Greekgeek's Online Odyssey - Hubpages and Online Article Writing Tips

Panda Update 3.2 Happened January 18

Has your traffic profile changed recently? The culprit may be Panda 3.2, confirmed on Jan 18, 2012. See that link on SearchEngineLand for more info.

To review what this Panda thing is about:

Google’s search algorithm ranks pages’ relevance to a given search query based on over 200 factors. For example, are the words in the search query (“what’s in a hot dog?”) found in the page’s headers, or does that page link to other good pages about that topic? The pages that rank highest on relevance get listed first for that query when someone searches for it on Google. A better Google listing means more clicks, more visitors, more traffic.

Starting last February, Google introduced a new factor, code named Panda. This factor is weighted more strongly than many other factors. Panda is different from most of the factors in that it’s a measure of the domain where the page is found. Are there a lot of spammy pages on that domain (e.g. Squidoo.com)? Are there a lot of pages whose content is found elsewhere? Or is that domain full of unique, useful pages? Panda attempts to determine the overall quality of a website. It then boosts or detracts the raw rank of any page found on that site.

Panda isn’t calculated every day. Instead, it’s recalculated manually whenever someone at Google says, “Time to run a Panda update again.” It then crawls all the sites on the web and re-evaluates whether they’re full of spam and junk or excellent content.

The long and short of it: each time Panda is recalculated, ALL articles on Squidoo may be somewhat impacted, depending on whether Squidoo gets a good Panda rating or a poor one. A good one means that — other things being equal, a page on Squidoo will be listed higher in search results than the same page posted somewhere else. Or, if Squidoo gets downgraded, it’ll give lenses a slight disadvantage, like a golf handicap.

January 18ith is about the time my Squidoo traffic jumped by about 20%. However, I haven’t seen a lot of Squidoo members gloating over a sudden traffic jump, so this is evidently not much of a sidewide change — in which case, my own traffic boost is probably not due to Panda.

There’s another Google update muddying the waters right now, making it difficult to tell which factor is causing what. Search Plus Your World now shows strongly personalized results in Google searches, including things your friends and circle have tweeted and shared. I’m not clear on whether Google has started giving more weight to socially shared links as a ranking factor— one of those 200+ factors mentioned above — or whether it’s still only regarding social signals from “trusted authorities” (say, a link posted by Neil Gaiman) as important and all the rest of our Tweets, Facebook Likes, etc as only significant to our friends.

At any rate, any one of the recent reshufflings of what Google displays as seach results could explain my traffic boost. It’s not just more traffic following a holiday lull, as this is significantly more traffic than I saw in 2011.

ETA: Click the widget below to view the full-sized Quantcast chart for Squidoo traffic. It may show a modest bump in traffic from the latest Panda update, or it may be within seasonal variation. (Here’s Hubpages’ traffic, too, for comparison.)

    

 

6 Comments

  1. Aysha says:

    This is the first I am hearing about this..Very interesting and something to remember when we work on our sites, Squidoo or otherwise..

  2. Great post as always. I had to go back and look at my Squdioo traffic on Jan 18, and I didn’t see any measureable change in traffic as the week before and after were about the same.

    I laughed at your comment, “Or, if Squidoo gets downgraded, it’ll give lenses a slight disadvantage, like a golf handicap”, as a golf handicap works to level the playing field so good golfers and bad golfers can play together as equals, which wasn’t your point. A better analogy may to a credit score, as the lower your score, the less access you will have to the top offerings.

    Keep up the good work.

    1. Greekgeek says:

      Oops. Apparently I know more about nuisance physical handicaps (I have arthritis) than those which apply to golf. :) One can still succeed with a handicap, but it puts you back a bit!

      1. I think it’s a good analogy actually – ‘hey, you’re doing too well, lets put you behind a bit so other sites can get a head start’.

        I’ve got a very minor increase, but not enough to be conclusive (also, that was the day I got a thousand visitors from FB over the next Pratchett book, so it rather messed my stats up!)

  3. I just checked my Squidoo stats on analytics for purely Google traffic, and overall have had approx average 200 views a day earlier this month double to a peak of about 400 yesterday all happened in the last 10 days! So I am happy and think it is real. If you take out the “noise” of referrals and direct traffic it is easy to see a trend. I hope it lasts!

  4. Dori79 says:

    I think these changes are warranted. Google needs to make sure that what a user looks for, that the actually get it. For many years people stuffed their keywords with anything they felt would direct traffic to their sites – names of celebrities, hot topics, products that were unrelated. There was once a time when it was easy to find what one was looking for on-line, it was a golden age. Then came all the unrelated material, as everyone wanted to make a quick buck. The internet needs to be a place where one can easily find what one is looking for, without plodding through a heap of meaningless muck that has nothing to do with anything. Though the Panda update does create a bit more work, I think it will be for the best when it comes to relevant content – it will make a more useful internet with a nicer user experience. I think that those whining loudest are the ones that caused the Panda update. People, companies, whomever…need to take more time to ensure that a users finds what they are actually looking for. If one’s page is optimized correctly and one has relevant content relating to the searches that brought people to one’s page in the first place, one has nothing to worry about. If you want a bunch of irrelevant keywords driving traffic to one’s site one is only going to annoy people. Use organic seo services if one wants ones site’s traffic to grow. It will take patience and time, but if one sticks with the guidelines laid out by Google, one will see results – not immediately, but they will come.

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