Jan Leow's Blog Page

Google's Panda update is really killing my websites!

Whatever happened to the "Do no evil" motto of Google? Sure there may be spammy websites out there, but this year's Google's Panda update is killing my websites, including this personal blog of mine!

I could see from my StatCounter account, the website traffic plummeting! At first it hit my authoritative travel site, it went down by 60%. Along with it my income dropped 50% from it too. It was a lot of hard work compiling the facts and writing them, and had to contend with webmaster plagiarizing my site.

Later Google hit another of my travel site, which also reduce its web traffic by 70% and there after like a bulldozer it started to bludgeon all my websites! This month I see that it is also going after my blog with downward spiral of 70% from the original website traffic! I get only about 30% of the web traffic of what I use to get for the past many years.

The update was meant to deal with spammy sites, unfortunately it also has a very high collateral damage. In some of the forums discussing about the Google Panda update, they liken it as gardener who didn't like the weeds growing in his garden and decided to use a chainsaw to grind out the weeds which meant also chopping up the flowers and plants and dug out the earth as well making the garden into a big mess!

According to some comments in the forum, the algorithm is not perfect, in fact it made some spammy sites rank better than authoritative sites. How can that be?

I do know that a blog such as mine may not have good articles (from the high bounce rate, I should know) but that didn't mean it didn't have some gems in it. And yet the Google Panda update start to target my site. Hey, the algo is really just a bunch of heartless subroutines and it won't care whose site it is, it will just crush it base on the "bad points" that it is fed into it. Some of which we webmaster don't even know about and thought it was nice to have to make the website look good, but in Google's eyes it is not.

Sheesh, in this bad economy, I do need to find side income no matter how small. And as a small fry getting whacked left, right, center is really no fun. And the big boys like Google getting into the act with their latest Panda update is really killing my websites!

Related Posts:
Fixing the Penalty of Google Panda 2.5.2 update
Has Panda update caused your website traffic to reduce?

1 comment:

Tony said...

I can relate to your frustration. One of my websites (www.couriersrus.com) used to be the number 1 courier directory on the net that was before i took googles message to add another ad to my pages. Now i have been penalized for having to many ads on that site. Income down 75% in 3 months. Thousands of hours work down the drain. Will have to give up on writing / feeding google soon. Thanks.