May 13, 2008
Google Algorithm Change Damages My Business
Imagine this…. You have a website that gets around 400-500 unique visitors each day, 300 of those are from Google as organic traffic, or free traffic.
Your website earns you between £500-£750 which is between $1000 and $1500 each month.
You start to get used to this type of income from your website and after 18 months of this, you feel fairly secure.
Then, one day… Google updates its Algorithm and you start to notice your traffic decreasing. Over a period of about 10 days your traffic dies to around about 100 visitors per day, with about 50 referrals from google.
This is what has just happened to one of my websites. The strange thing is that the site has 80,000 backlinks pointing to it in yahoo. The site is around about 5 years old with mature content!
There are several reasons why this could have happened…
- The site may have too many similar anchor text links pointing back to it with the same keywords.
- Google may think there are paid links on the site, which there aren't… Or
- The most likely reason is that not all the content is unique on the site. The site is a product directory and sometimes, I copy and paste the product descriptions to add them to the site.
So, I have learned a valuable lesson! …. I know that unique content is incredibly important, but this site has been ranking higher than the sites with the original content and it has more authority.
Anyway, I am being penalized now and fair enough… I just have to change my approach to the site in question and make sure all the product descriptions are unique! I'm not really one to moan about things… we have to expect change and just get on with it!
Have you had a similar experience? Have you noticed your traffic increase or decrease since the May 2008 Google algorithm change. My rankings have dropped dramatically on one of my sites and have increased on others.
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Filed under Blog by Ryan Shamus
Comments on Google Algorithm Change Damages My Business »
Ryan,
when did you start to notice this? I had a similar issue with a site with 'mostly' unique content, a week or two ago…
Hi Justin,
Thanks for stopping by! It started a couple of weeks ago when the traffic started to dry up a little, then end of last week, it went totally downhill…
Take a look at the image in this blog post and you will see when it really dived.
Is yours fixed now or are you still having problems?
Thanks
Gavin
I'm still working on it - rewriting the content of each and every page. This was one serious algo shift.
ps - you'd probably get more comments if you include the top commentators plugin
I'm having trouble getting Google to keep my sites indexed…. someties decent articles drop off for a few weeks and then return. I guess this could be Algorithm related?
The big G has some weird stuff happening right now. My travel website is down in similar fashion but no big changes on the site caused it. its 4 years old and has been consistent for several years before recent times. Other sites I can't seem to even get indexed and they have good backlinks and am using the same techniques I have used for years.
Fingers crossed ….
This is the perfect example of why you need to own more than one site and diversify your income streams. Could you imagine how you would have felt if that site was your main source of income? Be safe - build multiple sites that each utilize different monetization techniques. Than you can relax knowing that if something should happen, your other sites will still be there to support the weight.