It has been 10 days that Google released Panda 4.0 with the main aim to filter out low quality content from the top rank. Without further delay, we would like to focus our attention based on the winners and losers charts.
Moreover, we can make out that along with all other things, Press releases are going to have a tough time.
Panda 4.0’s release has directly resulted into a major lost significance of the rankings in Google search engine. Through search metrics, we get to see that even the most popular websites like PR Newswire, Businesswise, PR Log and PRWeb.com has lost their previous ranks in Google.
With small businesses getting a break and eBay getting smashed, we seem to have missed a major point that Press release agencies got literally demolished.
Mainly there is a mentionable drop of 63% to be noticed in the SEO visibility of PRNewsWire.com after the Panda came back roaring to life last week.
It is hardly a few days, and we see PRWeb.com lost almost more than half of their traffic overnight. They lost their position and dropped out of the top 20 Google results even after working with more than 8000 keywords.
BusinessWire.com noticed a 60 % drop after the release of Panda 4.0
In mid 2013, PRLog.org noticed a big drop, but a major drop after but the release of Panda 4.0:
What exactly might have happened?
Millions of individual Press release pages dropped off their previous ranks. However, it seems like a sudden take down, but Google had been hinting about this for quite some time now. It has been more than a year now that Google was suggesting that links in the Press releases should carry any value. They should have included no- follow links instead of do- follow resulting in direct impact. Excess links and anchor texts within press releases mentioned in the webmaster guidelines become the main reason behind this downfall.
Comparative study of PRWeb’s press release for AHRN, from April 27th SERPs to May 27th SERPs, shows that the term “AHRN” was in rank five but is now gone.
Google always wanted its users to find more results that are relevant and simply a great user experience, supposedly if searching for something like ‘protein shake diet plan’, it’s easy to make out that the user is not looking for Press release, which might come up and show at the song result itself. However, Google likes to stay focused on the interests of the users and display only the relevant results.
In the end, Google is a business and it owes to the fact of search user loyalty so in order to be noticed, be the best and achieve the best to have the ultimate impact.
Reference links:
https://searchengineland.com/google-panda-4-0-go-press-release-sites-192789
https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/press-release-rankings-slammed-by-panda