google observation

grantw · May 20, 2011

Since the Panda update I've been seeing an increasing number of visitors to my 'coming soon' landing pages coming from google. Looking into it, over the past month or so google seems to be ranking more and more of my pages based solely on the domains keywords, there is basically no content on any of the pages. Examples:

cues #4
sasha #5
performing arts #10

I'm not complaining obviously and can't see the rankings lasting, just finding it a bit odd given what the panda update was supposed to achieve! Anyone else noticed similar?

Grant

newguy · May 20, 2011

Maybe they're still tinkering with panda, or we've witnessed the calm before the storm rather than the actual panda update.

paymatters · May 20, 2011

What I've noticed is that the results from searching are worse than they used to be!

I'm sure now if I search for say 3 words the top results only seem to contain 2 of them so if you're searching for something ver specific you can't find it.

Also when results used to be primarily UK they are now american etc.

grantw · May 21, 2011

A further observation is that where I have both, the hyphenated versions are ranking higher than the non-hyphenated for identical landing pages.

Grant

wb · May 21, 2011

Not sure if you already know, but those examples do all have backlinks pointing at them.

Could be a similar reason for the hyphen/non-hyphen domains ranking differently too if any of those have history.

grantw · May 21, 2011

wb said:
Not sure if you already know, but those examples do all have backlinks pointing at them.

Could be a similar reason for the hyphen/non-hyphen domains ranking differently too if any of those have history.

Yep, could be related to that, some of these domains have been owned by me and indexed (nowhere) in google for years though, everything just seems to be getting a major boost up the rankings for some reason.

Grant

thecat · May 29, 2011

Panda is largely a nn bot and it seems to be Google are running it, getting the weights right then setting it in stone. Hence, at the moment it's bouncing all over the place. I don't see it settling down any time soon either.