Google, Panda Update | featured news

Talk about getting its ass-kicked by Google’s Panda Update, Mahalo’s been hit pretty hard. Jason Calacanis, the founder, has never been shy about how his site gets traffic - by paying writers cheaply to crank out content for the top Google keyword searches. In other words, an SEO play - a content farm.

Last week, Google launched another Panda update. After I kinda fully recovered from the previous update, this one brough me back down again. I lost about 50% of my Google traffic. After each update, I'll change a few things around to make it a site that Google would like. And I usually recover. The only thing is I wonder if I would have recovered anyway if I didn't do anything, especially since each update always bring me back down.

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.