I am trying to determine if my main site has seen yet another fall in PageRank or if it is just a temporary problem caused by Hurricane Irene.
Yesterday I saw a reduction in traffic of up to 50% from New York state and some other eastern states. This is extremely worrying for my business.
In the last few months the Google Panda changes have had a massive impact across my main website. I was making good progress through April, May, June and July but in August some new updates hit my overseas traffic and I think that I have now suffered even more collaterol damage.
Panda and Collaterol Damage
Results are very strange at the moment. It used to be a case that some of my main keyword phrases were a good indicator of the health of my website. For example, a search on “Google Panda Updates” (this really is just an example, not the search affecting the site I am talking about) would indicate well the state of the site. If I was at the top of page 1 in Google for that phrase then all other traffic would be healthy too, but if it dropped to page 2 or 3 then the long-tail traffic would also suffer.
Now I am back on page on in the USA and the UK for the main keyword phrase but total traffic is still down. It is as if I have lost all the long tail traffic that I had since the last Google Panda updates. It seems that musch of my problems are down to the collateral damage, i.e. I have lost ranking not because of on-page low quality factors but because so many of the sites that were linking to me have now themselves been “Pandered”.
If my site was classed as low quality by Google then surely it would not rank it well for some keywords (very competitive ones) and then ignore it for hundreds of longtail keywords.
Search results are weird
A good friend who is a web marketing professional pointed out the other day that search was a bit odd recently. His words were that there are odd things happening that SEOs are not talking about.
Most of it is surrounded the international language results. Websites with very few links are out-performing well establised sites and no traditional SEO analysis is providing any explanation of the reason.
At the moment I really am struggling to work out what strategy to take next. New, unique and well researched content is hardly making any difference. Building new, quality links from real people running good sites is not making much of a difference either.
At the moment my traffic levels are down to 2009 figures and my revenue is even less. In the 2 years that I have been self employed I have seen my business slowly grow to become a profitable company to suddenly plummet to be a loss making nightmare.
My only hope at the moment is to try to do more article writing (professional article writing for money) and keep trying to add quality articles and links to the site.
If that fails, no idea what I will do next! It is as if the whole web playing field has changed in a few months and it is suddenly very difficult to make anything work.