Panthom Update and its Potential Causes why it hit you so hard !

1st Google Panthom update revealed its presence on 8th May 2013. It seems to have affected the sites that were linked from the same network or group of websites. 

Several authority websites too seem to have been affected by this panthom update.  I'm sure there are many site owners that believe they can't get hit, since they think they are in great shape as an authority but that is not the case with panthom.

The following have been the major causes your site has been affected by Panthom Update

Link source:

Websites which had pages with many outgoing links to certain group of websites had been penalized. They could have been pages with site maps linking to related websites.  (ideally this should have been no followed links). Mostly people adopted this strategy to interlink websites from the same network to come out of the adverse effects of penguin updates but this new strategy did them no good. 

Google now considers links from the same group of network as unnatural and fishy.

Cross Linking:

Most of the SEO guys have been adopting link exchange strategy to build the links. Most of them have been reciprocal or three way link exchange. Google bots are now smart enough to read reciprocal links and penalise the sites adopting this strategy. There will be many who would be under this boat. 

Secondly, google is also capable to read third level links, in case if you have been adopting 3 way link exchange strategy, that is also going to penalise the website. 

You would wonder how can a google bot do that? The answer is your anchor text ! Google doesn't have to struggle much to penalise you, Most of you have been using the same anchor text across the web to link to your website. You made the task pretty simple for google bot. 

That is the reason most of the candidates who had taken up link building as their career path feel they are job less and trying to shift their domains. Don't lose hope, there is lot more coming your way, you needn't change your industry, simply change the way you have been working so far. 

Your link building History:

Google has been watching you for years now. It knows your strategy, how you have been building links over time. Getting links from spammy directories, content farms, spun articles. Google sees all the back links to your site and if 80-90 percent of the back links comes from these fishy places, you are penalised further.  

Though most of these directories don't exist any more, and the back links to your site don't exist either. But still it will take time for google to move your site from troubled waters to calmer waters. Your website still carries the unnatural link baggage with it.

Scrapped Content:

You would have seen sites giving you little information about something and then linking to the other site where full content exists. The other site you link to has full version of the content copied from somewhere else. The other site had included larger portions of text from the destination page without linking to it (more traditional scraping).

So, if you have adopted the strategy of adding more pages to your site with the logic of creation of dynamic search result pages where in the search results displayed on your site lead to other pages then you are in muddy pool too. You may have search result pages for content on your website, but if you planned to build another search engine like google where search results lead to multiple pages with copied content, google bots are not going to excuse you any more. 

Your Past of being hit by Panda:

If your site had been affected by Panda update in the past and it still carries the Panda baggage, it will hurt you down the line. The unnatural link building strategies doesn't hurt you linearly but there is an exponential hurt your site will have to face with these malicious activities. 

Effects of Panthom update on content has not been felt but we are wondering if Panthom is a two headed monster and has been carrying some traits of Panda and Penguin both. 

Keep reading our blog and we will definitely have some good analysis for you in near future.