While we are all working hard to improve our sites, maybe we could share some Panda stories. There has been a lot in the press about how the Google Panda update has affected some major companies, but as we all know, it is the smaller businesses that are really suffering.
OK, nobody wants to lose traffic, but if a company is seeing its search referrals drop from 1,000,000 a day down to 100,000 a day, they are still getting a lot of good business from Google and probably have a high exposure in social media and a loyal readership. Some people have mentioned how they have received thousands of emails from clients and fans since Panda, asking them where the site is – they still manage to find it though!
My Panda experience has been unpleasant to say the least, but I am seeing it as a new learning curve. Although I have lost a lot of good business from Panda, so much that my wife has had to go back to work (and I will look after my kids 1 day a week – that will be fun!) I am still confident that it will work out better in the end. Why?
I think that Google decided that enough was enough with poor quality PAGES, and Panda is there to stamp them out. Note, not websites of poor quality, but pages.
Many websites that have suffered talk about huge communities, forums that are 10 years old, millions of comments, videos, images, hundred of thousands of pages. This is all very well – but how many of those pages are actually read by customers and web surfers today? Maybe 10% at most. The rest sit dormant.
But think about poor old Googlebot, it still has to go and check those pages. Thousands of pages across millions of websites. Maybe the Panda update is a message to webmaster from Google, that is really just saying:
“Tidy up your mess, I am fed up with having to walk around the rubbish to get what I want!”
Other ideas is that it is designed to stamp out the scrapers and content thieves. Yes, many well established sites have suffered because of Panda. But think about it. If a professional scraper has a network of say, 1000 websites, that scrape 10,000 different domains, that is going to cost them a lot of money to run. If they too have lost a lot of traffic, they may be forced to close down their operations.
Yes, you may be suffering now, but maybe this will recover in time. The scrapers may still appear top of search for some terms, but not all.
Anyway, I digress. What is your Panda story? Share away.
