Panda and Penguin Vanished my Thousand Dollar Blog in just 30 Days
Today I am going to discuss the worst experience of my life, which took me to the ground in just 30 day period. Google Panda and Penguin don’t love me and my content now, that’s why they hit me badly. This story (from my real life) taught me so much and I want to share it with you.
What happened to my Blog?
I am MaddyAcca, working as a blogger for past 3 years and have four blogs. In past 30 days I lost my star blog, because of Google algorithm updates (Panda and Penguin). Wikipedia has a good explanation of Penguin and Panda, click on these links to learn more about them. The blog wasn’t so small in term of ranking, money and visitors. Below are the stats of my blog.
- Daily visitors: 37,000
- Monthly earnings: $3800
- Alexa rank: 11,000
The above stats are enough to explain the worth of my blog. A person wants to purchase my blog in $72,000, 2 months before. Before 1 month everything was ok with it, I was working passionately on my blog and suddenly on 21st August 2013, my traffic went down to 21k and on 28th august its was 6k. After facing this downfall in my blog’s visitors, I decided to check that what happened to it. I was working as an SEO consultant from past 4 years in a well reputed software house, and this downfall was something new for me. I analyzed my blog properly for 3 days and at the end successfully identified that what was the reason for this huge change.
Why I Lost my Blog’s Traffic?
Below are the reasons, identified by me and also some explanation about them.
Content
When I started my blog, no such updates like a penguin and panda were exist. The purpose of this update was to hit low quality websites by downgrading their search engine ranking. My content wasn’t fully unique, I used to rewrite some of the articles from other blogs. In my eyes, rewriting others’ articles was original content. Five months ago, I came to know that rewriting is just like copy pasting in front of Google, when some of my articles were removed from Google search because of the DMCA complaint by some other blog owner. On that day I decided to avoid rewriting and started creating my own content by investing lots of dollars. About 65% articles on my blog were rewritten and I was afraid to remove them, because I don’t want to face 404 errors, these errors are dangerous for blog’s SEO. I kept all these articles and started moving forward. But 21st August was the worst day of my life, when Google updated its search algorithm. Google updates its algorithm more than 400 times in a year, but this update was a major update. Below screenshot taken from Algoroo and Mozcast, can confirm the intensity of this update.
These are estimated values and I personally rely on these estimates, because these are reliable.
Sold Few Links
Money is really a bad thing, lust of man with money can never be killed. I was getting emails daily about paid posts and paid reviews, paying me $20 to $35 for adding one link in the post. I didn’t allow everyone to add posts on my blog, but allowed 5 to 10 different people to add, because they were paying me handsome amount. The links in the posts were about loans, games and spy software. It was the second reason, that made my blog zero. My blog was also penalized by unrelated and unnatural links penalty.
Bad Inbound Links to my Blog
After a thorough analysis of my blog, I also came to know that there are near about 5 to 10 blogs on free sub domains (Typad, Blogger and WordPress), which were copying my content and at the end of the articles, giving me a credit link. I added all of them to disavow tool in Google webmaster tools, but it was too late. Also I made another mistake, that I shared my blog articles on a website which allows everyone to share content. Google webmaster tools showed almost 3k links from that blog in just 7 days. I checked all those links and that web was just rubbish, because it was showing my articles’ links also in related posts at the other article’s bottom.
Content Quality
In my old articles, there were some quality issues. In the early days of my blog I hired some cheap writers, and they made so many grammar and spelling mistakes. Also they added images, and those images were hosted on other website’s servers. All the images were outbound links to other websites.
What I‘ll Do now?
It’s the most important heading of this article. I have decided that I will create unique and original content now and also I would avoid selling and buying backlinks. Monitoring inbound links to my blog is now my daily routine’s task. The first priority for me is content’s quality. All these steps have ethical in Google eyes and this incident just changed my thinking. I would suggest everyone to focus on quality, don’t follow other websites in creating content. Also avoid SEO techniques, if you are creating unique content then other would follow you and will give you natural backlinks automatically.
