The past 24 hours have been a wild time for those who either work in, or follow the field of SEO. Google confirmed the rollout of two major updates, one of which was Panda 4.0, an update projected to impact roughly 7.5% of english search queries.
As with any major Google update, there are those who rise in the rankings, and those who get crushed by the Google hammer. So, who was hit hardest and who benefitted the most? The results are somewhat surprising.
Panda 4.0 Losers
Searchmetrics conducted an immediate preliminary analysis, which they say is “based on the organic SEO Visibility for each domain for all researched keywords”, compared to their last data point.
Their findings show that eBay was among the top losers, as well as competing search engine Ask.com. Former SEO darling, RetailMeNot.com, also lost a substantial amount of traffic.
Here is the list of top 10 losers in order of absolute loss, also shown is an estimated percentage of traffic they lost:
- ask.com > – 50%
- ebay.com > – 33%
- biography.com > – 33%
- retailmenot.com > – 33%
- starpulse.com > – 50%
- history.com > – 33%
- isitdownrightnow.com > – 50%
- aceshowbiz.com > – 75%
- examiner.com > – 50%
- yellowpages.com > – 20%
Panda 4.0 Winners
The real story here might be the Panda 4.0 winners, as they gained a substantially greater percentage of traffic than the losers lost.
The biggest winner was Glassdoor, a site that provides useful information for job seekers. Next on the list is eMedicineHealth, which provides health information for consumers, and Medterms, a medical dictionary.
For the most part, it seems that a lot of good quality content that’s useful to searchers saw huge gains in traffic thanks to Panda 4.0.
Here is the list of top 10 winners, along with the percentage of traffic gained:
- glassdoor.com > 100%
- emedicinehealth.com > 500 %
- medterms.com > 500 %
- yourdictionary.com > 50%
- shopstyle.com > 250%
- zimbio.com > 500 %
- myrecipes.com > 250%
- couponcabin.com > 250%
- buzzfeed.com > 25%
- consumeraffairs.com > 100%
What Do These Findings Mean?
In the list of losers are mostly sites that publish syndicated or duplicate content. They can also be called aggregators. These sites mainly ranked with information from external sources.
Although, a few of those kinds of sites are among the list of winners, so it’s difficult to make a firm conclusion. Searchmetrics suggests that it is possible the Panda update is still not fully rolled out, and further rankings changes are still to come.
Were you affected by Panda 4.0 positively or negatively? What’s your take on it so far? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.
