Upset, Lost and Afraid Post Panda...

Thanks Paul, you've always been a great guy here too. In one way its embarassing after all this time still trying to make IM work, but its my dream I cant give up

Id love to get to work but I dont know what direction to go in anymore.


Yes I do have my account still. I love the adsense model but this Panda experience has made me reluctant to rely on Google so much.

With all due respect Ernie - SEO as an exclusive traffic generation strategy isn't for the faint hearted. After every Panda update many SEOers are pulling their hair out and wondering why they torture themselves relying so much on Google for traffic. But it can be an addiction and many like myself take it on the chin and keep on trekking.

I had one of my sites hit that was earning $1000+/month - I lost 70% of my income from that particular site overnight and I was devastated for a week, but then I took action and got the site to rank again and it is back to what it was earning before it was hit. What softened the blow was the fact that I have many sites that earn well. Diversification is one way to lower the risks! Concentrate on more than one site. Target keywords and niches with varying competition and mix up affiliate marketing with Adsense as well as other monetization methods.

With affiliate marketing focus on buyer keywords like "where to buy an xbox" or "buy product name" etc. These KWs are extremely profitable and you will realize amazing returns when you target them.

I'm sure you are wondering how I got my Panda affected sites ranking again, this what I did:

I added 1000+ words to my already existing pages and linked out to various authority sites that would add value to my user. I have up to 6 outgoing links on many of my pages that provide further information that the reader will find helpful.

I then 301 redirected the old Panda affected URLs to a new URL on the same site. Thereafter I built backlinks from high PR blog comments to the new URLs and I also used a high PR blog network for contextual links to the affected pages.

It took about a month to get everything back to normal but it was an awesome feeling once I recovered.

If you have a tight budget for backlinks, you should look into a network similar to BMR that is completely free if you add your own domains with PR into the network. The network is called Link Authority. You can pick up PR2 domains on Go Daddy for as little as $12 a piece and if you add 5 PR2 domains to this network you will be allowed to submit 10 articles a day.

You should also learn how to find high PR blogs to comment on (if you don't already know how) as these links are still extremely effective.

You can recover from this but you need to have the right mindset. Failure is just one hurdle toward success but if you focus on the hurdle you will be blinded to the rewards that lie ahead!

Good Luck!

This is not always true. ONE of my websites was hit hard. It was (and still is) a website from 2004, totally legit, with daily new content added from me and the users, very usefull.

Not sure why we were hit, since the keywords we lost seem to dance every 2-3 days like crazy and have not stabilized.

Apparently a Bot is a Bot.

And yes, the lessons i learnt was not to rely only to google. That was mentioned a lot of times from people here but never took it seriously.