither here nor there
By the way, if you type “search engine” into Google then Google only comes fourth
Step 1 of our attempts to recover from Panda was undertaken a little while ago, just after it hit the non-US English language searches with the consequent drop in over 85% of our traffic and our virtual disappearance from the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Our first action was to try and get over the shock, to realise that there was no point in bleating or howling at the moon and to start thinking about a long term strategy to recover.
Initially we thought this might be a ban. Why? Well, our SEO company had failed to warn us about the Panda under the bed so it came as a surprise. Lesson 1, SEO companies may not be all they claim to be (more of that later!). To check all this we tried the following
And breathe ….. Next step was to search and read … a lot. Doing a basic search on “loss of google position” revealed a flurry of posts from around the English Speaking World, it was from this that we learned about “Panda” which meant we could read up on it, assess that this was a very likely cause of our problem, work out that this was not going to be a quick fix and inform our SEO company (yep, we had to tell them!). I cannot emphasies too strongly how important this background reading is, really, everything you need to know is already out there if you take the time to look – and if you’ve just been Panda slapped then you do have the time, nothing will be happening to your site’s position until you read, understand and fix things!
Given that the SEO Company couldn’t come up with a co-herent strategy for recovery and seemed like it might have been at least part of the cause of the problem (bad links from bad articles placed in bad neighbourhoods) we fired them. As mentioned before, we got ourselves a more professional (expensive) SEO Company but, after a few months, they too went as their strategy seemed to be a secret known only to themselves. It was then that I came across the advice “The best thing to do with your SEO Company is push them under a bus” – well worth considering. Oh, and while we’re on the subject … all those emails you get promising Google Page 1, bin them, now!
Having armed myself with a good deal of background material (save links to good articles, you may need to re-read them later once you understand a bit more about the situation and your site) I went hunting more specific guidance on the Google Webmaster Forum. This forum is manned largely by volunteers but with the occasional Google Employee lurking there too. It is a place to raise questions and receive the combined wisdom of good people who give up their time for free. A few quick pieces of advice if you’re new to it
My first couple of questions on this forum had me told a few things that smarted
This gave me my first round of changes, and some of these were hard to get my head around as they went against things I had been doing, and been sure of, for 16 years … but basically
I also worked on Google analytics to make sure it recognised our iframe and ajax codes and went through and checked all our meta titles and descriptions ….
Phase 1 complete, took a few weeks but then all indications I had had were that the recovery from Panda could take months and all changes could take weeks and weeks to actually have an effect.
So after that lot the time had come to make sure I had good monitoring habits and I went looking for any deeper causes and issues that could be addressed … oh, and meantime, I kept the company going on our reduced income!
The Google Panda update is still causing us here at SeatChoice/UK Theatre web a mass of headache but we’re fighting back slowly.
The Panda isn’t actually, as we understand it, a direct part of the Google search but it is run from time to time to “weed out” sites that are deemed to be useless – basically all those rotten sites that you used to see in Google search results (SERPs) are now history. Unfortunately, some good sites are being caught in the net too – a bit like dolphins are killed as by-catch when netting for tuna (see Hugh’s Fish Fight for details!) … and yes, we’re part of that collateral damage.
UKTW/SeatChoice has been providing on-line what’s on services since 1995 (1994 if you count Gopher services!) and has been used, over the years, by SeatChoice, the BBC, Whatsonstage, London Dance, the eTelegraph, the New York Times (digital) and more. The services have been discussed on radio, including Front Row and are seen as a significant national resource by the Theatre Museum (V&A) as part of their on-going project to develop a national performing arts archive. Our listings are gathered in from a whole range of sources and are hand entered into our custom database … we then link tickets from over 20 suppliers to the individual shows so that our specialist live ticket search capabilities can find real live ticket availability and price – across the whole UK (not just the lucrative West End).
A labour of love but one that does need to earn enough to keep us doing it!
That was fine, we were doing ok, in fact things were getting better all the time, lots of people turning up at the site and using our unique functionality to find tickets and save money … lots of spend, lots of saved money, we were doing a worthwhile job that was appreciated … then the Panda arrived on the English speaking shores of Google … traffic for SeatChoice fell by over 80% overnight and then continued to slide down …. income went with it … wow …
So now the trick is to unpick why we have been slapped so hard, pick up the pieces, learn the lessons, rebuild and wait! No point in complaining, Google is what Google is and we all benefit from cleaner results. So here’s the first of some blogging about what we’re going to do about it all
First things first, we checked that the site stayed low in the traffic, checked that it was still being spidered, looked for errors in the code and basically checked around; nothing obvious, we still turned up somewhere in the results just not anywhere useful … we did, however, put in a reconsideration request and were informed that we didn’t break any guidelines. Good. That’s a start.
Next thing was to get advice from our SEO company .. well, actually, first step was to fire our SEO company, get a new one and ask for advice. To be honest, what the old company was doing was fine for the pre-Panda Google, but they should have known Panda was coming (it hit the USA before the rest of the world) and they should have warned us, or at least given us a strategy … we got silence so they got fired. The new SEO company was more business-like .. but in the end didn’t really have strong ideas, or if they did they failed to communicate them So, we appeared to be spending a lot of money on … well, they never told us what.
We did start to move up for the selected key phrases but to be honest had we been number 1 for all of them we still would not have replaced our original traffic – why? Well, we cover the whole UK, we have an enormous “long tail” response and if those minor pages do well then we do well … just picking off a few key phrases doesn’t really help. So that SEO company has also now gone. We’re on our own, but we’re happier (and richer) that way!
What I (re)discovered was the Google Webmaster Forums (Fora!) … volunteers (and the odd Google employee) who will answer your questions, look at your site, tell you things you don’t want to hear (but need to) and basically try to help. Wonderful people. Reminded me of the early days when everyone was a volunteer and free help was always the order of the day on-line … but then it was 1984 (no, not that 1984) and we were all sharing 64K of bandwidth and singing the praises of the VT100. Happy, heady, days when we argued about Green Book, worried that Janet was big-endian (I still say that’s more logical) and DARPA was little-endian (they won, it was their ball after all), wehn compuserve still had user id’s like 154562.88724 and when I had to login via Oxford University then Goonhilly to read my mail account in Argonne!
The other great discovery was the wonderful Matt Cutts on You Tube – the real word from Google!
Anyway, the lessons learned are that SeatChoice has fallen foul of one or more of the following no-nos
So, why were we hit so hard ….
Having looked over the SeatChoice site in great detail and having listened to the Webmaster Forum, our SEO company and the monkey on my shoulder I think that the pain has been caused very largely by (7) and made worse by (3), a misinterpretation that we fall foul of (4) and a lack of sufficient (5) … sounds like an order at a Chinese Restaurant ….
To be honest, however, I think Google has missed something here
Ok, so the problem is defined, the solutions need to follow … further blog entries will look at what we have done (and its effects) and what remains to be done (and our hopes for it)
There are a growing number of small, legitimate, websites reporting that they are going to have to give up as they can not recover from a fatal Panda Slap – and we are suffering badly too.
A good article, which tries to help explain it; Why Google Panda slapped quality sites.
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