Re-visiting the Florida Update

[whatson]

All this Panda stuff has reminded me a lot of Florida. I was wondering if we ever got to the bottom of what Florida actually was about.
If I recall and understood correctly:

* New domains were only able to rank for long-tail terms, nothing mainstream

* Links do not provide much benefit until they mature over a certain time period

* The "sandbox" period depends upon the industry, e.g. gambling sites have a much longer time to mature.

[superclown2]

A timely reminder, thanks. Many of the problems suffered by the sites I've worked on recently go back to Florida and may have nothing to do with the panda. It's very easy to learn new rules but forget the old ones <BWG>

[Bewenched]

OOHHhh... seeing the name Florida Update made me quiver. we were hit pretty hard back then

[Planet13]

OOHHhh... seeing the name Florida Update made me quiver. we were hit pretty hard back then

You know, we had been online since the late 90s and our site took off after 9/11, only to come crashing down at the time of Florida.

It's funny because back then I had NO CLUE about SEO (some will tell you I still have no clue). I was ecstatic that for some strange reason, yahoo loved us, so we got lots of sales.

When Florida hit, I don't even think I knew what google was. But apparently before Flroida, most of our traffic had started coming from google, and when Florida hit, it was like a 40% drop in sales.

[whatson]

Yeah, back those days I seemed to do ok in every search engine, but for some reason I was always #1 in Google for everything, and could achieve it for lots of new [money] sites. So you can imagine the sort of income I was producing. After Florida I think I took a 95% income drop, very painful.
Has taken me years to re-build my empire, although nothing like it was pre-florida, but now Panda has hit, and my income has dropped nearly 50%.

[MrFewkes]

I never recovered from florida - almost all my affiliate sites were hit hard - I estimate I lost around 300,000 $ per year income.