A Panda Post-Mortem

I was just reading about yet another Google Panda update. This one is supposedly to try to "un-punish" some legitimate sites that previous Panda passes may have down graded unfairly.

There are such sites, of course. No algorithm that attempts to determine the relative worth of Internet pages can ever be perfect, so some unworthy pages will rise above others that real searchers might honestly prefer to have found first. That will always happen, or at least I feel safe in saying that it will continue to happen until computers are much smarter than we are.

What's easy to miss here is that Google (and any search provider) has a strong interest in providing useful and accurate search results. Google wants you to find the "best" pages when you search for Ding Bat Bolts or anything else. If you don't find the best results, you may start using Bing, or Wolfram Alpha or some unknown startup that nobody else has ever heard of. If enough people abandon Google because they are getting inferior results, Google's multi-billion dollar empire can fall. Google very definitely does not want that. They will continue to tune and tweak their ranking algorithms regularly.

Winners and losers

SERP (Search engine results position) is a zero sum game. If you and I both have pages about Ding Bat bolts, only one of us can be in slot one when Suzy Homemaker goes looking for the best deals on those marvelous bolts. If there are a thousand other purveyors of "Double Foolers" and the many other fascinating varieties, only ten of us can be in the Top Ten. If there are tens of thousands, many will never be seen by any searcher.

If I am on Page One now and your SEO efforts increase your SERP to reach that position from your former place on page two, you will push someone else off page one. That someone might well be me.

That's all fairly obvious, but it's easy to lose sight of that when we think about our own efforts.

A Panda Story

I have a website that saw its first article posted in 1997. It did very well in SERP and in Adsense income for many years. I've made over $64,000 from Adsense since I first started using it in 2003. That was just Adsense - I made good income from affiliate sales too.

The very first Panda deployment changed all that almost instantly. Where my site had once had a PR 6, it now has dropped to 4. Search traffic has been cut in half. Alexa rank, once pegging that site in the top thirty to fifty thousand world wide, now floats around the 100K mark.

Adsense is now barely reaching the $100 monthly payout minimum and the affiliate stuff is almost totally gone. My book sales are down. Everything is down, down, down. Panda has chopped the legs out from under me.

The $64,000 question

I feel wounded. But the $64,000 question (rather literally, in this case) is, am I unfairly wounded?

That site is a niche site. It appeals to a fairly narrow class of semi-geekish folk. It doesn't have broad appeal. Worse, for most of its life, it focused on the products of a specific company that is now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Very few people use those products today. Of course I moved away from that focus, but it was the writing about that one product that had initially caused the site to grow.

If I look at this with total objectivity, I can't imagine any reason it deserved to be as popular in search as it recently was. Its day had passed and although I had moved on to write about other things, I'm no Ars Technica or anything close. In the world of websites in the same genre, I'm mediocre at best. That I have any pages still in top SERP positions as I do ought to be cause for celebration.

From that perspective, I ought to feel rather pleased. A narrowly focused site of somewhat mediocre quality is breaking Adsense payout? Hey, that's GOOD. I have a half dozen pages that manage to beat out similar pages at sites with dozens of writers and the money for deep research and aggressive SEO? That's FANTASTIC!

And then I look here at HubPages, which is now clipping along at $60-$70 a month or more. Again trying to be as objective as possible, I look at my hubs and have to say that's not so shabby. My writing is quirky, it will only appeal to a narrow band of readers, so that income is really rather pleasing. Moreover, it's from less than 300 hubs and some of those are definite no-shows in the SERP races. If I write more, and concentrate hard on quality, I should do even better - maybe much better!

My overall on-line income has gone down by something around $10,000 yearly, but I am realizing that is not the right way to look at it. That previous income was a fluke, an anomaly that never should have been dying off anyway. Google's Panda algorithm updates may have hastened it, but the decrease was both inevitable and deserved. My income now is more representative of reality. I initially wanted to recover from Panda, but I think now that there is nothing to recover from.

Do I want to increase my income? Of course I do and there is good news there too: I have a solid base to work from, both here and at that other site. I don't have crap, I have decent mediocrity. I can polish, I can improve, I can make more. The future looks bright. I should be hopeful and optimistic - the old saw about not crying over spilt milk comes to mind. In this case, the milk was past its expiration date too!

It's not always easy to be objective. If you try to compare your article to one by someone else, it can be hard to see that from a search engine's perspective, there isn't necessarily much to distinguish one from the other. You want to see yours as "better" and I am no different: I like the way I write!

But I can at least momentarily separate my ego from my rational mind and this analysis comes from there. It tells me that I should be happy rather than morose. It tells me that I had a good run and that maybe I can have another.

It tells me to just keep plugging.

But is plugging enough?

It may not be.

I was just reading and watching "How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever" and realized it probably is not.

There's something else that has changed since I rode high on the Internet waves. That's professionalism.

According to that article, "web site experience" is much more important than it used to be.

Let's contrast it with television advertising. There was a time when an actor would stand in front of a camera and say "Pepsodent is great!" and that was that. Contrast that with the Super bowl ads of today.

That's the reality of the web today. The ante is higher, the stakes are higher, we are playing with the big boys now and I'll never compete with that. I can't step up to that level. I'm not sure that any individual can. The future of success on the web may be teams, not individuals.

Oh, well. It is what it is. I'll do the best I can. That's all that I can do.