Been a while since I visited but I took a look at your sites. Panda is a pain for sure and there is probably more than one update in play.

You’ve offered me tons of great advice over the years so I’ll offer a few of my suggestions (in case you want them):

1) Add authorship. This plays into trust with Google (which your Shakespeare competition is using) but really plays into the user metrics with Panda. That image gets a much higher CTR than a SERP w/o one and it is huge. If you have authorship and can keep users from clicking back to the SERP with engaging content and teasers to keep navigating you’ll fix most of your issues.

2) Kinda mentioned it before but the users metrics are big. Related content, images, direct response copy, paginated articles and anything else that can lower bounce rate, keep users clicking and keep time on site means a lot.

3) Code. Everything is trending towards mobile browsing and I’m convinced G has a trust/weight for updated code. Responsive web design for mobile seems to help from my experience.

4) Freshness and markup. Google wants info so I give it as much as I can with any relevant schema or rich snippet markup that doesn’t come off as spammy. I especially pay attention to the schema “dateModified” item prop which G also seems to care about. Enough that I’m considering a scheduled DateModified chron update plugin to test it. I’d bet two identical old sites with one updating just a dateModified tag and nothing else would have totally different rankings.

Hit me up if you want to discuss more. I’ve spent literally over a thousand hours on this stuff and have recovered anything that has been hit.

I am at the whims of Google. I have been doing this for four years yet I can’t shake this feeling that one day the revenue will be gone, whether it’s from the result of a major algorithm change or Google taking away my adsense account for a stupid reason. I seriously got to reevaluate my long term career paths and figure out where to put my time in.

Sorry I have no good news, except I have a site that recovered from Panda after 6 months or so of hard work.

Good luck! and don’t bother complaining, nobody of importance is listening.

I really don’t understand the latest update, it seems to have increased rankings of spammy sites for a lot of queries. I’ve literally got sites that copy my content ranking higher than mine with the original.

I do find it humorous that Google, through adsense, will tell you to place ads prominently, and Google, through search, now says not to.

This is another example of Google trying to second guess their existing algorithm. If all off pages factors, filtered for spam, indicate a site is high quality, then actual humans have voted and decided the ad ratio is okay.

If things do not correct I may experiment with redesigns moving ad units around, but it doesn’t seem like that is what got me here.

http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613