Beware The Panda!

Hello Good People!

Well, as I mentioned a few days ago, on around the 26th or 27th of September all of my websites took a nose dive on Google. Rankings evaporated, traffic dried up, and Adsense earnings plummeted.

I went from earning around $140 a day on the 25th, to…

$125 on the 26th
$93 on the 27th
$47 on the 28th
$49 on the 29th
$53 on the 30th

October hasn’t fared much better…

$46 on the 1st
$62 on the 2nd
$47 on the 3rd
$62 on the 4th
$62 on the 5th
$62 on the 6th

Which isn’t bad considering how bad some people have been hit…but it’s still less than half of what I was earning just last month.

So what happened?

Google released a major algorithm update, code named Panda 2.5 (Panda 1 and 2 were released earlier last year and this year). Think of the algorithm as the thing that determines how websites are listed in the SERPS.

This Panda update was supposed to address “scraper sites”, or sites that use (or scrape) content from other web sites. This can be done using a spider to swipe the content from other sites (both legally and illegally) or by importing and/or modifying a web site’s RSS feed.

RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and was created to make it easier for people to scrape your content, that’s what RSS feeds are for.

Scraper sites are often considered spam sites, but there are very legitimate scraper sites as well.

For Example…

If you owned a website that went around and legally scraped RSS feeds for coupons from all the major coupon websites and then displayed them all in one place on your website, you would be creating a valuable resource that would save people time so that they wouldn’t have to run around and check all the different coupon websites manually. Your site would NOT be considered a spam site in that case.

Another example might be price comparison websites that list prices of items for sale across many different companies. They might scrape price data from Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, and dozens of other retailers and show you the lowest price. Again, this is not considered a Spam website.

Of course, Google…as they often do…just decided to paint all scraper sites with the same brush, label them spam, and penalize them off the face of the planet.

So what about my sites?

My sites really aren’t what you would consider scraper sites, though I do use twitter posts relating to the keyword of each page which are technically scraped content from twitter. But it’s a relatively small portion of the content on each page.

Also, my amazon widget technically scrapes product descriptions from amazon.com but those descriptions are only a sentence or two max. Still a small percentage of the actual content of my sites.

Maybe that’s why my websites are still gaining some traffic and earnings and haven’t been expelled from Google completely.

Why Does This Happen?

Google constantly tweaks their algorithm (they say over 500 times per year). But 2-3 times a year they come out with a major overhaul like this one. When they do, a lot of people feel the pain, and those unfortunate people that rely on Google for 100% of their traffic can easily go out of business overnight.

Google does this in an attempt to keep their search engine fresh and relevant and to reduce the almost overpowering amount of spam websites that get indexed every day. You can’t really blame them for it, if you owned a search engine you’d need to do the same thing too.

How can you safeguard yourself? You can’t. That’s part of the risk of this type of business. It’s part of the game and it’s something you’ll have to keep in mind if you want to get into this type of business.

So What Does This Mean Going Forward?

As I see it, there are 3 options:

1. Try to fix the sites and make them pleasing in the eyes of Google, in an attempt to regain past traffic levels.

2. Forget about the sites and move on.

3. Some sort of hybrid of 1 and 2.

Normally I’d choose option 2, forget about it and move on – and start cranking out new sites. But this time I’m going to choose selection 3. Why? Because Google has been fairly specific about this Panda update (ie telling us it’s supposed to target scraper sites). So in this case, I can remove the scraped content from the sites fairly easily and quickly and then see if that changes things.

So that’s what I’m going to do. And in the mean time, I’m going to continue to work on the bot I’m building that will create all my future sites for me, automatically…but more on that soon.

It’s really hard to see months of hard work and hundreds, even thousands of invested dollars turn to dust because someone over at Google flipped a switch and knocked all your sites out of the index.

But, that’s the name of the game….and let’s face it…there has to be *SOME* sort of risk involved in any business, especially one that cranks out huge piles of cash as easily as this one. So all in all, it aint so bad!

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

---

Did you like this article? Share it:

Tweet