Panda 4.0 & May Earnings

[RedBar]

Talk about a month of two halves, well almost halves, here are my metrics of May 19th to 31st v May 1st to 18th:

PVs 123.36%
Clicks 121.74%
CTR 101.13%
EPC 109.52%
RPM 107.97%
Earnings 133.33%

Fingers crossed this continues, how do your numbers look?

[wa desert rat]

Yes, the last half of May was much higher for me, as well.

WDR

[breeks]

Panda took a bite out of pages that I promote affiliate sales on although they seem to be moving back up the ladder the last couple of days.

As far as pages that only have AdSense they are doing as good and in some cases better.

Might be a case of my way (Google) or the highway.

[hannamyluv]

I recovered from a Panda hit, and not only came back up to where my Profit & Loss reports predicted I would be by this time (based on previous growth), but have surpassed that by about 20%.

That being said, this time of plenty will be used refilling the coffers for the next downturn and planning to make further improvements and expansions to the site.

While I hope that it is a permanent improvement, given the temperamental nature of Google, I am only betting on 3 months of sure traffic. After that, it is all up in the air and I will continue to build my social presence to offset any future possible Google losses.

[netmeg]

I had *one* site that I suspected was pandalyzed in 2012 after I had to abandon updating it for a while. I didn't do anything special to it, just treated it like the others, and it ended up with a partial recovery last week (it's about 2/3rds of where it should be). So that was a nice surprise.

[webcentric]

this time of plenty will be used refilling the coffers for the next downturn

Once again, your business acumen is showing through. It doesn't take a crystal ball to know that dry times can come along at any moment. I've also seen Panda recoveries in the past, they're nice, but the bear is fickle and it's prudent to keep that in mind.

[zarathustra2011]

I'm not sure if Panda is being kind to me - when did the update begin? I started gaining traffic since the 26th May, and it's increased little by little every day since. When I checked images and text from my website that were created by myself, all the scrapers and plagiarists totally outranked me in the results, but now I see google is finally giving me back credit!

[oggienet]

A significant drop in adsense earnings has taken place on my blog since 1st May - i.e. income in May approx. a third of previous income and continuing into June. It is evident that the CTR and CPC are causing this, page view remain consistent with previous patterns.

Just wondering if anyone else has experienced anything similar?

[netmeg]

I'm not sure if Panda is being kind to me - when did the update begin? I started gaining traffic since the 26th May, and it's increased little by little every day since.

That's the case on my one site too - it wasn't an overnight spike (or at least not much of one) but around the 26th it started climbing, and every day it's a bit more. According to SEMRush the number of top 20 keywords for this site is five times what it was two weeks ago. I'll take that.

[zarathustra2011]

That sounds like good news NetMeg. It's great news for me, as if you recall I used to post regularly in the forum until it all went downhill. I'm not sure if the upward trend will continue until I reach the levels of old, but today looks like it will outdo yesterday, and everyday has been an improvement on the one before.
In Webmaster Tools the amount of impressions my site is getting has increased almost 10 fold, and I'm almost back to number one listing on all my old keywords and phrases.

[EditorialGuy]

Our Google "organic traffic" and overall traffic are up significantly since the Panda 4.0 update. (Google traffic has more than doubled).

AdSense earnings, in contrast, have declined since early May.

The good news is that affiliate earnings are way up.

[eek2121]

I've done nothing wrong. Yet my website took a rather large hit (15-20%) on traffic. Earnings from AdSense were even worse. I almost became discouraged, however finally yesterday i started seeing signs of life, and today things really picked up. I understand Google needs to weed out spammers, but i'm not, and have never have been, a spammer. I've constantly tried to improve user experience at the cost of revenue. I've never tried things like link building or email marketing (starting an email newsletter soon, but it's non commercial, it's only there to allow users to see the content they've missed by not visiting my site, content which, outside of ads, is not for profit.) I wish they'd stop hurting innocent publishers like me.

Some know/realize i have a somewhat large client that is an (unnamed) multi-million dollar E commerce site. They too were affected, and they also were not spammers. Luckily they rely far less on Google (Employees of Google themselves often order from us...we have a large amount of both government as well as private contractors that have helped us grow). I've met matt cutts in person as well as many other google employees, I just don't understand why they are targeting the very folks that bring them greatness.

Today Google is smiling upon me, showering me with traffic as well as ad revenue, yet i can't help but wonder how long the shower will last...

[hannamyluv]

I've done nothing wrong.

To be very honest, you need to stop thinking in terms of Google this way. It is easier on your sanity. ;)

Yes, G does go after spammers, but even after all the spammers are weeded out, there are only 10 spots that anyone really looks at for any given keywords and there are 100s, sometimes thousands, of good and well-meaning websites for any given topic.

If a site gets hit in an update, it does not mean you did anything wrong (well, ok, if you get hit with a Penguin, yeah you did something wrong but that aside). It means a site did not match up to a set of mathematical equations. Not bad, not wrong, just not the sum G was looking for. That is why even good sites do SEO. It is so you can continue to make sure your good site adds up to what G wants.

[GreyBeard123]

(well, ok, if you get hit with a Penguin, yeah you did something wrong but that aside).

You are wrong, please do not generalize with such statements.

[hannamyluv]

You are wrong, please do not generalize with such statements.

Nope, not wrong. Been doing this a long time. By Google's own admission, the one and only reason that Penguin exists is to hit sites that over did it on the link building. It was so important to Google to make a point of this, they didn't even bother rolling it in together with Panda, which would have been very doable given how close they were released to each other. Google wanted to make sure every site owner fully understood what Penguin did.

People knew aggressive manual link building was gaming the system and did it anyway. And now they are all upset because that was "the only way to rank". Which was bull too. Sites can and did rank just fine without manual link building - but, oh, you just actually have to work at making a good site which is harder than buying links but still doable.

So, IMHO, if you got hit by Penguin, you did something wrong. And you did not have the foresight to look back on Google's history of dealing with things that "work" but people took to an extreme. And I will generalize as I please, thank you very much.