Google Panda Update Hits the UK and SmallBusinessPro

So yesterday at around 5.30pm uk time Google rolled out their aptly named Panda (or Farmer) update to the rest of the world in English speaking countries. Many more sites got hit and so did ours unfortunately so what’s it all about ?

The original algorithm change happened only in the US and was looking at lowering the rankings of so called content farms – very large sites with scrapped content or lots of feeds from other sites so in reality they were not providing original content. A note from Google confirmed that this has rolled out internationally (we saw it yesterday evening) and now this site’s traffic is down around 50% today.

So how can we tell how this affected our site ?

Today we had a look through our site to see how it stacked up to the original searchengineland post to see how we fared against what they thought the criteria was. We *have* made some changes to improve user experience. Here’s where we are at :

Is it a content farm ? Well smallbusinesspro is only 250 pages or so in total is hardly a farm and all pages are researched thoroughly. We are trained accountants so most information is of a financial nature and just last week we spent nearly 5 days updating all the pages from the recent budget report from the Chancellor of the Exchequer to ensure everything was accurate and up to date.

A lot of content and no traffic ? Those 250 pages roughly receive around 4,000 unique visitors a day (well up to yesterday) and we have 427 followers on Twitter – is that the sign of a poor low quality site? We don’t think so.

Limited moderation ? We write the pages ourselves and don’t have a forum although we do get comments on the blog. We found a few links to websites that no longer exist so removed those but that doesn’t count for “spammy links”

Loads of adverts ? - perhaps we were a little guilty here. We had some AdSense on the site to pay for the bills (after all, people don’t usually put great content online for no reward) – we followed all the Google AdSense guidelines but perhaps it was too much. Today we have removed all those ads. We also had some recommended affiliate links. These have remained because we feel they are relevant to the content on the site.

So why us? We don’t really know – we have also seen another small business information site suffer the same consequences (we are not affiliated with them but noticed their rankings had dropped – we contacted them and they say they have seen about the same drop as we have although they did not wished to be named).

We don’t know if it’s because people have copied our unique content which has taken years of hard work to develop or that it was because of some ads to pay the bills. We don’t make tons of money with this labour of love site but need to cover the costs at least.

All our content is 100% original and we don’t include news feeds or consolidate anyone else’s work.

It’s a real shame as the site was beginning to see some traction – what should we do now ? Matt Cutts any ideas ?

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