Update: When asked if an iteration of Panda was implemented this week, a Google spokesperson told us, “yes.” She also provided the following statement:
“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”
If you’ve followed the Google Panda update saga throughout the year, you may recall Dani Horowitz’s story. She runs an IT discussion community called Daniweb, and it was hit hard by the Panda update, but she made a lot of changes, and gradually started to build back some Google cred.
We interviewed in May, and she talked about the kinds of things that she was doing that was helping her get back some of her lost traffic:
In July, she claimed that her site had achieved 110% recovery from Panda, as all the while Google had released various iterations of the Panda update.
Unfortunately for Dani, in what may or may not be the latest iteration, DaniWeb has been hit again, and even harder than the first time.
We got an email from her today in which she told us, “After being hit in February, and fully documenting every change we’ve made, we eventually made a more than complete recovery. We went from averaging 280-290K pageviews (every so often hitting 300K) pre-Panda, to consistently being at 370K post-Panda.”
“However, we were hit again on Wednesday, September 28th, once again losing more than half of our traffic,” she added. “I think this might even be a bigger hit than last time. I am still investigating whether or not this was another iteration of Panda that just went out or something different.”
Apparently, Dani just can’t catch a break, despite all of the work she’s been putting into it (as discussed in the above video).
We’ve asked Google if it has released another iteration of the Panda update. We’ll update if we receive a response. About 10 days ago, we reported on some suspicion that was going around that another Panda update had been released, but Google shot down that theory. We’ll see if that happens this time.
Dani says there is “definite confirmation that we lost all our Google traffic overnight.”