Is SEO now about who you know ?

Big changes were made in the last few months from Google and many sites suffered – of course those sites were replaced by others but some folks who had problems seemed to get them fixed quite quickly.

The Google Panda or Farmer update was originally rolled out in the US in February then around the world in April – many sites got hit with various penalties including smallbusinesspro – but looking around the internet we have seen changes quickly made once people have made a blog post or twitter to Matt Cutts or the Google team. Here are some examples :

Cult of Mac – this popular blog was hit with the first update and the blog made a post on 28th February hereabout it and made a tweat to Matt Cutts - just one day later they posted here that the blog was reinstated. That’s great.

ppcblog – Aaron made a post on his seo blog herethat one of his posts was not ranking well but instead a scraped post was ranking and he posted a screen shot of the serps to prove it. Roll on 24 hours and that scraped post has disappeared and his original post is now ranking in position 4.

Our story – so when we were hit we made some changes that we thought could be the problem and posted about them hereand made a tweat to Matt Cutts about it – the results ? Nothing. We know we are not alone and some really excellent sites have also been penalised. No one really knows yet what the problems are.

Checking our site we have around 250 pages of expert content for new business start-ups to use. All original content, nothing scrapped. This is a real site. We checked around our articles and most have at least 500 words of original text to guide people onto the right path. I think we have 2 or 3 that are below 400 but these are just index type pages. So what could be the problem here ?

Looking around the web there are no straight answers. Many point to pages having 3 or more adsense units on them but there are many cases of sites still ranking well with loads of adsense ads. (We have removed those in any case). The word from Google is they wanted to have a better quality to their results pages and weed out all the duplicate content once and for all. But for some of the pages this website used to rank highly for there are no particular sites that are ranking above us with the same content that has been stolen.

There must be many website owners in the same position as us. ie: spent years developing good solid sites that they enjoy developing and produces a modest income and now they have disappeared. We wondered whether we should continue to write about this in public just in case the site had even more problems, but it’s so severe, we thought we would share where we are.

So please, come on Google, someone suggest why sites have plummeted and some provide some rough guidance on what could be done.

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