Panda 4.1 – the Return of the Design Sites?
Mark Porter
Posted 29 September, 2014 by Mark Porter in SEO
Panda 4.1 – the Return of the Design Sites?
On Friday Google announced that they slowly started rolling out the latest Panda update, dubbed 4.1 by Search Engine Land, earlier in the week. This latest ‘improved’ iteration of the Panda algorithm has affected around 3-5% of search queries, and according to Pierre Far the update rewards high quality small to medium sized sites with better rankings. Great news if you’ve been working hard on top notch content, bad news if you have local pages that are as thin as a pancake.
As I suspect many SEO’s were doing on the day, one of the first things I did was head over to Searchmetrics to check out some visibility graphs. After taking a look at clients who were waiting to recover (which they have!), I headed over to the ‘Winners & Losers’ to see if I could spot anything interesting. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Searchmetrics, each week they release a top 100 list highlighting sites with the biggest gains and losses in organic visibility. As I was scrolling through the relative winners, which mostly contains obscurely named adult sites, I began spotting some familiar domains (no, not the smutty ones).
Those of you who have heard of some of these sites before will know that they reside in the web design niche, and that in general they post similar content and in most cases are very similar aesthetically. They all experienced healthy increases in organic visibility in the US right on cue with the latest Panda update, piquing my interest enough to do some extra digging.
I began reeling off some more well known design sites, and sure enough I found that the majority of them experienced considerable drops in visibility around the 18th of May or, aka Panda 4.0.
Hongkiat.com – 406% Increase
Notable ranking increases:
- funny photos – Up 92 positions into 9th – 40,500 AMSV
- black wallpaper – Up 93 positions into 9th – 33,100 AMSV
- space wallpaper – Up 96 positions into 5th – 14,800 AMSV
Onextrapixel.com – 438% Increase
Notable ranking increases: - national geographic wallpaper – Up 85 positions into 16th – 4,400 AMSV
- pictures of rain – Up 89 positions into 12th – 1,600 AMSV
- flyer design – Up 86 positions into 15th – 2,900 AMSV
DesignInstruct.com – 238% Increase
Notable ranking increases: - portfolio websites – Up 88 positions into 13th – 4,400 AMSV
- free stock images – Up 79 positions into 22nd – 18,100 AMSV
- cool drawings – Up 76 positions into 25th – 40,500 AMSV
Designyourway.net – 510% Increase
This site experienced a significant drop in August 2013, the only update around this time being Hummingbird, but has experienced a nice boost in visibility.
Notable ranking increases: - cool wallpapers – Up 85 positions into 16th – 110,000 AMSV
- cool fonts – Up 87 positions into 14th – 5,400 AMSV
- cool logos – Up 91 positions into 10th – 12,100 AMSV
Inspiredm.com – +1,124% Increase
- gimp vs photoshop – Up 90 positions into 11th – 2,400 AMSV
- how to use gimp – Up 84 positions into 17th – 2,900 AMSV
- seamless web – Up 72 positions into 29th – 14,800 AMSV
VandelayDesign.com – 325% Increase
Cygnus SEO put together a post for them when they got hit by Panda. While I don’t agree that ‘reaching out’ to John Mueller or Matt Cutts is the best way to get out of Panda, there is some great advice around auditing existing content. - music websites – Up 92 positions into 9th – 27,100 AMSV
- calligraphy fonts – Up 11 positions into 90th – 22,200 AMSV
- wood texture – Up 10 positions into 91st – 14,800 AMSV
Speckyboy.com – 269% Increase
- inkscape tutorial – Up 88 positions into 13th – 2,900 AMSV
- web design portfolio – Up 91 positions into 10th – 1,000 AMSV
- icon sets – Up 90 positions into 11th – 1,000 AMSV
NaldzGraphics.net – 269% Increase
- wood texture – Up 92 positions into 9th – 14,800 AMSV
- calendar icon – Up 93 positions into 8th – 4,400 AMSV
- paint splatter – Up 89 positions into 12th – 8,100 AMSV
Tympanus.net/Codrops – 79% Increase
While this site didn’t experience a significant drop during Panda 4.0, they have certainly been rewarded with higher rankings this time round. - animated backgrounds – Up 100 positions into 1st – 2,400 AMSV
- backgrounds – Up 81 positions into 20th – 165,000 AMSV
- overlay – Up 93 positions into 8th – 5,400 AMSV
Designm.ag- 116% Increase
- grunge texture – Up 88 positions into 13th – 8,100 AMSV
- grunge background – Up 85 positions into 16th – 4,400 AMSV
- calligraphy fonts – Up 79 positions into 22nd – 22,200 AMSV
Closing Thoughts
There are some notable trends to be observed across all of the above sites. They all have very image heavy ‘list posts’ with little text, which have now experienced considerable increases in organic visibility. Perhaps Google interpreted these posts and tutorials as low quality content, when they can offer value to readers and often attract impressive amounts of social shares.
These image heavy list articles are essentially what fuels these design blogs, which is understandable for such a visually driven niche. Perhaps some have overdone the ‘X number of free resources about X’ or ‘X examples of X’ type posts and often categorisation and archiving can be massively improved.
These sites also have a large amount of very similar content (on their own domains, as well as in comparison to each other), they can have quite a lot of ads, can be slow loading (due to the imagery and ads!) and while social shares are generally impressive, I do wonder about engagement signals. Some of the sites do encourage you to read a list post and leave.
Terrific drops for Panda 4.0, i didn’t noticed that ! Thanks for pointing out… and also for the gain of traffic due to Panda 4.1. Maybe Google realized is mistake…
Hello Mark ,
Thanks for this research & analysis, One que comes to see this blog post are these sites ranked without SEO or with seo ? Is SEO have its good career for long term because if these sites can rank without SEO on 1st or 2nd page from #10th page so what’s the benefit of SEO ?
this is my que MARK what’s your view on this ?
Hi,
These sites are certainly aware of SEO, and they have anywhere between several hundred to several thousand inking root domains! The nature of their content, list posts, tutorials, roundups etc. means that they often get natural pickup and citations on external sites. Saying that these rank well without SEO is not the case.
Thanks!
Good observations in the post. Any thoughts on what this particular group of design sites did that caused the increase in rankings?
The rollover ia especially for thin quality sites, that have low quality content. how a affected admin can resubmit to Google after major changes, will reconsideration work
Thanks for such a detailed post
Excellent post! To top it all, here is an interesting Infographic and history of Panda: http://digitalora.com/2014/10/03/google-panda-things-you-should-know/
Its nuts how one update could slash views 25%. I saw my site highintensitysupplements.com drop about 20% before recovering. The weird thing is, my content is genuine and not thin, while I am sure there at BS sites that saw a pop.
These sites with lots of images and little text not only are design sites, this match too for tumblr…. ¿greath graphic content is equal to low quality?
Mark
from the graphs showing s significant dip and then a significant increase, there seems to be three months in between?
Are these the dates of the release of panda 4 and panda 4.1?
around three months between updates?
cheers
Owen
Hi Owen,
That’s right, Panda 4.0 was on May 19th, and then 4.1 update was on September 23rd.
Thanks
Hi Mark, as always good post, in these days I have noticed many changes in the rankings of my websites, now wanted to ask, what are the exact days that we can attribute these changes to Panda and not to other factors?
Thanks in advance
Moz’s algorithm history is usually pretty spot on for this kind of stuff:
http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
The dates certainly match up!
So what has this shitty algorithm actually done in real terms?
Thanks for the data Mark.
Statistics are telling the whole story. Nice work for gathering information to demonstrate the Panda 4.1 impact!
Mark
do you know if google rolls out their algorithms around the world at once. Or is there a sequential role out by region?
cheers
Owen
Great analysis Mark. When is the next Update from Google as well as Page Rank update?
Uh uh uh I know that!!!
The next update from Google is, when Google decide it is time, plus/minus some more time…
Which basically is the same as saying no one outside Big G knows.
And for the Page Rank update, the answer is – Never.
Googles John Mueller confirmed it in this hangout published October 6, 2014:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GlxLlpm3Ew
Hi Mark.
Interesting article, I do have one question which probably exhibit my lack of knowledge, but hey – That’s why I’m here in the first place.
What is ‘AMSV’??
Glad:) Google decided to announce this latest version of its Panda Update. And it’s very interesting that they added some new signals to Panda. My website was hit by Panda 4.0. Now I see my keywords recovered its lost positions from 1st page.
I am happy to see them again on Top positions. Thanks Mr.Google.
Great article thanks
Does anyone know if Google has rolled out penguin 3.0 around the world now?
thanks
Owen
Jay Behm, don’t get too excited :) “Mr. Google” will update their algorithm once again,so you better keep it white hat :)
We’ve been going up and down the rankings for months, now Google is rolling Panda out continuously we’ve stopped worrying what Google is doing. We’re putting web design at the heart and things which will help our clients i.e good quality content. You can’t go wrong with this. So we redesigned our website making it very clear and easy with high quality content, our rankings have bounced back and we’re even ranking for keywords we’re not targeting.
Can anyone answer the what is ASMV question? Many thanks, great post btw!!
Hi Mark,
AMSV stands for ‘average monthly search volume’ on Google.
Cheers.
Dan
Thanks!!
What still really annoys me with Google are brand new websites (most with EMDs) get ranked to position 1 for competitive keywords for months before they get kicked off. These sites have no blogs or any quality content, but because they have 1000’s of spammy keyword links they get ranked pretty much instantly.
They most generate so many sales of these months they are up there and taking away traffic from real websites that work hard to genuinely earn their rankings. I actually did a quick search while i was writing this and there is a website smallseo.co.uk that is ranked above you for no reason!! so frustrating!
Glad:) Google decided to announce this latest version of its Panda Update. And it’s very interesting that they added some new signals to Panda. My website was hit by Panda 4.0. Now I see my keywords recovered its lost positions from 1st page.
I am happy to see them again on Top positions. Thanks Mr.Google.
Mark, I should say that this was a great post. I should also develop data-driven posts on my blog, instead of just generic content. Thanks!
I’ve been doing this for long enough that I remember the carnage the original Panda update caused!