
Pandalized: Sites Negatively Impacted by Google's Panda Update - rlander
http://www.pandalized.com/
======
bcrescimanno
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
_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.

------
WillyF
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-
guid...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-
building-high-quality.html)

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.

~~~
WalterGR
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
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)

~~~
WalterGR
_I would be glad to share that information with small site owners privately
for free, one on one._

Panda hit my site almost 5 months ago. Though I've made lots of changes, I'm
not seeing any recovery. So clearly I'm doing something wrong. As a small site
owner, I'd be ecstatic to receive any advice you can share. My email address
is waltergr@aol.com.

------
bmatheny
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>). 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
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
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.

------
rlander
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...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/13/site-claims-to-loosen-
google-%E2%80%9Cdeath-grip%E2%80%9D/)

------
_delirium
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.

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

~~~
TomGullen
Yup, totally agree

------
TomGullen
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.

------
Rantenki
This is not a bug. This is a feature.

------
Rusky
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
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
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.

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

------
wtf242
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_97j3...](http://chattypics.com/files/Screenshot20110903at13423PM_97j31h78an.png)

the site is <http://thegreatestbooks.org>

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

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

------
alexhawket
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.

------
cagey
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
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).

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

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

~~~
tatsuke95
It's overall rank. Lower is better.

