Matt Cutts announced that Google is rolling out Panda 4.0 today. This update seems to be good for Small businesses as mentioned by Matt Cutts at SMX West in March 2014. Did you guys see any changes in your rankings?
I haven't seen any changes yet. I read a bit earlier about the release of Panda 4.0 so keeping an eye out.
In last 5 years, i never seen any site being on top consistently at one position for any keyword more than 3 months. " Please do realize that these kind of updates are just dramas to pull customers towards adwords instead trusting SEO. "
I like that quote. Where does it come from? From some outer point of view all these google dancing looks really like a crazy theater showing the vanity of SEO and instability of results it gives. The disappointed customers have to come to the idea of reliable adwords result themselves
Personal "Quote" , And i bet that after this current update, so called penguin 4.0 which is against poor content websites, i can find at least 100 one or two page sites ranking on top various keywords, i have found many such sites in past updates and also including mine
I'm not sure if this would have any negative or positive effects. So far I haven't noticed some changes on my rankings...
I don't think so small businesses gained a top visibility, but many webmasters has lost their presence from page 1 to page 8/9.
It just mean that some have moved up. What I like about this update is that they've hit some barely readable spun content sites, which used to get on top every now and then.
Will this update also affect to sites which accepts guest posts on their platforms? - (Informative guest posts with do-follow links, nothing spam and only niche relevant)
Hello crystal, Google panda update is only about killing and penalizing sites with poor content. Regarding sites which are accepting guest post, Few weeks back google already started penalizing few sites which accept guest posts by making them PR 0. Few sites of mine have been penalized and some weren't, so am really not sure why google left few sites, not that I have posted niche relevant nor that I didn't spam. So to be safe I have turned the out bound links to no follow, where Google have asked to do so in of their webmaster hangout regarding guest posts.
That's not entirely true. While it's the aim of Google Panda to only penalize those sites, we're still talking about an algorithm. That means it's a machine trying to determine if your site is spammy or not. When a site is really spammy (keyword stuffing, only one of 2 pages, etc.), that's not that hard to detect. But it quickly gets much less black & white. Even humans aren't very good at determining spammy or not for a lot of sites. If we were, people wouldn't go through our sites to Amazon or CB sales pages. All that means that while Panda does try to penalize spammy sites, there will always be false positives. So even good sites might get hit. On the other hands some sites that should get hit, won't. The only thing where you can say that Google penalized only spammy sites is when the do a manual action. Those are truly manual and not a part of their ranking algorithm.
You probably mean Panda 4.0, right? Anyway, how long has it been since you've updated your site? I mean like a big change in at least one post or a new post or bigger site layout changes. Stuff like that.
After update got nothing new on SERP except new few of our SEO fellow got their site out of ranking after all that efforts, what we get nothing.