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You are here: Home / Website Traffic / Panda 4.0 and Metafilter

Panda 4.0 and Metafilter

By Vinny O'Hare

Updated 6/12/2014 – Googles Matt Cutts says at SMX yesterday that Metafilter was hit with an algo update and not a Panda or Penguin penalty.

For the past couple of days everyone and their grandmother has been talking about Metafilter and how a mainstream site that did nothing wrong was unfairly hit by the Google Panda update and caused their rankings to go down.

When I first heard of it I laughed and said to myself “Oh another company that had time to adjust after Panda 1.0 came out and did nothing.” Then I went to the site and alarm bells went off. Actually if I had just visited the site for the first time I would have clicked off it and went somewhere else. The 1990’s design with white text on a brown background was very hard to read.

I then clicked on to another page and the site had a blue background with the same white text. I didn’t even read the 50 lines of text that looked like gibberish to me to see why they would have a problem.

Besides the usability of the site there is pages and pages of thin user generated content like this. I ask you if you owned a search engine would you have pages that looked like this in it for your users?

“Everyone On Wall Street Is A Dick.” | MetaFilter

The two-day Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) graduate showcase at NYU was a madhouse, with some 100 projects on view, ranging from groundbreaking innovations to timely trinkets. But…

That article was the top one on the page that I clicked on from their homepage. A homepage full of articles where a Hashtag is the only word in the title. I’m sorry but if they didn’t see this coming shame on them.

I wish them luck, I am sure they will clean it up a bit and maybe update the look of the site or something. What gets me though is their bounce rate had to be going up over the years. I spent a total of 8 seconds on the site the first time before I clicked off it because it hurt my eyes.

While Google doesn’t say aesthetics isn’t a ranking factor you can bet in this case the bounce rate going up consistently played a factor.

The article below sums it up in this paragraph.

Engagement and Usability Matter
While analyzing the fresh hits, it was hard to overlook the serious engagement issues I was coming across. For example, stimulus overload on the pages that were receiving a lot of Google organic traffic prior to the hit. There were ads that expanded into or over the content, double-serving of video ads, stacked “recommended articles” on the page, lack of white space, a long and confusing navigation, etc. All of this led to me wanting to bounce off the page faster than a superball on concrete. And again, high bounce rates and low dwell times can get you killed by Panda. Avoid that like the plague.”

Read further in the article below

Panda 4.0 Analysis | Nuclear Option Rewarded, Phantom Victims Recover, and Industry Experts Rise

Panda 4.0 Analysis | Nuclear Option Rewarded, Phantom Victims Recover, and Industry Experts Rise

On May 20th, 2014 Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Panda 4.0 was rolling out. Leading up to that tweet, there was a lot of chatter across the industry

Related posts:

  1. Recovering From Panda and Penguin Updates
  2. Is Fluff Killing Your Website
  3. What Does The User Do On Your Website

About Vinny O'Hare

Vinny O'Hare is the founder of Vincent O'Hare Consulting an internet marketing service that provides information on how to make money online with affiliate programs while building quality websites. You can follow him on Twitter @Vinnyohare or listen to his Affiliate Marketing podcast

Vinny O'Hare is the founder of Vincent O'Hare Consulting an internet marketing service that provides information on how to make money online with affiliate programs while building quality websites. You can follow him on Twitter @Vinnyohare or listen to his Affiliate Marketing podcast Read More…

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