Google have been tweating their search algorithms this year to battle content farms and scrapers. They named this tweak Panda Update. In February of this year, they released the first version, which was aimed at lowering the rankings of content farms - i.e. eHow, ezinearticles.com, and wisegeek.com. I don’t consider my site a content farm, but I did saw a 40% decrease in traffic as soon as the new algorithm went live.

Since then, Wopular has slowly recovered its lost traffic month after month. That is until a couple days ago when I experienced another steep drop. I’ve read the Panda Update 2.2 was released on June 16. This time, it’s to lower the rankings of scraper sites - sites that copy most of its content from other sites. I can see how Wopular would be lumped into this group since most of its content comes from RSS feeds.

I saw a slight drop in traffic on the 16th - maybe 10-20% - but this week, it went up to 40-50%. It’s the biggest drop in traffic I’ve experienced yet.

I’ve been busy working on a new site and am very close to finish. I guess it’s finally time to do some planned improvements to Wopular now that my new site is almost done.

The Panda update changes the SEO landscape a bit. Instead of relying on links from authoritative sites and keywords, you now have to take other metrics into account - like bounce rates and user engagement.

It's a good thing for the web, even if my site is hurt by it.