Hey everyone,

I won't mention the url but will try to be as specific as possible. After the 23rd of March, a site of mine lost 60-70$ of its google traffic. This is a 4.5 year old website that is somewhat of an authority (Top 10k alexa, Top 5k quantcast usa)

Anyways, the site is not a spammy site, has original content (its a gossip blog) And up until march 23rd was doing over 1 million visitors a month.

Now we are appearing below sites that have scraped our content. I am not sure what happened, was it some kind of late farmer update hit? I've submitted a reconsideration request so hopefully will find out something soon although I've never had a response from Google in the past and don't expect one now.

Has anyone else experienced a late march hit? I'm running out of ideas on getting this site back into its big traffic. Its very unfortunate, this site employ's 4 people and is the main bread winner for our company.

Thanks,
Jeff

Recommended Answers

All 6 Replies

Hey Jeff,

Sorry to hear that to you. Believe me, I can completely relate! That being said, I've been following our traffic patterns and working on SEO very very closely since we were killed by Panda, and noticed no fluctuations around March 23rd.

However, I am hearing reports that things changed within the past couple of days. There is speculation that it is the long-awaited Panda update.

Check out this article: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-update-13242.html

There are many webmasters that felt the same earlier March 23rd, but I haven't read anything specific for that date.
User made content can be a risk if we don't control it, not just blog comments but also forum posts.

Theres no way we can control what, where or how other people link to us. As far as comments go, I was under the impression that comment links had no follow tags on them in wordpress. Hopefully I am right about that. Most of the time though I remove any unrelated links.

Me too noticed that there was a huge difference in my site traffic also.

What NuclearMediaLLC said is correct, that is most of the blog comments are no follow links, so its always fine to find do follow blogs and post the comments there.

I'm not talking about links but mass comments that add spun or duplicated content, completely spammy, to your own pages.

ah, yeah good call. Good thing we manually approve ours. We usually delete the ones that are obvious auto comments.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.