Until now, all of the Google Panda updates have only made my sites stronger by rewarding them with better rankings in Google. On the 14th of October however, I did see a sharp and noticeable change in my traffic due to a slight drop in rankings on a couple of my websites.
Check out these traffic screenshots from Google Analytics:
Website 1:
Website 2:
Both these websites lost rankings for a few keywords. One of my high traffic keywords on Website 1 dropped from being ranked #1, to being ranked #8. On Website 2 my ranking dropped from #1 to #9.
These kind of ranking drops can result in major traffic reductions and therefore significant earning reductions as well. Thankfully only a couple of my niche websites have been effected, the vast majority are ranking better than ever (which goes to show my methods are still working well).
So what caused these particular websites to drop down the rankings?
And why did Google rank other websites better than mine?
I did some investigation and analysis to try to find out. What I found are some trends that shed light as to where Google is heading.
Case 1
First let’s take a look at how the top 10 websites compare when a few different SEO metrics are compared. To give you as much information as I can without divulging specific sites I own and keyword I target, I’ll keep the format of the url intact without sharing the exact url.
Top 10 Rankings for Keyword 1
Website #1: http://nichekeyword.com/GeneralNiche/TargetKeyword.php
Number of Affiliate Links: 6
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 3 times each
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: Uncloaked
Page Load Time: 0.624s
Total Social Shares: 4
Pages on Domain: 36
Domain Age: 2010
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 4
Website #2 = http://www.target-keyword.net/
Number of Affiliate Links: 4
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 4 times
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: Cloaked
Page Load Time: 3.14s
Total Social Shares: 10
Pages on Domain: 15
Domain Age: 2010
Related Outbound Links on Page: 1
PR: 1
Website #3 = http://www.nichespecifickeyword.com/
Number of Affiliate Links: 4
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 4 times
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: Cloaked
Page Load Time: 3.77s
Total Social Shares: 5
Pages on Domain: 42
Domain Age: 2009
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 2
Website #4 = http://www.nichespecifickeyword.info/target-keyword/
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (this page links back to the homepage where there is heavy use of affiliate links)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 10.95s
Total Social Shares: 0
Pages on Domain: 42
Domain Age: 2009
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 3
Website #5 = http://targetkeyword.net/
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (website appears to be ready for Adsense although no ads have yet been added)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 1.92s
Total Social Shares: 6
Pages on Domain: 8
Domain Age: 2007
Related Outbound Links on Page: 1
PR: 1
Website #6 = Not Loading
Number of Affiliate Links: No Data Available
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: N/A
Total Social Shares: 0
Pages on Domain: 7,870
Domain Age: 1998
Related Outbound Links on Page: No Data Available
PR: 3
Website #7 = en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword
Number of Affiliate Links: 0
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 0
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 2.06s
Total Social Shares: 738
Pages on Domain: 8,760,000
Domain Age: 2002
Related Outbound Links on Page: MANY
PR: 5
My Website: Website #8 = www.nichekeyword.com/target-keyword.php
Number of Affiliate Links: 5
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 5
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: Cloaked
Page Load Time: 3.58s
Total Social Shares: 4
Pages on Domain: 48
Domain Age: 2009
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 2
Website #9 = nichekeyword.com/target-keyword
Number of Affiliate Links: 1
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 1
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: Cloaked
Page Load Time: 3.49s
Total Social Shares: 0
Pages on Domain: 28
Domain Age: 2011
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 3
Website #10 = www.niche-keyword.com/category/Keyword.html
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (Adsense Site)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 3.58s
Total Social Shares: 0
Pages on Domain: 37
Domain Age: 2011
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 0
Observations
A couple of the things that really stood out amongst the first set of websites analyzed. One being that a .info website ranks at number 4 in Google for a very competitive keyword. I’ve never ever seen this before so it came as quite a shock. Historically .info websites have only achieved mediocre rankings.
Is Google beginning to analyze a website for it’s content and not look so much at the domain extension?
I doubt it but it’s worth thinking about…I still won’t be buying any .info domains though as this ranking is the first of it’s kind I’ve seen in a long time.
I was a little surprised to see that the #1 ranking website heavily uses affiliate links and that it has uncloaked affiliate links…One of my suspicions was that Google was perhaps penalizing websites that promote affiliate products multiple times on the same site – while there may be some truth in this, the #1 ranking website goes completely against this theory.
An area where the #1 ranked website does very well is load time. 0.62 seconds is an extremely fast load time and this is definitely a factor that Google is now taking into consideration.
NOTE: I used http://fpt.pingdom.com/ to test the load time of the websites mentioned.
Case 2
Below is the second set of rankings which I analyzed, these rankings are from a completely different website in a niche totally unrelated to website 1:
Top 9 Rankings for Keyword 2
Website #1 = www.keyword.com/category/target-keyword.html
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (Adsense Site)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 2.36s
Total Social Shares: 2
Pages on Domain: 1,660,000
Domain Age: 1996
Related Outbound Links on Page: 2
PR: 4
Website #2 = http://www.nichekeyword.com/category/articles/subtopic/keyword.aspx
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (Product Vendor)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 1.26s
Total Social Shares: 4
Pages on Domain: 702
Domain Age: 2010
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 3
Website #3 = http://www.niche-keyword.com/category/topic/keyword.htm
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (looks to be a site built to link out to other sites, lots of quality content, a few links, but no affiliate links)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 1.47s
Total Social Shares: 21
Pages on Domain: 826
Domain Age: 2003
Related Outbound Links on Page: 6
PR: 4
Website #4 = http://www.targetkeyword.net/
Number of Affiliate Links: 2 (Adsense also on website)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 2
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: Cloaked
Page Load Time: 2.08s
Total Social Shares: 0
Pages on Domain: 142
Domain Age: 2011
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 0
Website #5 = http://www.niche.com/topic/article.htm
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (Adsense)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 1.46s
Total Social Shares: 186
Pages on Domain: 281,000
Domain Age: 1996
Related Outbound Links on Page: 10
PR: 5
Website #6 = http://www.keyword.de/
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (100% content, no monetization or links at all)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 0.27s
Total Social Shares: 11
Pages on Domain: 18
Domain Age: 2002
Related Outbound Links on Page: 10
PR: 2
Website #7 = http://nichekeyword.com/category/target-keyword.asp
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (Product Vendor)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 1.71s
Total Social Shares: 1
Pages on Domain: 2450
Domain Age: 2003
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 3
Website #8 = http://nichekeyword.com/content/keyword
Number of Affiliate Links: 0 (Adsense)
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: N/A
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: N/A
Page Load Time: 1.7s
Total Social Shares: 1
Pages on Domain: 85
Domain Age: 2003
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 3
MY WEBSITE: Website #9 = http://www.nichekeyword.com/target-keyword.php
Number of Affiliate Links: 5
Number of Times The Same Affiliate Links Are Repeated: 5
Cloaked or Uncloaked Links: Cloaked
Page Load Time: 3.64s
Total Social Shares: 2
Pages on Domain: 34
Domain Age: 2010
Related Outbound Links on Page: 0
PR: 1
Observations
The website ranked #6 (http://www.keyword.de) has absolutely no form of monetization at all. The website is relatively small (18 pages) and very basic (it’s a static “non-wordpress” website. It loads extremely quickly in 0.27 seconds, contains a high number of outbound links to authority websites such as Wikipedia and it has a reasonable number of social shares. This website grabbed my attention as it’s quite strange to see a “.de” website ranking so well in the USA for a competitive keyword.
When I closely analyzed the website it really did have all the makings of a good resource, something Google would want to have listed near the top of the listings. Good quality information, nothing promotional, fast loading, easy to navigate and linking to other useful resources. It think there’s a strong lesson there…
While nothing stands out as a crystal clear reason as to why the mid-October Panda Update pushed some of my rankings down and promoted other websites ahead of mine, I did find some interesting nuggets of information in the data and I do have a hunch of a couple of things that could help reverse my ranking slip.
For one, I’ll look to reduce the use of my affiliate links. While there is no sure evidence that this is a reason Google has dropped my rankings, it could in some way be related. Maybe I’ll start using 2 affiliate links rather than 5 in an attempt to make my websites slightly less promotional (this will result in a lower conversion rate but might mean I get ranked #1 instead of #8 so I’ll get much more traffic and higher earnings overall).
Another thing I definitely need to improve is my website load time. On the 2 of my websites that I analyzed above, neither uses any form of caching plugin (they are websites which I set up a long time ago). By using a simple caching plugin like W3 Total Cache (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/), I could probably shave at least 1 second of the load time of these websites.
In addition to using a simple caching plugin, I recommend you minimize the number of plugins you use…keep things simple and your website will most likely load faster as a result.
Getting social links to your website is important but these results show that it’s not a vital element. Some of the websites analyzed above have 0 (or very few) social shares. In saying that, Social Shares is something that I believe will be more and more important moving forward, I just don’t have any hard data to back that up right now.
SEO is changing and Google is getting smarter. Make sure you stay up to date with the latest SEO techniques and most of all, try to ensure you really are adding value to the internet…if you can do that, I can almost guarantee you’ll do well in the long term.
Extra Information:
- I used SEOMoz find the total number of Social Shares each website has received (click here to take a free 30 day trial of SEOMoz). Check out my full SEOMoz review today.
- I used SEO Quake to determine the number of pages indexed on each domain, the domain age, and the PR (page rank) of each domain.
- I used http://fpt.pingdom.com/ to test page load speed.
- I used my own 2 eyes to count the number of affiliate links on each page and check if links were cloaked or not. I also manually went through each website to check what type of monetization strategy was being used
If you’ve found this useful, leave a comment below (and click the Like Button at the top of the page!) – I read all comments and appreciate your feedback!
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Hey Aidan,
Great write up. I had several sites affected in the same way as yours. Dropping from #1 or #2 down to # 8 or # 9.
I think one of the most frustrating things about Google is it’s virtually impossible to actually KNOW why your website dropped. Yes, you can do research, look at metrics, etc., etc. and take an educated guess, but it’s still just that…a guess.
Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, there will be some oddball site ranking that doesn’t seem to fit the same metrics as the rest of the top 10. Then you start scratching your head again.
I did have one question. After your sites dropped from #1 to #8 or #9, did they stay there or have they been moving up and down a lot? Mine seem to dance all over the place throughout the day…#2, then #9, then #14, then back to #8, then back to #2, then second page…etc. etc.
My guess is Google is tweaking constantly still trying to find the best solution. It does make it really hard to determine if any changes you’re making are working when it dances all about.
These are aged sites so it’s not the “Google Dance” you sometimes hear about with new sites.
Derek
Hey Derek, thanks for your insights, I appreciate them!! I agree with you that it’s very hard to nail down exactly what Google is doing and sometimes the best thing we can do is take educated guesses. My rankings that dropped to #8 and #9 have been pretty solid. It’s still early days as this update only happened 16 days ago but they haven’t been moving around so far. I am making a few tweaks to the pages so we’ll wait and see how they turn out…And yes, as you mentioned, the sites in this study are aged sites so if there was movement it wouldn’t be due to the typical dance we often see on new websites.
Amazing break down here Aidan! I thought it was really interesting that your first case study showed up a .info with a high first page ranking when I was working on a .info for over a year and sniffed page one just one time! I agree that its probably an exception and not the rule!
David
Thanks David, you’re welcome. Yes that .info was a real surprise to me too! I still think it was a one-off but it’s pretty strange. The keyword it ranks for is hugely competitive…
Interesting results. Are you still using any autocontent cash ticks? I had some sites that worked really well thanks to Brian’s system and they got hit by panda(some are still ranking ok amazingly!) Quantity of content does not seem to be as important anymore, quality does. I use categories and make the category pages into silos (put a sticky post on the top for the actual SEO optimized page info) as done in autocontent cash themes.
Regarding pageload times I’m thinking it maybe an idea to get rid of posts on the homepage altogether and just have links to the posts. What do you think? Thanks!
Hi Karl, no, I’m not using any Auto Content Cash tricks…all my content is always written by a real person. I think you’re 100% right where you say the quantity isn’t as important as the quality. We need to give people good quality and where possible encourage interaction (like I’ve done with the Like button and the comments on this post).
Regarding load times, I think you just need to play around with it. Try taking posts off the homepage, check the load speed, then try with the posts. Removing posts probably would speed up the load time but themes vary so much it’s hard to give any suggestions, I recommend just testing it out
Thanks Aidan,
I came to the same conclusion about page load times when a couple of my sites got slammed. I’ll be looking at a caching plugin and maybe a better hosting account moving forwards.
Good move Jay…smart decision
Aidan,
This study could not have come at a better time. I have been puzzled by a sudden drop in my traffic/earnings.
I plan to reduce my affiliate links too…wish me luck because the sites affected by the decreased earnings support my ‘Rank and Pillage’ projects. Which by the way, I love your course.
Again, thank you for this study!
Thanks Kelly – glad you found this useful. I think we are all still in a very strong position…remember, only a couple of my websites lost rankings and they dropped from #1 to #8-#10…it’s not that they got slapped or anything…but by focusing on good content it definitely will help.
I started out for Halloween couple of months back. My site is in number 4, but it is an exact match domain. I have lot of cloaked links with about 4 pages, but I have not had an impact. The page loads in about 9.06 seconds.
Srinivas
Hi Srinivas, you might want to add a caching plugin to speed up your load time…you could probably halve it and it may have some positive SEO effect…something to consider
Thanks for commenting.
Hi Aidan,
this is really an interesting post, thanks.
I was wondering if you mean the site “http://www.keywords.de/” which you mentioned in your observations because there doesn’t exist a site with the URL “http://www.keyword.de”, at least not over here in Germany.
Have a great day
Raphaela
Hi Raphaela,
The actual domain name isn’t “keywords.de”….what I meant by that was that the structure of the domain was “keywords.de”, for example:
- dogtraining.de
- weightlosstips.de
- internetmarketingadvice.de
The above are all examples of “keyword.de”. Does this make more sense? I didn’t want to put the real website names in because that would give up a couple of my niches which I’d rather keep private (for now
)
Thanks for the comments Raphaela, comment again if anything else is unclear.
Hey Aiden,
Quite interesting read. I think we are moving towards subtle affiliate marketing
Thank you for your insight.
You’re welcome, thanks for your comment.
I think you’re right…subtle tweaks definitely won’t hurt.
Hi Aidan -
In the case of the site I worked on as part of the RAP study, (HalloweenSkullduggery.com), because of the nature of it, it is laden with images -which probably bog it down (in terms of load speed). I don’t know how that could change -the images are fairly important.
Now that November is here, I can report i had a few thousand visitors but only a 0.12 conversion rate/.
I’ll have to iron that out before next year.
Thanks for your report. It is enlightening. Good of you too share the info.
Dave Christensen
Hi Dave, thanks for the comment and you’re welcome – glad you’ve found this information useful.
One way you can get images to load faster is by using a more powerful server (I use a Virtual Private server on Host Gator, thats the next step down from a fully private server and it costs a lot less), another option is to host images on the Amazon AWS servers, thats what we did with the launch of Rank and Pillage, I wouldn’t want to do that every single time for niche sites though if I could avoid it (time consuming to upload them etc).
About your 0.12 conversion rate, if thats 0.12% then yes, I think something isn’t working as well as it should be. Perhaps the keywords you’re targeting don’t lead to sales? Or perhaps your calls to action need a bit of work? Either way, take a close look at your site and I’m sure you’ll be able to work out
The good news is that you got a few thousand visitors…a little tweaking may be all it takes to get due reward next year (or in future projects).
Thanks for the reply Aidan – I just use the autocontent cash themes they work great. But some are still ranking number 1! I still think adding content does work though- the more pages the more internal links you get as well which is very important
Hi again Karl, I agree with you 100%, I think adding new content on a regular basis shows Google that your site is still in use…most big professional sites have minor additions and new pieces of content added frequently. And like you say, internal linking is also useful and a great benefit of adding more posts. The other thing to rememberis that previous Google Panda updates targeted “thin” sites…so I think the comment you make about adding new content is very relevant.
So that’s why a few of my sites dropped in rankings. I had a site on #3 for its main keyword and suddenly my traffic dropped form 50 a day to 0 – 5 a day.
I said to myself this is just temporary and I just need to build more backlinks, which, btw, you didn’t; mention in your analysis.
But it is clear what Google wants: quality content, and by quality I mean content that really helps your visitor. I think your websites got reviewed by a human person and have been flagged in some way or another. We just need to put more content of higher quality.
Hey Romy,
I know I didn’t cover backlinks in the study – it took me a looong time to do the analysis I did without even taking backlinks into account…maybe I’ll add them at some stage. I think continually building backlinks will definitely help you regain they positions you lost, I’m doing more backlinking to the affected pages and I’m sure it’ll help (definitely won’t hurt).
Quality is the key…and I think Google is now using different methods to measure quality (Big Brother is getting smarter)…for example, do Google robots think a webpage with 40 Facebook Likes and 20 Google +1 shares is more popular than a site without any social signals? I think so…but I’m still testing that theory
It’shard to say what impact social signals will have because like link building, they’re also pretty easy to manipulate…
I was lucky, pre-Panda I was doing a lot of BH and grey hat stuff for a company replicated site that I actually managed to get onto page 1 of Google for the keywords Website Traffic. After Panda slapped me down, and I really got bored with the affiliate marketing model of making money I moved to more WH SEO techniques on my new site. As such I have enjoyed a steady increase in traffic and rankings from Google. I found unique high quality content and some syndication is getting my site much respect from Google and my new content is indexed and ranking pretty well all around for a site that is just over a month old.
Thats awesome Clint, and thanks for sharing your experiences.
White Hat (white hat = legitimate, nothing sneaky) is definitely the way to go. Google is no fool and is always improving it’s algorithm. By staying clean and using White Hat methods you can’t go wrong really and as long as you’re always focusing on quality content, you’ll be onto a winner in the long term.
Yesterday’s post on TechRepublic talked about collateral damage of the Panda update on a serious content-driven site:
Can Google survive its blind faith in the algorithm?
(http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/can-google-survive-its-blind-faith-in-the-algorithm/9654?tag=nl.e101)
“So, Google apparently bagged its big game in the Panda hunt. The problem is that it took months to do it and a lot of algorithm trial-and-error and there was plenty of collateral damage done in the process. It’s as if Google looked at its backyard, spotted a bunch of dandelions, and instead of taking hand trimmers and going out and clipping them, Google decided to build a highly-advanced chainsaw to deal with it. The chainsaw eventually got rid of the dandelions but it also whacked some chunks out of the hedges, put some gashes into the ground, and took out part of the back fence.”
If the techies are feeling the pinch, it’s no wonder affiliates are suffering. Should we all move to Adsense instead?
Just kidding…
Hey Pat, I hadn’t seen that article. You know, it’s a funny thing you joke about Adsense, there were a lot of Adsense sites appearing in the top 10 I analyzed….something to think about…
Thanks, Aidan. I’m looking for some clear information on the latest Panda update. One of my strange experiences is having a large, 1999 site with very few affiliate links and lots of quality information drop 60%, while most of my mini-sites (a la Brian Johnson) increased their rankings! I’ll have to take a look at my large site and see where it happened.
Hey Chris, lots of strange things are happening and I think this is going to take some time to settle down…Some of my mini-sites are also doing extremely well which kind of goes against what Google was trying to do with their initial Google Panda update.
Aiden, will be interested to know if you also looked at the post length on each sight am hearing reposrts that 400-500 posts lenght will no longer cut it and we need to be looking at post of 1000+ words.
Also another way of increasing your load speed is storing all media on Amazon S3, which you can do for pennies on the $.
Hey Tony, while I didn’t really mention it in the analysis, I did see that sites with more content were doing better. Moving forward I think longer articles will be good as long as the quality remains high. The longer an article is, the more time people will stay on the site which is something Google likes…it also usually results in a lower bounce rate but the key is always to ensure the content is high.
Amazon S3 is a great idea, thats where I host my images and videos on high traffic sites, and yes – it’s a very cheap “pay for what you use” solution. Those interested in Amazon S3 can find out more here: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Hey Brian, yes…Google has come a looong way and the old school spammy tactics just don’t work anymore. Good on you for creating a way to cloak affiliate links that even Google cna’t pick up, in saying that, if the content on your site is really good, I doubt Google will worry too much about the affiliate links. The #1 ranked website in one of the studies was packed with affiliate links…this surprised me a bit but it goes to show that affiliate links aren’t all bad…
Build a site people love, and Google will probably love it as well.
Hi Tony I use amazons3 for videos hadn’t thought of it for images though – what do you do setup a CDN?
Karl, just upload the images (I use S3 Fox), set them to be readable by the public, and it should all work fine…thats how I do it.
Hi Aidan,
Don’t know if this applies directly to your case study, but is something to think about going forward: Google apparently is hiring more and more people to work as “human site reviewers,” rounding out the work that until now has been done by bots.
Obviously, a trained human reviewer can make far more sophisticated judgements about site content, quality, etc. and how the site fits in with Google’s aim of enhancing the user experience. And with the billions or trillions of pages on the internet, those that get human scrutiny are the ones ranking in the top ten. So, for authority sites to survive, they’ll have to really BE authority sites, not just junk propped up by a gazillion backlinks.
Very good point David – thanks for sharing, I agree with you 100%.
Hey Guys;
I was on a webinar the other night where a guy who had an authority site was able to get his post ranked number one on google in under 5 minutes. Lets face it. Google panda and subsequent updates are aimed at spammers and affiliate marketers who link to products from their websites. I believe that google refers to these affiliate pages as “bridge pages”. Unfortunately, that means that the days of 1 or 2 page affiliate blogs are over. Google wants content “fresh content”. The good news is that google loves sites that curate information like mashable.com. This site gathers news on a topic from all over the web, and posts it on their page with commentary and a link to the original story. These types of authority sites are what you should be building now. I’m not talking about an auto poster or bot. You actually need to read this material and write commentary on them. If your site becomes an authority on a topic, google will show you extra love, and will rank new posts much higher. However, I have also discovered a way to completely shield my affiliate links from google. I mean that the only way that google would be able to find my affiliate links, is if they had a human visited my page. Not ready to share that trick yet, but may in the future. Hope you got something from all of this rant.
Hi Aidan,
I have a suspicion that Google is getting hot on load times. I have a number of Halloween Sites that run on Word Press and it seems those with a “cute” halloween theme but a slow load time get a lower ranking than those with a “standard” fast loading theme.
I also think that google is losing its snobbery over the domain extension espcially under the new domain types allowed under the last WWW convention.
Regards
Nick
Thanks for your feedback Nick
All the keywords that I had done backlinking for got effected. Most where at or near # 1. The site and its keyword went from 1 to 100. What I did notice for all my sites was that where keyword-in domain-name.com was in the top 10, only 1 keyword-in domain-name.com stayed on page 1 the rest where total random when it came to keyword.
That adsence comment got me thinking, most of the sites in the top 10 for my keyword were adsence sites and google is pushing their new adsense system. I even got an invite after been banned a few years back. I would suspect its all about the money. Google puts the adsences sites on page 1, Google makes more money. I’m now looking at PPV.
Hi Graeme, I’m sorry to hear your website got affected…for what it’s worth, I’m running new tests (surprise, surprise) on my affected domains and as soon as I find a way to reverse what happened I’ll share it with you here. I haven’t really tried PPV seriously so can’t really give a comment about it…
I don’t have so many websites, but one of my oldest authority travel site got whacked and I lost 50% of the traffic and hence 50% of my adsense income. It took me a long time to build up that site with long insightful long articles with average 1000 words. And yet it still got slapped by Panda. I notice thin sites can sometime rank better than mine in the similar topic even though I have better information? Now that is very strange.
I did a little experiment on another new travel site of my mine which uses duplicate content taken from newspapers. I wanted to see whether duplicate content (with some short comment added) would do as well as those articles that I wrote myself. It did well for a short while, and after October there was a sharp decline in web traffic. I wonder how mashable did it…
Anyway thanks for your insights, I will have to keep in mind your research and apply to my site accordingly.
I still haven’t really tried the R&P for mini sites due to time constraint. Hope to really give it a try. But the latest Panda update and lower traffic has cause me some frustration and demotivation. Need to pull myself out of this doldrums…
Hi Jan, thanks for the comment.
One thing that I am 100% sure of is that in the long term, high quality websites will always win. So focus on doing the best you can, build the best websites you can and eventually you will rank at the top. Regarding your Authority Adsense site, I’d try adding new content to it. If you are heavily using Adsense on it you might want to ease up a little as well…
Hi Aidan:
Thanks for sharing this. As a person who is just beginning to try and get to #1, this is great stuff to think about and try to apply.
Thank you Aidan – I’m just starting out on R and P. I’m impressed with your attention to your readers. The results of Panda and Googles ongoing tweeks gives food for thought about what strategy should one employ to give “long term reliable” passive income. People will still find ways to game the system however,I doubt, they will be reliable long term or even medium. Does it mean I have to have more variety in the types of sites and strategies I employ to help smooth out the bumps.
Hi Colin, thanks for your kind comments about Rank and Pillage
You’re right that there will always be ways to game the system, but as you also mentioned, these will be short term tactics and won’t really work in the long term. I think going for a variety of sites is a really good idea. Diversity always helps in internet marketing. If one thing isn’t working so well, you’ve got other options to fall back on. Relating this to Rank and Pillage, it’s a good idea to build an Authority site and some Adsense sites…while the Adsense might bring you in less earnings in the short term, they might be an extremely good long term earner.
As someone has already wrote, SEO is not “rocket science” but getting it right takes time, especially for newbies. I highly recommend the “SEO Book” by Aaron Wall.Thanks for the advice.
Great post – I have around 15 sites and a few of my main ones dropped
traffic in Oct. and no amount of tweaking worked for me so I have taken
a novel approach to get my traffic numbers back up – ignore Google altogether!
I am using other traffic methods… videos, slideshows, articles,
pdfs, press releases, ppc, twitter, facebook, ezines, linkbuilding…
We have all become too depended on Google and creating profitable sites
outside of Google has been quite liberating for me. Any traffic I now do
get from Google is considered gravy or extra… to what I need to made income
from the few sites poisoned by Panda.
thans Aidan,
i would like to tell one thing that high quality content websites will always win. And for like me new geek who wanna try and get to top on google search, that’s great stuff to implement and think.