1 Month After The Panda Update - How Is Your Traffic? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

The Passive Income Earner said:

The Financial Blogger said:

thx guys!

It seems that "older" sites were more affected than new blogs!

@Miss T,

the key is to spend time ;-) if you don't have much time to put on your blog, it will be hard to make it grow.

Hi Mike,

Is it TFB that was affected or all of them? Just curious if the new direction of TFB affected your authority and it may just take time to establish a new authority.

In fact,

my other sites are going through the regular small decline of traffic brought by spring and summer time. so everything else is normal. Mind you, The Dividend Guy Blog or Intelligent Speculator didn't change their direction either ;-)

I guess I will see traffic going back up with TFB. The good thing is that I am getting more direct hit and more reference since I've changed my posts. Then, the overall traffic has not been affected too much ;-D

JT_McGee said:

Google is dealing with half-truths when they say Panda is only one of 500 changes this year.  That statement is true, I'm sure, but Google makes several hundred changes per year to their algorithms that aren't nearly to the same scale as Panda.  We won't see anything as "game changing" as Panda for a very long time, I sense.

 

BTW, I don't think it was only newer sites that saw growth.  An older site of mine, which has nearly six years of domain history and a lot of "historic" content saw quite the boost from Panda to the tune of 30-40%, depending on the day.  Truthfully, I think the drop in ranking for older sites is due a bit to game theory; webdevs who had been around for a while had learned to beat Google all too well, and were far too heavy on SEO and light on content.  The new update is light on SEO, and heavy on content.

 

Google is raising the bar for content; they want quality, informative, and authoritative content that is not general in nature, but serves to provide a solution to a problem, a well-thought analysis of a topic, and is well-written.  All the while, I suspect that the value of links (especially internal links, from what I've seen) is being lowered.  In looking through Google's recent comments, it appears to me that they are targeting people who had previously earned #1-3 spots because they SEO'd as best they could–h2 tags galore, internal linking that isn't for humans but for search engines, and/or page titles that match directly to popular search phrases.

 

Webmasters who do the complete opposite of what eHow does will be the winners in the search engines.  Let's use an example: an article on "How to plan a child's birthday party inexpensively." The article is here: http://www.ehow.com/how_14770_…..party.html

 

I admit that this is probably better than 80% of eHow's content, but look through those steps and tell me what that article says that isn't plainly obvious.  I know nothing about planning birthday parties, and absolutely nothing about children, and I could write that same article in 10 minutes because it really doesn't say all that much.

 

However, I could spend a further 50 minutes, for a total of one hour writing it, to research and thicken it so it is actually useful.  Step 2, for example, is to find an inexpensive location.  Why not thicken it with a list of national organizations that do rent out space for parties?  Step 6 could use some more content, too.  What if you gave an example, even an off the wall one, where you find the cost for a package of 6 twinkies and the cost for a package of 36 twinkies, and compute the difference per twinkie?  Bam!  Completely original content that is also informative.  For Step 9, I know that most dollar and discount stores carry roughly the same stuff.  So, with a simple 10 minute perusal of DollarTree's website, I can give examples of party favors and materials that can be purchased inexpensively.  

 

If all an article does is describe a basic thought process to solve a problem, it isn't adding value, and it shouldn't do well in the search engines.  If, however, an article not only explains the thought process but gives resources, thoughtful analysis, and action steps, then it solves the problem and will naturally rise in the search engines due to Google's quality control, or natural backlink growth that results from people passing the link to friends via FB and Twitter, posting it on forums like this one, or linking to it from their website.

 

/endSEOnerding (My love of SEO borders on unhealthy.)

That's a very interesting theory. However, I'm wondering how Google is able to determine what is good content and what is not (besides looking at keywords, bold, h2 or other SEO that we know of). For example, one of my most popular posts (in term of visits when it was published, reference and tweet) was How I Run Multiple Blogs. This is a complete and lenghty article (that you can't obviously write within 1 hour) and show high quality content. On the other side, I didn't (and still don't get) much SE traffic on this page… I was expecting this since Google can't really give me ranking as I did this post without doing SEO…

Many big PF bloggers (I'm talking site with over 40,000 visits per month) saw their SE traffic going down and I know a lot of them provide high quality content… it remains a big mystery for me!

My plan is to wait a few months and try to catch up on the "new" game ;-).

The Single Saver said:

The Financial Blogger said:

In fact,

my other sites are going through the regular small decline of traffic brought by spring and summer time. so everything else is normal. Mind you, The Dividend Guy Blog or Intelligent Speculator didn't change their direction either ;-)

 

I guess I will see traffic going back up with TFB. The good thing is that I am getting more direct hit and more reference since I've changed my posts. Then, the overall traffic has not been affected too much ;-D

I am glad to read this as my site seems to be in a slight decline (though SE traffic and subscribers keeps increasing and reader engagement is up) so I was hoping this might just be a "time of year" type of thing. 

 

By the way, sorry I haven't been posting much on Yakezie lately, everyone.  It isn't by choice… half the time I can't seem to get logged into Yakezie anymore. 

Did you try hitting refresh after you log in? I think the cache page shows up first even after you log in.

My traffic declined in April, but seems to be picking up again in May.

JT_McGee said:

Google is dealing with half-truths when they say Panda is only one of 500 changes this year.  That statement is true, I'm sure, but Google makes several hundred changes per year to their algorithms that aren't nearly to the same scale as Panda.  We won't see anything as "game changing" as Panda for a very long time, I sense.

 

BTW, I don't think it was only newer sites that saw growth.  An older site of mine, which has nearly six years of domain history and a lot of "historic" content saw quite the boost from Panda to the tune of 30-40%, depending on the day.  Truthfully, I think the drop in ranking for older sites is due a bit to game theory; webdevs who had been around for a while had learned to beat Google all too well, and were far too heavy on SEO and light on content.  The new update is light on SEO, and heavy on content.

 

Google is raising the bar for content; they want quality, informative, and authoritative content that is not general in nature, but serves to provide a solution to a problem, a well-thought analysis of a topic, and is well-written.  All the while, I suspect that the value of links (especially internal links, from what I've seen) is being lowered.  In looking through Google's recent comments, it appears to me that they are targeting people who had previously earned #1-3 spots because they SEO'd as best they could–h2 tags galore, internal linking that isn't for humans but for search engines, and/or page titles that match directly to popular search phrases.

 

Webmasters who do the complete opposite of what eHow does will be the winners in the search engines.  Let's use an example: an article on "How to plan a child's birthday party inexpensively." The article is here: http://www.ehow.com/how_14770_…..party.html

 

I admit that this is probably better than 80% of eHow's content, but look through those steps and tell me what that article says that isn't plainly obvious.  I know nothing about planning birthday parties, and absolutely nothing about children, and I could write that same article in 10 minutes because it really doesn't say all that much.

 

However, I could spend a further 50 minutes, for a total of one hour writing it, to research and thicken it so it is actually useful.  Step 2, for example, is to find an inexpensive location.  Why not thicken it with a list of national organizations that do rent out space for parties?  Step 6 could use some more content, too.  What if you gave an example, even an off the wall one, where you find the cost for a package of 6 twinkies and the cost for a package of 36 twinkies, and compute the difference per twinkie?  Bam!  Completely original content that is also informative.  For Step 9, I know that most dollar and discount stores carry roughly the same stuff.  So, with a simple 10 minute perusal of DollarTree's website, I can give examples of party favors and materials that can be purchased inexpensively.  

 

If all an article does is describe a basic thought process to solve a problem, it isn't adding value, and it shouldn't do well in the search engines.  If, however, an article not only explains the thought process but gives resources, thoughtful analysis, and action steps, then it solves the problem and will naturally rise in the search engines due to Google's quality control, or natural backlink growth that results from people passing the link to friends via FB and Twitter, posting it on forums like this one, or linking to it from their website.

 

/endSEOnerding (My love of SEO borders on unhealthy.)

JT, Not sure if it's appropriate for MoneyMamba but if you aren't already sharing this knowledge publicly somewhere then you should!

That is an outstanding analysis of SEO.

I don't disagree at all that monetization was a key part of the update.  For a long time, Google has been interested in site design and navigation, so monetization was the next logical step for killing off sites that were there solely for the purpose of getting SE traffic then conning them into clicking Adsense.

I know this isn't a popular view here, but sites that place Adsense block above the content SHOULD be penalized.  The reality is that 40-50% (Depending on the study) of all surfers still click Adwords, and slightly more click Adsense.  Placement above the fold is one thing, but placement right on top of an article is sketch, IMO.  Who knows how many millions of clicks each day are the result of someone thinking that a link at the top of the page was a link to a new article and not an Adsense block.  

Going overboard with Adsense ads doesn't make a lot of sense anyway, and often having a 468x60 is just as good (on a eCPM basis) than 3 leaderboards/big blocks.  Google shows the most profitable ads that are most likely to be clicked, so having space for only 2 links means that you're showing only the cream of the crop. Having 12 adsense links from 3 big blocks means that you're showing a lot of ads that aren't going to pay all that well for a few clicks, and taking up valuable virtual real estate.  I've never put more than 1 Adsense unit on a page, but I'm a puritan in that regard.  I think Adsense looks like garbage anyway, and I'm just picky.  It pays to be picky anymore, though.

Something had to be done about affiliates as well.  Do a search for "(some product) review" and you'll see a bunch of half-assed posts from someone who has never even used the product with a million links pointing visitors to an affiliate link.  Not saying that this shouldn't be refined–it should–but affiliates and Adsense are clogging up Google SERPs and taking up space for better content that isn't influenced by making money, but informing people AND making money. 

I'm thinking that quality of the written content is already incorporated into their algorithms, and it will be the next step toward removing poor articles from search engines.  Google has an excellent spellcheck built into its search engine on the visitor side, I'd imagine it can be reversed and used to evaluate sites, too.

Nothing I say is meant to be a shot at the bow of anyone or any website.  I'm speaking in absolutes, and Google's algos are anything but absolute.

Thx for the feedback MoneySmart!

I guess you might be right since all my "adsense paying articles" are going down. I do have a lot of ads on my site so it makes sense that I got penalize.

We are kind of stuck in a catch 22: taking adsense block off the prime spot would result into more traffic but less income from ad. And now, leaving the adsense block in the the prime spots will result into lower traffic, therefore less income from ad too!

Due to the drop of traffic I am suffering in regards with TFB, I might try to take off a good part of my adsense blocks and see how it goes…