This blog post was originally posted on TechCrunch by Matt Moog.
One Year Later: How Google Panda Changed Our Business
Editor’s note: Matt Moog is the founder and CEO of Viewpoints.com. Follow him on Twitter@MattMoog.
Google Panda strikes
February 24, 2011 was a day that will live in infamy for the team here at Viewpoints. That was the day of the Google Panda update. Up until that point we had enjoyed four years of consistent traffic growth to Viewpoints.com. We managed to double traffic each year and had just reached 2.7 million unique users. We had heard that Google was planning to update its algorithm to penalize content and link farms and were excited about the bump we might get as a result. Turns out we were in for a bit of a surprise.
Viewpoints takes it on the chin
You see, Viewpoints is a consumer reviews and product ranking web site. We have 600,000 reviews of 100,000 products contributed by more than 250,000 members. We have had more than 70 million visits to the site since we launched in late 2007. All of our content is original and we always viewed all of our practices as the “right way” to do things. Apparently Google felt differently because we lost 50% of organic search traffic overnight as a result of the Panda update.
