Did your rankings drop after the Google Panda update?  A lot of websites lost their first page rankings after this update–and the main reason has to do with content.  I was fortunate enough to be contacted this week by a small business owner who has a website that dropped sharply in rankings after the Google Panda algorithm update.  This owner was seeing anywhere from 300 to 500 unique visitors every single day before the Google Panda update, and following the update this website is only seeing an average of 80 to 100 unique visitors every day–that’s a HUGE drop that has had a HUGE impact on this company’s bottom line.  This is not from a website that we managed–all our sites are still doing well after the Panda update because we practice quality SEO techniques.

Google Panda Explained

I’m not going to go too far in depth about what Google Panda actually is–but here’s a great blog post we published in the past explaining Google Panda and what this change means for website owners: Google Panda Update Explained

Google Panda Rankings Dropped

Following the Google Panda update, the following website’s rankings dropped dramatically as shown in the following screen shot taken directly from their Google Analytics account:

Click Image To Enlarge

We can see that prior to the Google Panda update, from roughly August 2010 until roughly March 2011 they saw a consistent increase in search engine traffic.  Since the Google Panda update this site not only saw a huge drop in traffic after the update went in effect around March 2011 but they have seen a gradual decline every since then–moving from about 110 visitors per day in March 2011 to around 80 visitors per day in September 2011.

The reason for this drop is simply because of content.  This website was getting by without posting any unique content–they were simply importing content from other sites through an RSS feed reader which is an application that grabs information from other blogs via an RSS feed.  This site is being penalized by Google for duplicate content and not having any unique content.  An obvious remedy to this issue is to turn off the RSS feed reader, but there’s a lot more to it than that to fix the damage and begin actually repairing the damage in Google’s eyes.

In our experiences, once you get on Google’s bad side you have to go above and beyond to show their computers that your website is worthy of being ranked in search engines and receiving their traffic.  If your website has suffered after the Google Panda Update, fill out our free SEO consultation request form directly to the right of this post and we’ll explain what our services can do to help!