Google's Panda update and a drop in traffic

Posted April 15th, 2011 in Miscellaneous Postings

Google rolled out an update in late February known as "Panda" or "Farmer" for US queries only; this week it rolled the update out for all English language queries. The purpose of the update is an attempt to drop the rank of low quality pages and sites which have little use to the end user.

We've all seen the sorts of sites they're trying to affect and not having these at the top of the search results is a good thing. However, the update appears to have had a major impact on many tech sites including mine, which has seen a 1/3 drop in traffic. In this post I'll provide my theory as to why.

What is the Google Panda update?

I won't bother rehashing what others have posted about the update. Instead here's a link to a Google search where you can find all the info you need about it.

How it has affected this blog?

On Tuesday NZ time (Monday US time), I noticed my traffic had dropped off by about a third. I figured something weird was up and maybe it was just a blip but then the trend continued on Wednesday and Thursday, so I searched Google for information about algorithm updates and found out about Panda.

Last night I posted on Twitter about losing a 1/3 of my traffic and my friends over at Elated.com replied saying they'd also lost about the same. Both this blog and theirs contain tutorials and tips relating to web development etc.

So why have we been affected by this update?

My theory is that there's nothing necessarily wrong with the quality of content on our websites, or issues with outbound links or the amount of advertising displayed, all of which are factors in website downgrades by this update.

I suspect it's simply that the manual pages on the authoritative websites for each topic are now being displayed slightly higher than our tutorial posts, whereas in the past our tuts may have been higher.

This will especially be so when the tutorial pages don't really offer much more than the manual page on the authority website; I know a number of my own posts have been guilty of this.

Unfortunately I have no actual evidence to support this theory other than checking how certain keyword phrases I get for my most popular page show up in the SERPS, as I don't know how my tuts appeared in realation to those before the update.

What do you think?

So that's my theory. I wonder how other web tutorial websites are faring after this update. Have they been affected in the same way? What do you think of my theory?