Google's latest Page Layout & Panda 3.2 updates

Google has been busy in the last week with a couple of big updates. First, the "page layout" update was announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog on the 19th, stating that Google was starting to penalize sites with too many ads at the top of its site.

"Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward."

The second big update was a Panda 3.2 refresh, as reported by SearchEngineLand a couple days back.

"Google has confirmed reports of a Panda update with us. The company told us they have done a data refresh of the Google Panda algorithm about a week ago, and added that there were no additional signals or algorithm changes. This was only a data refresh. I saw reports over the past week or so of webmasters commenting about their rankings. Most were complaining that they lost rankings, but some said sites that were originally hit by Panda regained their traffic levels pre-Panda. This would explain the data refresh, where Google ran the algorithm and updated the sites that should or should not have been touched by Panda."

More info on these two updates are available at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...provement.html and http://searchengineland.com/google-p...nfirmed-109321

Did your rankings change? And if yes, for the better or worse?

After Panda the page rank of our best site went down from 2 to 0, but has returned to 2 a while ago. So I'd say the PR returned back to it's old value long before this new update. However, site listing, and thus site visits, are still way below pre-Panda. We played around with SEO, tried to follow G's guidelines, but it was just a waste of time as it has changed nothing at all.

What to expect from this new update?
Most likely G listing will become even worse and less visitors again. And the top of listings will still be crowded by static sites that offer little to no value for visitors and that are clearly not following G's guidelines.

The funny thing about G is that they are punishing sites, but at the same time they make it top secret why you've been punished. I mean punishing is okay, but at least the one who punishes you should say what you're doing wrong. But then, it would make thousands of SEO companies go bancrupt. :D