Tag Archives: Panda

While many of our sites are still struggling to recover from the original Panda update from early last year, a few have managed to buck the trend and not just return to their previous levels, but also start growing.  One of those success stories is All-About-Car-Accidents.com.

Just like with DisabilitySecrets.com, we had to completely overhaul the site.  We consolidated content down to the essentials, and made sure that those essentials were well written and useful for anyone visiting the site.  The interesting thing about All-About-Car-Accidents is that it was flat for so long, then improved in the blink of an eye.  Even DisabilitySecrets.com took months of constant growth before it got back to pre-Panda levels.

It’s also interesting to note that not only did Panda 3.5 seem to have a positive impact on AACA, but so did Penguin.  That surely would not have been the case if we hadn’t done so much work to make AACA better.

The lesson here is that there is no lesson here!  While we think we know the best way to go about getting back into Google’s good graces, the speed at which that happens seems to be a bit of a mystery.  It is good to see that our hard work will pay off, even if we aren’t entirely sure when that will be.

At the very least, it’s keeping us on our toes!

It’s been well over a year since Panda 2.0 rolled out and Google traffic to one of our sites, DisabilitySecrets.com, was halved. Admittedly, DisabilitySecrets was undeservedly getting a lot of love from The Google.

For a quick peak, take a look at the graph. Read on for more detail.

This is a site that we acquired in 2010 from a former Social Security Disability examiner. While it did have plenty of unique, useful content, it also had thousands of thin quality pages that contained a lot of boilerplate text, and many thousands of pages with very little unique content, all of which ranked fairly well.

After Panda rolled out, we realized we had a lot of work to do to get the site’s content up to Nolo standards.

The first thing we did was start cutting out the poor quality and duplicative content, in an effort to minimize the site footprint in Google’s index. This also reduced the number of pages that our editor and writers would need to tackle.

It took us about two months of organizing and redirecting before we could boil the content down to the meat and move it on to editorial.

After that, our own Beth Laurence went to work. She spent months researching, editing content, recruiting freelancers with the necessary experience, and organizing all the information into a new taxonomy. This process, which continues today, took about six months before nearly all of the content had been addressed. Most of it had to be rewritten completely, but some was salvaged with only minor edits.

The focus was twofold. Beth and her team were responsible for the content quality, as well as user engagement metrics. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate, improve visitor time on site, and make sure our visitors weren’t clicking back to other search results.

It took nearly a year of work from both the SEO team and editorial before we finally starting seeing the fruits of our labor. The first quarter of this year was the “bounce back”.  As you can see in the graph below, Panda is quick to take away your traffic, and slow to give it back. At this point though, we are at higher traffic levels than ever, and continuing to grow.

The real benefit, though, is for our users. Panda forced us to dig in and really build a better site.

Last week, Google released the latest version of Panda, 3.4.  The update changed the algorithm Google uses to rank organic search results.  Given the chaos that generally results from a new Panda update, we prepared for a flurry of activity.

But unlike with the original Panda change, Nolo’s affiliated sites actually gained traffic this time around.  This makes sense, given that Google’s goal is to rank quality pages at the top, and we’ve spent a lot of time making sure our sites are of the highest quality.

One of the sites that benefited the most from the update was Drivinglaws.org, which was something of a relief for editor Rich Stim and analyst Kyle Vanderneut, as both have been working hard to make the site the best it can be.

Drivinglaws.org covers a lot of topics, from DUI/DWI and distracted driving, to speeding tickets and teen driving laws.  Since every state has its own set of laws regarding these subjects, you can probably see that we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.  And let’s not forget that driving laws are always changing!  There’s also the matter that certain laws generate more interest depending upon what’s going on in the world.

For example, traffic to our DUI/DWI pages tends to spike just after the holidays.

Lately, though, we’ve seen increases in people searching for what are generally referred to as “distracted driving” laws.  These focus on cell phone use while driving, or specifically about texting while driving.  This has been a hot button topic as more and more states move to making any cell phone usage while operating a vehicle illegal.  We’ve made expanding and improving this section of Drivinglaws.org a priority, and it appears the hard work has paid off.

“Distracted driving” laws are still relatively new, and we doubt that they will ever become a topic as huge as DUI/DWI laws.  But our goal is to cover every topic as accurately and thoroughly as possible, for every state in the nation (and the District of Columbia!).  And, as always, we present it in language that is easy to understand, even if you’re not a lawyer.

Quality is key, and it’s nice to see that, with this recent Panda release, that quality is paying off.

Ninety-nine percent of the legal content you’ll come across online is junk. Actually, this is true for much of the content online in general. SEO’s have been publishing nonsensical content for years to boost organic traffic, and for a long time it worked really well (I know, I did it before Nolo). Then people started to complain that Google’s search results were constantly returning useless content published solely for the sake of search engines. Google’s flagship product was not able to differentiate legitimate, useful content from a random stringing together of words by some content farm. In response, Google rolled out the “Panda” update (also called the “farmer” update).

Panda is Google’s attempt to reward quality content publishers with higher rankings, and “demote” the bad publishers. The result was an entire community of SEO’s falling into Panda-monium. All of a sudden, it was no longer profitable to spend money publishing terrible $10 articles, because the traffic wasn’t coming as readily as it had before.  Now entire companies switched gears and began deleting content in an effort to clean up the mess that they had made (Again, I know, it sucked).

I don’t personally perceive that Panda has really made much of a difference in producing great search results. I still see tons of sites with inaccurate/poorly written/heavily biased content ranking for highly competitive legal keywords. The data certainly shows that Panda has rewarded Nolo for years of publishing the best quality and most reliable legal information you can find online.

The graph below shows traffic to Nolo.com from The Google through the various iterations/updates of Panda.

Obviously, whatever signals Google is using to determine a quality site, Nolo is a winner. It’s about time; I’ve known that for years. My hat is off to our awesome editorial team.