It has been a while since I posted the last time about our traffic loss through the Google Panda update. We are still under to big paw of Panda. We pretty much tried everything. The result? We now get tons more traffic from Bing and Yahoo (which is also Bing) compared to Google. We basically have now the traffic we had before Panda hitting us in February. We did not escape Panda but our changes led to a major traffic increase from Bing to compensate for the lost traffic.

So for now, I gave up on finding new ways that possibly would apeace Google Panda. I continue to improve I4U News to make it an attractive destination for technology minded readers.

A big thank you also to our regular readers! You have been always our base also in the hard months that lie behind us.

We did lots of that too, but also did not see a change. Today we have seen some changes in the scraper rankings though, no traffic improvement associated.

ericbjorndahl:

BACKGROUND

My main site, TravBuddy, was hit in February by Google’s latest “Panda” algorithm. This post isn’t really meant to complain about the issues we’ve noticed - we’ll save that for a later post ;) - but to openly talk about some of the things we’ve done to try to recover.

First off,…

Google is supposed to roll out a new Panda update. this time original source issues are supposed to be fixed. our original content on I4U News still gets outranked by nasty and by legitimate scrapers. Let’s see if Google can get things right after four months of fun Panda time.

The Google Panda update is still hurting publishers around the world. SEOBook covers an interesting case. A Panda hit site is declined to run Google Adwords, because scraper sites out rank it. The site is producing original content, but the Adwords reviewers can’t see it as Google Panda is still not able deal with scrapers. An issue that did not exist before the Panda Update. More details on SEOBook.

We face the same issue. We have started to issue DMCA and actually scared one blatant scraper off that took the whole page. I actually don’t have a problem with legit “scrapers” that link back to us and only post a paragraph, but they out rank us too.

Well Google has hit tech news sites already with the Panda Update. The whole tech angle spinning on topics is though not what they went after. Somehow the Google algorithm is seeing content farms when looking at some tech news sites like ours (I4U News). Yes that is right Panda is still in effect despite tons of changes we made to the site.

The tech angle spinning on Osama’s death was also too easy with this guy tweeting about the attack. But I am sure even without him there would be a lot of spinning, not only from tech blogs.

parislemon:

The information in the image above is not surprising at all. But still pathetic.

Imagine that, you write 35 200-word posts featuring the words “Bin Laden” in the headline and they pull in traffic on the day it’s one of the most searched terms ever. 

Were any of those stories really about technology? A few, maybe. But none were given the actual attention that a story of such magnitude deserves. It was a pure traffic/SEO play.

Read More

The more i have to deal with Facebook the more it reminds me on CompuServe decades ago. Getting a bloody welcome page up for non Fans is takes already ages. Especially when I get this trying to create an app for iFrames:

Sorry, something went wrong.

We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.

We are rolling out a cool new feature on I4U News. I4U Deals features the best tech deals available each day in one compact format. Integrated social features let you share the deals with your friends. During the year I4U Deals features tech deals from the best retailers on the web. Come Black Friday I4U Deals will become the destination for the best Black Friday 2011 deals throughout the month long sales bonanza.

Check out I4U Deals now.

Watch fans descend to Switzerland today. The BaselWorld 2011 is opening its doors. In past years we did extensive coverage of the BaselWorld on Wrist Dreams, but interest has somehow faded. Now we just post the highlights on I4U News.

I have been once at the BaselWorld and it is really awesome for watch fans. Ideally you have a well filled bank account as the exhibited mechanical master pieces have their price.

As editor in chief of a technology news site I need to be aware of what is new on tons of web pages. RSS feeds and RSS readers never really cut it for me. They are to inflexible and feeds are not offered everywhere.

This is why I use the great Update Scanner add-on in Firefox to monitor hundreds of pages on different schedules. My productivity and overview levels are through the roof with this tool.

Since a while i compliment Update Scanner with a custom Twitter channel of the most important tech news sites to not miss a beat.

We are now entering the third week after the Google Panda Update (Feb. 24). The traffic on my technology news site I4U News site is as low as it never has been in over 6 years. We have changed a lot of things already and did tons of tests. The latest results are pretty discouraging. It is clear that Google assigned a site-wide ranking penalty or whatever you want to call it. Initially I thought the ranking decrease is not on all content, but now it is obvious that all content is getting the boot. It does not matter how good or unique it is.

Experiment 1:
A great example for this situation is this personal review report of the iPad 2. My colleague used a rather unique title: “iPad 2 Pre-Review…”. As expected when I search for this in Google.com from Europe I see the report ranked at #1. Searching for the same on Google.com from the US the report ranks only on page 2. Sites that posted an excerpt of the report actually rank first - this is just painful to look at!

Experiment 2:
Another test I did was to post the exact same story at the same time on I4U News and on my abandoned watch site Wrist Dreams. On the old Google the I4U News version i ranks #1. On the Panda version the Wrist Dreams version ranks higher (#2) than the I4U News one (page 2).

Status Quo:
So as it stands we are at the mercy of Google to get reclassified as a “good” site. I still do not know what got us qualified as a bad site. Based on what Google said and SEO people discuss on Webmasterworld we have deleted so called thin content. We accumulated short reports over the years doing up to the minute tech news and rumor reports. 

We have also pointed our readers to interesting gadget reviews on other sites over the years in short blurbs. We have deleted in general now all short reports from the site (40% of the content). We have also deleted all accumulated tag pages. 

Additionally we have removed several ad units including the dominating Google Ad to increase page-views per user and with that reduce bounce rate.

Google, What else do I need to do?