This guest post is by Kevin Sanders, of strongandfit.net.
Things were going well over at my fitness blog. I was not an A-lister, but traffic was steadily increasing.
I was starting to get ranked for several lower competition keywords. Organic traffic was improving. Then suddenly my search engine traffic dropped dramatically.
I was apparently one of the casualties of Google's so-called Panda update. I'm guessing it's because about 10% of my website's content was re-posted. I wasn't just mindlessly copying and pasting a bunch of content for the sake of content. I only posted stuff I considered valuable to my readers—and I only ever post articles with permission of the original author. Regardless, it seems this was enough to have my blog slapped with the "content farm" label.
I've bowed to the Google gods and removed the "duplicate content." Maybe I'll recover my SERP rank, maybe not. Based on what I'm reading, no one has successfully recovered from the Panda meltdown once his or her site has been affected—I think it will take some time for Google to re-crawl sites reassess sites.
But I've learned some important lessons from this. Some lessons are new, while others just reinforce what I've already learned.
Lesson #1: Never become over-dependent on one source of traffic
The algorithm change has affected my site, but it hasn't destroyed it. That's because I use several methods for driving traffic to my site. Staying active on forums, for example, has been one of my favorite strategies I've spent a little more time on forums in lately in light of the Google issue.
Lesson #2: Blog as if no one is reading
Blog as if everyone is reading. Here's what I mean: I love lifting weights, and fitness in general. I enjoy blogging about it, regardless of how many (or few) read my posts. This passion has kept me going in spite of the setback. But I always want to make sure I'm producing...
