I know a lot of marketers that would like to do just that, shoot the Google Panda right in the head

Yeah, the title is a bit over the top, but it got your attention didn’t it? I know of a lot of people who have seen their affiliate earnings drop like a rock since February of 2011, this is date which will live in infamy for a lot of people with niche blogs and affiliate sales websites of various types. I have seen my work on my one of my other blogs go down the toilet, the keywords I had been going after for a year and a half…all gone. I was on the first page, and it had taken me that long to get there, not by black hat or bluefart  methods, but real work. I have other blogs that do very well, but it is a mixed bag of tricks. They make changes and try to improve the search results, but I have went to see those results for people who took my spot I earned and I was shocked a little bit. Total crappy looking pages with spammed to death links on-page. I had a real blog with real life experience from many years of work that I did all out in the open and written about for new people to learn from my mistakes. The bottom line here is I have to get over it and just realize that a computer program does not really care how much of your life’s work is put into your blog, if you get outranked by a spammy blog, you just have to live with it, or so I thought.

I am not one to go crying to the Google search team about my newest search results or complain and name a blog for spam or not related to its industry type of thing. That to me is ratting out a fellow marketer and its dirty pool. I know Google asks actively for people to do that, block that sites search results or whatever, but to me again I think that is just asking for trouble. When the Google search quality pdf came out a month ago or so, people scrambled to get a look at it so they could get a leg up on competition and bump other websites down in rank. A lot of people went looking for this e-book so they could learn more before Google went out actively admonishing people for having it or offering it as a download. That’s fine, they owned the content, but it got out to a lot of file hosting sites and was downloaded a many thousands of times before they got most of them removed.

A question from my readers might go something like this…

So Jim, how do we shoot the Google Panda and get away with it? I am speaking only in a comical sense here, the Panda above in the photo is just a stuffed toy, but it is funny as hell. My answer would be to create a 3-tap on your titles and descriptions when you write. This gives extra power and ranking ability for your chosen keywords. I use wordpress SEO by Yoast, and I try to get all of my lines in the plugin as a green color. In order to do that and have it all make sense, you just have to experiment with it and keep practicing. I use keywords a little when I write, but not so much as to water down what I am writing about to really screw up the actual article. I want to make a point to get the content written and have it be actually useful and not care so much about what Google will think about it. I do most of that work in the title and meta description. I also will use my focus keywords in the content of course, but not to many times and in no real thought out order. It makes the point I am trying to make sound really messed up and it pisses people off.

I recently had a reader of mine take a look at an article I wrote and he made a screenshot of it. I had outranked Google themselves for their own keyword that they had in play for many years. I was pleased that I was able to do that, but to rest on my laurels on just one article would be totally foolish and it may not last for long. I know once people see that my blog is ranking that high for a very competitive keyword, the fight would be on. The internet is a battleground of sorts, people fighting for page one, number one slots is fierce. You constantly have to fend off attacks from many different angles.

 The Panda Update May Just Have Some Golden Lining

I never thought I would have ever said these words in a million years. I know that the panda updates were supposed to be a death certificate for a lot of spammy blogs out on the net, I have seen many varied results in just a few searches that I have done. I used old search terms that I knew would bring up the same exact results as years in the past, searches for certain keyword management tools and stuff like that. I saw that these searches no longer brought up what I was looking for. I was bummed out a lot. But on the other hand I have found that some of what I was writing about and terms that were being used were correctly being indexed and placed in the search results over a period of about 36-48 hours. I was able to hit page one in a short time, and be very competitive for the number one spot over a slightly longer time period.

I know like so many other people who have their own blogs that these panda updates are actually a series of updates rolled out one after another. It could be said from various sides of the story that it seems like the world is just trying to screw everything a person is trying to do on the net, I mean why was it really broke in the first place and why do we have to sit and watch as our livelihoods are being crushed under the heel of Google? There are a lot of bloggers out there who have asked the same thing and it not so nice terminology.

Then there are folks who applaud the updates and ask why it was not done sooner to protect what they write for content and rankings they feel explicitly belong to them. I don’t work for Google obviously, so you would have to ask them that question and good luck in getting anything other than either a fanboy answer or some other less than useful reply. I see this type of content in the Google webmaster forums and the amount of people who have asked, “why has my blog been de-indexed” or something very close to that number in the many thousands. I have read threads from folks across the nation and around the world who have lost whole life savings trying to combat the Panda, regain their rankings and generally lose all hope of regaining what used to be a good income and now it is all gone.

It is a sad state of affairs for some people, and a boon to others. It is a mixed bag of tricks to some and a complete heaven-sent search engine change to others. I guess it depends on how your website was effected as to what side of the fence you are on when answering this question.