Panda Research

Over the past couple of weeks since the Google Panda update 2.5, I have been tweaking and testing. I had a few sites drop heavily in Google, several had rankings increase and some hardly moved at all.. Needless to say it was hard to see what was actually going on. Judging by some of the forum threads and emails I have been getting, it has left a lot of people very confused.

Anyway, a couple of weeks of tests, research and analysis and I believe I have a better grasp on what has happened and perhaps why it happened.. Here are the main points.

My worst affected site has seen several of its best performing pre-panda keywords drop and have hardly moved since then. However, many other keywords (long tails) that previously were not performing have either risen or are jumping around all over the place. At first this looked like very chaotic and illogical. So I decided to take a closer look at each of the keywords in turn and investigate why the changes have taken place..

I don’t profess to have all the answers but there are some very clear patterns emerging from this investigation. The site in question is an informational type site in a market where 80% or more of the sites that are performing on Google for many keywords are shopping portal type sites.

My pre-Panda best performing keyword was something like “foxtrot dance steps” (real keyword hidden for demonstration purposes). It is the sort of keyword that suits an informational type site and my web page that was performing well was basically an article explaining these “foxtrot dance steps” with a few images thrown in. This web page dropped like a stone and was replaced with 6 YouTube Videos (Yes SIX!!) and a few highly graphical article type web pages. It is very obvious that Google are looking at searcher intent a lot closer now and giving them the best quality results for that search. In this example, the searcher’s intent is to see all the foxtrot steps and in this example, what is better to show this, video or text? Obviously it is video and then images..

I have a few other keywords that also back this example up and there is little doubt in my mind that the Panda update is doing a better job at matching searcher intent with the content that will help them best.

To further back this up, some of the “buyer” type keywords my informational site was ranking for before have now been replaced by shopping portal type sites. It seems a web page with information and some affiliate links or Adsense does not cut it for these buyer type keywords.

I know there are a lot of contradictory results out there but you have to remember that Panda is a manual,incremental type of algo update. In other words it is being rolled out little by little and this probably explains why some people have seen changes in their web sites’ rankings and other people have not… yet.

The other interesting thing I have noticed is that my worst performing site has now seen a marked increase in the number of long tail keywords that it is now ranking for. These keywords tend to suit searcher’s intent, i.e. people looking for info on something. There are two interesting points about this..

• The long tails are low search volume but result in visitors spending more time on my site.
• My Adsense CTR as a result has doubled and the CPC has also increased slightly. The reason for this I believe is that because searcher’s intent is being matched a lot better. The upshot of this is more inclination to read the article and by the looks of it, click on an Adsense ad. The rise in CPC also indicates that these visitors are converting more for the advertisers meaning my Adsense account has improved in terms of smart pricing. I know it is still early days for this and I am speculating a bit but there is ceratinly a lot of consistency to this improved CTR and CPC.

In summary, after this last Panda update, there is a lot of evidence that demonstrates a vast improvement by Google in matching searcher’s intent with a better fit in terms of the type of content, i.e. video, images, text etc… Whether it is the best content available is open to speculation and this is where I believe the usual rules of on and off page SEO come into play still. There are still a lot of contradictions that can disprove this a bit but I put that down to the Panda roll out happening in the incremental way that it is. I am sure there are a gazillion other factors influencing the algo changes but none more so than this in my experience.

I believe we all need to look at the best performing keywords and analyse whether the content we are providing is the best match for the searcher based on the intent of that searcher. If your beautifully crafted article on  picture framing drops in ranking, maybe a video or more images might just help improve that ranking again.