5 ms·

Pandalized: Sites Negatively Impacted by Google's Panda Update

30 points by rlander 15y ago

thirsteh 15y ago
And pretty much all of them are a collection of poor content. Good then.
- TomGullen 15y ago
  Yup, totally agree
_delirium 15y ago
On the plus side (for me), some of my niche hobby sites that have information on a few static HTML pages, without much monetization or SEO effort, have gotten significant rankings boosts lately. May or may not be due to Panda, but did happen about the same time.
Rantenki 15y ago
This is not a bug. This is a feature.
bcrescimanno 15y ago
Does it make me vindictive to want to see most of these sites never "recover?" This basically reads like a list of sites that, up through the "panda" update, I would mistakenly click on, get pissed off, and go back looking for a REAL result. Many of these sites were basically duping people into giving them ad impressions with thin, stale (and sometimes stolen) content and making people's lives more difficult. Kudos to Google for the first time in many years making a solid stand against obvious gaming of their search results.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  I would mistakenly click on, get pissed off, and go back looking for a REAL result. Precisely. Virtually all of these are pure crap. I'm sure there are some legitimate sites that became collateral damage, but these aren't them.
- morrow 15y ago
  A good tool for blocking domains like these from appearing in your search results is the personal blocklist extension for chrome (made by Google): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd...
Rusky 15y ago
I love how chacha.com is the first one on that list. Of course they're doing worse, that was the entire point. Nobody wants to find results from some random person spewing out whatever answers they feel like.
- troutwine 15y ago
  I never happened across chacha.com results in any of my searches. I'm unsure of it's purpose, based on its website. What does/did it do?
  - dangrossman 15y ago
    Human-powered Q&A/search. You ask a question, a human gets paid a pittance to answer it. They are focused on mobile now (text a question, get a text back with an answer). Sometimes their answers show up in search results (I've encountered them), and they're usually just a few words and not very useful.
- codexon 15y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate, how is this different from stackoverflow or quora? (Maybe they were pandalized too?)
  - antimarketing 15y ago
    Good question, I played the Devil's Advocate inside my mind. Here is what I get as return / output: All the traditional elements of marketing are different: a) Is the target market specific? Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. b) Is the target market pro. / high-end users with high sense of fidelity to the topic / site / brand or casual consumers? Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. c) Does the target audience return to said sites regularly, participate in a community (with hierarchies, badges, comments and replies etc..)? Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. d) Do the specific topics discussed get relevant links from blogs, tuts sites etc.. from similiar fields Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. This is simply the tip of the iceberg.
    - 15y ago
TomGullen 15y ago
Looking through the list, I see a lot of junk websites I don't want to recover. Most people who seem to be complaining about Panda have really bad websites. Most people wont even give you their URL after moaning about it for a good few minutes. Perhaps it's time for them to change their strategy. I'm sure there are legitimate 'victims' but I'm yet to see one I sympathise with.
baby 15y ago
I thought you were talking about Panda the antivirus at first. And now I'm wondering if it's still existing.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
timcederman 15y ago
Panda killed rankings for a lot of my personal sites that I don't update often, but still have a lot of content on them (that I created, not junk). One of them seems to be actively excluded from search results now. As an example of the ridiculousness of the new algo, try searching for "shopsquad" (a friend of a friend's startup). The official site had to purchase an ad to appear in search results. Why?
BasDirks 15y ago
Is this site ironic? Great to see crap websites dying.
cookiecaper 15y ago
Can someone fill me in? I don't know anything about "Panda".
- acangiano 15y ago
  A recent update to Google's ranking algorithm aimed at penalizing content farms and other sites with low quality content.
bmatheny 15y ago
I'm just going to point out that this site is hosted by wisegeek.com, a site that was hit hard by the panda update (see http://www.quantcast.com/wisegeek.com http://www.quantcast.com/wisegeek.com). Although the data is accurate, I wouldn't feel sorry for most of these sites. Full disclosure. I used to work for ChaCha. I am no longer associated with the company, but in my time there I know a lot of time/effort/money went into producing original content. An aside. Pandalized was using a domain proxy so I connected to port 80 via telnet which gave me back the following banner (which gave up the hostname): Apache/2.2.8 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 PHP/5.2.5-3+lenny2 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at strongwiki.wisegeek.com Port 80
- troels 15y ago
  Interesting aside. I didn't even know domain proxies existed, although I'm sure that's common knowledge, and a fairly obvious thing to create. Can you walk me through the way you discovered the hostname? If I `telnet pandalized.com 80`, I don't get anything interesting back.
  - troels 15y ago
    Ah .. I got it. telnet in, then print some garbage, causing the server to respond with an error. This comes from the main Apache instance, rather than the individual virtualhost, and that has the hostname you mentioned. Clever.
andrewcooke 15y ago
what is the y axis for the alexa plots? the numbers seem to be increasing downwards.
- tatsuke95 15y ago
  It's overall rank. Lower is better.
WillyF 15y ago
It's pretty interesting to see just how drastically Panda affected some very large sites. Most of the sites shown are the kind of sites that Panda was designed to deemphasize in the search results. It's what Google got right with Panda. What it doesn't seem to show is what Google got wrong with Panda. One of my sites lost 30% traffic on the day Panda went live, and it hasn't recovered. It's an extremely high quality site that I've put my life into for the past 4 years. I've tried a number of different things to recover, but so far I've had no success. My strong hunch is that it's a duplicate content issue, but I can't be sure. I've tried using rel="canonical" and reindexing parts of my site to no avail Google hasn't offered anything to help. I've been through their guidance on building high quality sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid... It doesn't really help when you already have a high quality site and still are penalized. I'm pretty confident that Panda improved the overall quality of Google's SERPs, but they definitely made some mistakes. It sucks when you've lost thousands of dollars in revenue because you're one of the mistakes.
- starwed 15y ago
  Your anecdote isn't, by itself, even a single datapoint against Panda -- traffic might have been reduced because searchers have ended up at a site more useful to them!
- WalterGR 15y ago
  My story is almost exactly the same. The only difference is that my site was hit not by the original Panda update, but by the April 11 update ("Panda 2.0".) There was definitely collateral damage. Unfortunately for owners of such sites, since Panda did penalize several huge sites that people hate very much, it's viewed as an overwhelming success. Small site owners are burning the midnight oil, posting to the "official" Google Panda thread, and getting no feedback from Google.
  - antimarketing 15y ago
    Google has given precise and clear signals of what to do with other releases from other teams, the Google Panda team is not directly responsible for rankings. The information is purposefully fragmented among the different releses, blogs etc.. of different teams. Because that is the way Google is structured, works and also because they want to avoid giving stupid people too much power by providing an easy "how-to" guide to rankings. You need to be a pro. marketer and know a bit about programming to keep up with Google's recommendations. I have done this, I simply do not want to share this information here where marketers read and make thousands or millions off it, but I would be glad to share that information with small site owners privately for free, one on one. No marketing orgies allowed! :) Simply stated, if you would for the next month study everything that Google has released the last couple of years (80+ hour work wweks) you would realize where they are going in the next couple of years not only theoritically, which is very useful, but also with practical steps in how to become a friend of Google. The reason that Google does not produce a even more straightforward guide to SERP / SEO field than they do right now (to lazy to link to it, because it is not that important right now) is that most marketing people are dumb and simply want to build an automatic system that generates money for them without hiring someone or fixing stuff themselves. I think they, meaning Google, consciously want to keep the human element alive and active in search engine marketing right now, therefore you saw Panda, you saw Google+ and you will see a lot of other things down the road as well. You have to understand that Google sees itself as educating, if not enlightening marketers with their activites as well. It might surprise you, but most marketers are ignorant of how their field really works. Having attended tons of seminars and a few conferences to boot, they can not even grasp simple technological innovations like HTML5 Video, even if it is explained to them nice and clearly many, many times. So from Google's stand point, they want to make this learninge xperience slow, step by step, and like a puzzle for a child. (I am leaving out all the criticism of Google that I have and portraying it in a neutral light for now)
wtf242 15y ago
My site has seen the exact opposite effect, probably because it's geared more toward showing interesting and helpful data. http://chattypics.com/files/Screenshot20110903at13423PM_97j31h78an.png http://chattypics.com/files/Screenshot20110903at13423PM_97j3... the site is http://thegreatestbooks.org http://thegreatestbooks.org
rlander 15y ago
Just an aside: the original title before it got edited by HN mods was "Yes, There Are Sites Recovering From Panda". I posted this because, although a lot of the sites affected by the algo update were junk, there were a few casualties that did not deserve it. I hear a lot of people asking wether it is possible to recover from the penalty and it appears that, although AFAIK no site has been able to recover 100%, a few like Hubpages (which is legit enough) are slowly recovering. [1] [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/13/site-claims-to-loosen-google-%E2%80%9Cdeath-grip%E2%80%9D/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/13/site-claims-to-loosen...
cagey 15y ago
I've found www.city-data.com to be quite useful over the years. If it's actually "pure crap", what's the corresponding "crap-free" site?
- _delirium 15y ago
  It doesn't look like they were one of the ones penalized; they're in the section at the bottom listing sites whose traffic was unaffected (and the graph doesn't show any noticeable cliff).
alexhawket 15y ago
No surprise here, the majority of that list are sites used by internet marketers for traffic/link building etc. They all deserve a mighty wallop upside the head.

30 points by rlander 15y ago

thirsteh 15y ago

And pretty much all of them are a collection of poor content. Good then.

TomGullen 15y ago
Yup, totally agree

_delirium 15y ago

On the plus side (for me), some of my niche hobby sites that have information on a few static HTML pages, without much monetization or SEO effort, have gotten significant rankings boosts lately. May or may not be due to Panda, but did happen about the same time.

Rantenki 15y ago

This is not a bug. This is a feature.

bcrescimanno 15y ago

Does it make me vindictive to want to see most of these sites never "recover?" This basically reads like a list of sites that, up through the "panda" update, I would mistakenly click on, get pissed off, and go back looking for a REAL result. Many of these sites were basically duping people into giving them ad impressions with thin, stale (and sometimes stolen) content and making people's lives more difficult. Kudos to Google for the first time in many years making a solid stand against obvious gaming of their search results.

Turing_Machine 15y ago
I would mistakenly click on, get pissed off, and go back looking for a REAL result. Precisely. Virtually all of these are pure crap. I'm sure there are some legitimate sites that became collateral damage, but these aren't them.
morrow 15y ago
A good tool for blocking domains like these from appearing in your search results is the personal blocklist extension for chrome (made by Google): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd...

Rusky 15y ago

I love how chacha.com is the first one on that list. Of course they're doing worse, that was the entire point. Nobody wants to find results from some random person spewing out whatever answers they feel like.

troutwine 15y ago
I never happened across chacha.com results in any of my searches. I'm unsure of it's purpose, based on its website. What does/did it do?
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Human-powered Q&A/search. You ask a question, a human gets paid a pittance to answer it. They are focused on mobile now (text a question, get a text back with an answer). Sometimes their answers show up in search results (I've encountered them), and they're usually just a few words and not very useful.
codexon 15y ago
Just to play devil's advocate, how is this different from stackoverflow or quora? (Maybe they were pandalized too?)
- antimarketing 15y ago
  Good question, I played the Devil's Advocate inside my mind. Here is what I get as return / output: All the traditional elements of marketing are different: a) Is the target market specific? Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. b) Is the target market pro. / high-end users with high sense of fidelity to the topic / site / brand or casual consumers? Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. c) Does the target audience return to said sites regularly, participate in a community (with hierarchies, badges, comments and replies etc..)? Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. d) Do the specific topics discussed get relevant links from blogs, tuts sites etc.. from similiar fields Yes for q. & s., no for c.c. This is simply the tip of the iceberg.
  - 15y ago

TomGullen 15y ago

Looking through the list, I see a lot of junk websites I don't want to recover. Most people who seem to be complaining about Panda have really bad websites. Most people wont even give you their URL after moaning about it for a good few minutes. Perhaps it's time for them to change their strategy. I'm sure there are legitimate 'victims' but I'm yet to see one I sympathise with.

baby 15y ago

I thought you were talking about Panda the antivirus at first. And now I'm wondering if it's still existing.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

timcederman 15y ago

Panda killed rankings for a lot of my personal sites that I don't update often, but still have a lot of content on them (that I created, not junk). One of them seems to be actively excluded from search results now. As an example of the ridiculousness of the new algo, try searching for "shopsquad" (a friend of a friend's startup). The official site had to purchase an ad to appear in search results. Why?

BasDirks 15y ago

Is this site ironic? Great to see crap websites dying.

cookiecaper 15y ago

Can someone fill me in? I don't know anything about "Panda".

acangiano 15y ago
A recent update to Google's ranking algorithm aimed at penalizing content farms and other sites with low quality content.

bmatheny 15y ago

I'm just going to point out that this site is hosted by wisegeek.com, a site that was hit hard by the panda update (see http://www.quantcast.com/wisegeek.com http://www.quantcast.com/wisegeek.com). Although the data is accurate, I wouldn't feel sorry for most of these sites. Full disclosure. I used to work for ChaCha. I am no longer associated with the company, but in my time there I know a lot of time/effort/money went into producing original content. An aside. Pandalized was using a domain proxy so I connected to port 80 via telnet which gave me back the following banner (which gave up the hostname): Apache/2.2.8 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 PHP/5.2.5-3+lenny2 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at strongwiki.wisegeek.com Port 80

troels 15y ago
Interesting aside. I didn't even know domain proxies existed, although I'm sure that's common knowledge, and a fairly obvious thing to create. Can you walk me through the way you discovered the hostname? If I `telnet pandalized.com 80`, I don't get anything interesting back.
- troels 15y ago
  Ah .. I got it. telnet in, then print some garbage, causing the server to respond with an error. This comes from the main Apache instance, rather than the individual virtualhost, and that has the hostname you mentioned. Clever.

andrewcooke 15y ago

what is the y axis for the alexa plots? the numbers seem to be increasing downwards.

tatsuke95 15y ago
It's overall rank. Lower is better.

WillyF 15y ago

It's pretty interesting to see just how drastically Panda affected some very large sites. Most of the sites shown are the kind of sites that Panda was designed to deemphasize in the search results. It's what Google got right with Panda. What it doesn't seem to show is what Google got wrong with Panda. One of my sites lost 30% traffic on the day Panda went live, and it hasn't recovered. It's an extremely high quality site that I've put my life into for the past 4 years. I've tried a number of different things to recover, but so far I've had no success. My strong hunch is that it's a duplicate content issue, but I can't be sure. I've tried using rel="canonical" and reindexing parts of my site to no avail Google hasn't offered anything to help. I've been through their guidance on building high quality sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid... It doesn't really help when you already have a high quality site and still are penalized. I'm pretty confident that Panda improved the overall quality of Google's SERPs, but they definitely made some mistakes. It sucks when you've lost thousands of dollars in revenue because you're one of the mistakes.

starwed 15y ago
Your anecdote isn't, by itself, even a single datapoint against Panda -- traffic might have been reduced because searchers have ended up at a site more useful to them!
WalterGR 15y ago
My story is almost exactly the same. The only difference is that my site was hit not by the original Panda update, but by the April 11 update ("Panda 2.0".) There was definitely collateral damage. Unfortunately for owners of such sites, since Panda did penalize several huge sites that people hate very much, it's viewed as an overwhelming success. Small site owners are burning the midnight oil, posting to the "official" Google Panda thread, and getting no feedback from Google.
- antimarketing 15y ago
  Google has given precise and clear signals of what to do with other releases from other teams, the Google Panda team is not directly responsible for rankings. The information is purposefully fragmented among the different releses, blogs etc.. of different teams. Because that is the way Google is structured, works and also because they want to avoid giving stupid people too much power by providing an easy "how-to" guide to rankings. You need to be a pro. marketer and know a bit about programming to keep up with Google's recommendations. I have done this, I simply do not want to share this information here where marketers read and make thousands or millions off it, but I would be glad to share that information with small site owners privately for free, one on one. No marketing orgies allowed! :) Simply stated, if you would for the next month study everything that Google has released the last couple of years (80+ hour work wweks) you would realize where they are going in the next couple of years not only theoritically, which is very useful, but also with practical steps in how to become a friend of Google. The reason that Google does not produce a even more straightforward guide to SERP / SEO field than they do right now (to lazy to link to it, because it is not that important right now) is that most marketing people are dumb and simply want to build an automatic system that generates money for them without hiring someone or fixing stuff themselves. I think they, meaning Google, consciously want to keep the human element alive and active in search engine marketing right now, therefore you saw Panda, you saw Google+ and you will see a lot of other things down the road as well. You have to understand that Google sees itself as educating, if not enlightening marketers with their activites as well. It might surprise you, but most marketers are ignorant of how their field really works. Having attended tons of seminars and a few conferences to boot, they can not even grasp simple technological innovations like HTML5 Video, even if it is explained to them nice and clearly many, many times. So from Google's stand point, they want to make this learninge xperience slow, step by step, and like a puzzle for a child. (I am leaving out all the criticism of Google that I have and portraying it in a neutral light for now)

wtf242 15y ago

My site has seen the exact opposite effect, probably because it's geared more toward showing interesting and helpful data. http://chattypics.com/files/Screenshot20110903at13423PM_97j31h78an.png http://chattypics.com/files/Screenshot20110903at13423PM_97j3... the site is http://thegreatestbooks.org http://thegreatestbooks.org

rlander 15y ago

Just an aside: the original title before it got edited by HN mods was "Yes, There Are Sites Recovering From Panda". I posted this because, although a lot of the sites affected by the algo update were junk, there were a few casualties that did not deserve it. I hear a lot of people asking wether it is possible to recover from the penalty and it appears that, although AFAIK no site has been able to recover 100%, a few like Hubpages (which is legit enough) are slowly recovering. [1] [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/13/site-claims-to-loosen-google-%E2%80%9Cdeath-grip%E2%80%9D/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/13/site-claims-to-loosen...

cagey 15y ago

I've found www.city-data.com to be quite useful over the years. If it's actually "pure crap", what's the corresponding "crap-free" site?

_delirium 15y ago
It doesn't look like they were one of the ones penalized; they're in the section at the bottom listing sites whose traffic was unaffected (and the graph doesn't show any noticeable cliff).

alexhawket 15y ago

No surprise here, the majority of that list are sites used by internet marketers for traffic/link building etc. They all deserve a mighty wallop upside the head.