The big content farming companies understand that they have to stuff the "brand" ballot box. Which is why Demand Media is doing all sorts of stuff with promotional sponsors & Aol is closing down many of their niche sites at the same time they are adding a celebrities section to the Huffington Post. Huffington has a green light to spam with authority after the Panda update.
Yeah they are like marketeers -- a little may be necessary (Oh, our entire site shouldn't be in flash?) but more than that and you end up in a war of attrition.
Did anyone else read a lot of anger/frustation in this piece?
From Matt's quote, I just got the impression that sub-domains are an option and that GBot treats them as logically cohesive groupings of information, I didn't see anywhere that he said subdirectories were suddenly bad.
Then the author went on about best practices and getting burned for them -- he'd know better than I would if that has been true over the longer term -- I just didn't interpret Matt's comment to imply all that.
Some people must have benefited from Panda... I still find plenty of junk in my search results, but it makes me sick to think that if they hadn't rolled it out how impossible it would be to find good content at all.
I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.
Largely 2 groups of sites did
- big brands & big media sites / sites with plenty of "brand" signal
- smallish sites that were too small to get clipped when a lot of the larger (but not BIG BRAND large) sites in their vertical got hit.
'I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.'
That is a great point...and in Tim Wu's book I mentioned above, he highlighted how this was the big fundamental strategic difference between Google & Apple.
The answer to how it all turns out is still a bit unknown.
This presumes that the stuff that is ranking higher is more useful than the stuff that disappeared. That, unfortunately, is not always the case. A couple counter examples:
Right now, it is much easier to create directories in a script. You can't exactly do that with subdomains yet because they are hosted on DNS servers separate from the http server. That makes subdomain structure intrinsically much more valuable - it's guaranteed to be created by a human.
Maybe the nextgen frameworks will incorporate an easy way to create subdomains via a script?
Nah, subdomains aren't any different from directories. You can easily setup wildcard subdomains and all of them run off the same code base. I can easily have username.mysite.com show the user's profile the moment a user signs up. No changes to any servers needed.
You don't have to create separate subdomains, you just create the *.example.com. subdomain and point it to your document root. You've never used a site that assigns each user a subdomain? There's no human editing a config file for that.
The author's based his career around the ability to pervert search results - and apparently he's frustrated because this fucks up the results for everybody so badly that Google have to change their algorithm.
Sympathy? Not really. I hope he stubs his toe so hard they have to amputate his foot.
I'm not feeling a whole lot of sympathy for the SEO crowd that caused the spam clusterfuck in the first place. Search results are better. That's all I care about. If your huffpo/associated content clone isn't ranking first anymore, cry me a river. When I google something it means I'm looking for an informative site on the subject, not your useless crapfest.
Furthermore, this is now a few SEO articles I've seen hit the frontpage today with very few people in the comments seeming to like the article. Considering HN has a very respectable pagerank of 6 and doesn't use nofollow tags, could it be that we're getting spammed for backlink juice?
I'm not a big proponent of advanced SEO and mostly stick to doing the right things (proper page title, good content, easy to read/type links, use of H1, H2 etc.) I don't make 100 landing pages or optimize my apps/sites for SEO by using all possible synonyms for my keywords. I don't do these things because they do not make my content better or improve usability but simply try to increase search engine rankings.
> You follow best practices. You get torched for it. You are deciding how many employees to fire & if you should simply file bankruptcy and be done with it.
Anytime I read any SEO complaints against Google, I notice this huge sense of entitlement that the authors and commenters have, as if Google owes them something with respect to search engine rankings just because they might be paying for AdWords or some other Google service. You have the full right to complain if your ad campaigns do not work as advertised. But it's your own fault if you have to fire employees because Google changed their primary search algorithm which tanked your traffic. Sorry. Google does not owe you anything even if their statements are contradictory.
> And the truth is, this sort of shift is common, because as soon as Google openly recommends something people take it to the Nth degree & find ways to exploit it, which forces Google to change.
The author hits the nail on the head right here and even suggests the proper method:
> The only ways to get clarity from Google on issues of importance are to:
* ignore what Google suggests & test what actually works
Don't try to read too much into how Google works from a comment by an employee here or an official blog post there. Just do what your site needs to function properly and most importantly offer something that people want.
"But it's your own fault if you have to fire employees because Google changed their primary search algorithm which tanked your traffic. "
I used to work for an ecommerce site. Over 60% of our traffic and sales came from google. To handle those orders we hired people, then if we lost ranking in google we would have to fire them. How would that have been our fault?
> Over 60% of our traffic and sales came from google.
Because you did not diversify strongly enough. Certainly, Google is a great way to get lots of traffic but if 60% of your sales comes from a single source with whom you do not have a signed contract, it is your own fault if you cannot handle your business when the sales tank. It is no different than putting 60% of your investments in a single stock and seeing the company fail, wiping out 60% of your savings. Sure, you didn't cause the company to fail but you did plan very poorly. People keep blaming Google when this happens. But who told you to rely on Google for 60% of your sales, especially when you haven't paid them or signed anything with them with respect to search engine rankings?
Please note that my reply is directed more to the owners of the ecom site than you personally.
I think you missed my point. We can handle our business when google drops us, but the volume from google is large enough that it required hiring more people. If that goes away, we'd fire those people.
I agree with your larger point, but let's be honest, when people are shopping for things online they usually type it into a search engine (if they don't go to amazon directly). Depending on the type of product you are selling you may not be able to get around this.
A lot of the biggest brands see more "search" referrals that are just their brand name going through search engines.
As web browsers replace address bars with search boxes the search engines in a very real sense act like a utility the redirects the traffic flow through a page with ads on it. If you rank fine then no big deal, but if you don't show up for your own brand then that is brutal.
Of course most the sites hit by Panda were not hit so hard that they don't show up for their site name (unless their site was named after a generic commercial keyword where there were lots of other competitors already) but in the cases where it was a lot of those businesses were just hosed. It is yet another way to boost big brands...not only put weight on brand related signals, but make the generics more likely to get clipped by the algorithm at some point.
That forces non-brands to build brand assets & re-enforce them display ads and such. Google is even buying a ton of display ads that advertise display ads. And a lot of those ads highlight how display ads have increased branded search queries for the brands that are buying them.
Matt Cutts wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among other things.
Matt Cutts isn't claiming here that subdomains are better than subdirectories, just that they are treated differently (which should come as no great surprise -- "different things are treated differently" isn't exactly a shock.)
Suggesting to someone that they try something different when their first approach doesn't seem to be working out is hardly revolutionary or headline-worthy.
But somehow this short quote manages to get a whole blog post hung on it, with the eventual conclusion that "the average webmaster is told to "sit and spin"".
The author took the lazy way out, appealing to emotion and outrage, rather than actually doing the experiments to see how google differentiates between subdomains and subdirectories.
Also: All we know is that it has been close to a half-year since Panda has been implemented, and in spite of massive capital investments virtually nobody has recovered.
Well, of course.
Panda was aiming to lower the rankings of certain kinds of content-suppliers. These sites weren't supposed to be able to just make a few changes and recover; they were supposed to be permanently affected.
Panda wasn't an assault course that Google built just so that a few webmasters could test their skillz.
"The author took the lazy way out, appealing to emotion and outrage, rather than actually doing the experiments to see how google differentiates between subdomains and subdirectories."
That presumes that the algorithm behaves consistently across sites & that the author of the article has dozens of sites that were hit by Panda to do a variety of scientific subdomain tests on it.
What actual search results became worse for users as a result of these changes? Anyone got examples?
If this is a matter of certain SEO-reliant websites being sent to the back of the line and not being able to figure out how to cut in front of everyone else again, well, good.
And the Google index is still plenty spammy, as we discussed just recently on HN. There was also an article about lead generation sites crowding out genuine local businesses for searches like "locksmith emergency portland". Google needs to be trying more changes, not less.
EDIT: oh, read some replies down the thread and feel the love for the SEO guys. I get it - heavy SEO and outright search engine spam at this point is more annoying than email spam ever was.
Here is a message for the SEOers: "Nobody wants to hear you complain. Nobody cares. Nobody sympathizes." I say we google-bomb that and make it the first result for "SEO". [That was a joke.]
AT&T made the same argument with their network as well. And the problem was that you couldn't see all the hidden costs baked into that while it was happening.
You could only see those sorts of hidden costs after the fact, when waves of innovation appeared quickly out of nowhere. Held back for decades, a half-century of innovation appeared in little more than a decade.
How do you calculate the cost of that? In Tim Wu's book titled The Master Switch http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-Borz... he highlighted that AT&T example & asked a person to imagine some company deciding to hold back email for 10 years & trying to guess the incalculable astronomical costs.
Now, to be fair, I wouldn't say Google is anywhere near as anti-competitive as AT&T has been historically, but they have certainly grown more adversarial over the past 3 or 4 years. Compete.com shows over 5% of Google's downstream traffic going to Youtube & that traffic flow was up 18% in a single month...after lots of other user generated content sites got whacked. Think Youtube is different & better than the others? In some ways it may be, but if you read the comments below the video they are about as low quality as they come anywhere across the web. Something like 30% of Youtube pages have "Bieber" in them.
site:youtube.com search on Google = About 621,000,000 results
site:youtube.com bieber search on Google = About 203,000,000 results
The other big issue (at least inside the United States) is the large companies are not hiring that many people domestically...so most of the job grow must come from small businesses.
A lot of the companies that were wiped off the search results were not "evil SEO spammers" of some sort, but rather small ecommerce shops & such. The drastic shifts in business do increase risks (perceived & real). How much innovation & economic prosperity that destroys isn't something that is easy to calculate.
I am doing better now than I was before Panda, however a lot of people who are not SEO experts who run small businesses just lost their business. As search keeps raising the bar on the number of steps required to be good enough to be in the game a lot of small businesses get torched, because who has time to know their craft & jump through 30 hoops for Google? Of course that is no big deal to the SEO pro who focuses on SEO...but to the small business who has to do everything from accounting to taking out the trash such a large shift in traffic & increase in complexity in search is devastating.
And, if we go back to why the update was even needed, it was primarily driven by Google funding MFA content farms/factories like Demand Media's eHow & "answer" scrapers like Ask.com.
I can show you one HUGE example of the search results looking nastier...check out some of Google's product search integration in the search results.
I just searched Google for "necklaces" and the products they showed cost $60, $8, $19, & $5. They are not widely representative of the diversity of the category, look ugly, and are generally of far lower utility than the affiliate sites & smaller specialty ecommerce sites that got torched & are now considered spam by "the algorithm".
There are also cases where some original content creators had their sites whacked, whereas the file hosting warez sites violating their copyright outrank the original source. Search can't create a much more damaging ecosystem then penalizing the creative sources & directly funding their parasites.
A parting thought here...we are generally the most unique where we are the most refined & we are generally the most alike in how we are vulgar.
As the web moves from specialty shops to big box stores (aka: big brands) a lot of that diversity & beauty becomes less accessible. Google is/was one of the few counter-weights to the big business walled garden interests onlin...
I submitted this because I'm a "victim" of Panda, and this article did a good job of explaining the frustration I'm dealing with.
A lot of the commenters seem to feel that Google doesn't owe webmasters anything. I disagree. Every time a SERPs page shows up with my site in the results, Google is selling advertising on top of my content. I gave them permission to use snippets of my content in return for sending whatever traffic they think should be sent my way. It's a mutually beneficial relationship (though they definitely hold most of the power), but it's certainly not a gift. We can both pull out of the deal at any time, but there's no reason to since we're both profiting from it.
I run sites to help college students find jobs and internships. One is called One Day, One Job and the other is One Day, One Internship. Every day I write about a new company. It's usually 400-600 words and I talk about what the company does, who they are, why they're interesting, and what kind of entry level jobs or internships they have. I get thank you notes from readers every day. I've helped put dozens of people into jobs they never would have found without my help. I get a ton of praise from college career services offices. There's certainly a consensus that my content is extremely high quality, useful, and something that Google would want searchers to find.
I've made SEO an important part of my strategy. I've optimized my pages, reworked my site architecture, and built a ton of high quality links. I've also done a lot of keyword research to try and better understand the psychology of a job seeker whose main tool for finding jobs is the Internet. I've tried a lot of other marketing techniques. I keep coming back to SEO. It's the absolute best way to reach job seekers. I've always followed Google's rules as closely as possible. I keep up with what Matt Cutts is saying and what Google is posting on their Webmaster Central blog. I'm not trying to game the search engines, I'm just trying to make the most of the opportunity that they offer to expand the reach of my content.
One Day, One Job got hit by Panda on February 24th. One Day, One Internship was never hit. Because the sites are nearly identical (including a lot of posts that are 90-95% shared content), it seemed weird that one would get hit and the other wouldn't. I figured out quickly that it had to be some sort of duplicate content issue. For a long time Google has said that duplicate content was not something that would be penalized--they'd just filter out anything that looks to be a duplicate. I found that One Day, One Job would rank for job related queries, and One Day, One Internship would rank for internship related queries. Rarely would they both show up on the first page for a given search term.
The reason that I built two separate sites was that I thought it was the best choice for my users. Job seekers and internship seekers are looking for slightly different things, so why not build separate sites and e-mail lists for them. I'm not trying to manipulate anything. I'm just trying to serve two mostly separate audiences with very similar content. Google assured me this wasn't a problem--and if it was they'd just show the user the most relevant result.
Google messed up with Panda. Even though One Day, One Job always gets the content first, has more and stronger incoming links, and has been around longer than One Day, One Internship, it got the penalty. One Day, One Internship is not the canonical source, but Google thinks it is.
So far I've been unable to fix this. I tried linking all duplicated posts on One Day, One Internship to the corresponding post on One Day, One Job to tell Google that it was the original source. I gave this over a month to set in, yet saw no results. Now I've used rel="canonical" to give Google a strong signal that One Day, One Job posts should be seen as canonical. It killed my One Day, One Internship traffic, and One Day, One Job has not seen any benefit yet. I'm waiting to see if it will eventually start working, but I'm not very hope...
I suspect I got hit by Panda too... we should know what are the basis for their classification or else, we're all in the dark.
Asked here in HN but nobody answered so I'm guessing.
The only clue I have is that after the "Panda hit" I'm on the 4th/5th page on the results on Google but still on top on Bing and Yahoo..
33 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 84.6 ms ] threadFrom Matt's quote, I just got the impression that sub-domains are an option and that GBot treats them as logically cohesive groupings of information, I didn't see anywhere that he said subdirectories were suddenly bad.
Then the author went on about best practices and getting burned for them -- he'd know better than I would if that has been true over the longer term -- I just didn't interpret Matt's comment to imply all that.
Some people must have benefited from Panda... I still find plenty of junk in my search results, but it makes me sick to think that if they hadn't rolled it out how impossible it would be to find good content at all.
I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.
Largely 2 groups of sites did - big brands & big media sites / sites with plenty of "brand" signal - smallish sites that were too small to get clipped when a lot of the larger (but not BIG BRAND large) sites in their vertical got hit.
'I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.'
That is a great point...and in Tim Wu's book I mentioned above, he highlighted how this was the big fundamental strategic difference between Google & Apple.
The answer to how it all turns out is still a bit unknown.
http://www.seobook.com/huffington-post http://www.seobook.com/doorway-pages-ranking-google-2011
Maybe the nextgen frameworks will incorporate an easy way to create subdomains via a script?
Sympathy? Not really. I hope he stubs his toe so hard they have to amputate his foot.
You sound much more clever than you are. Or was that backwards?
Furthermore, this is now a few SEO articles I've seen hit the frontpage today with very few people in the comments seeming to like the article. Considering HN has a very respectable pagerank of 6 and doesn't use nofollow tags, could it be that we're getting spammed for backlink juice?
> You follow best practices. You get torched for it. You are deciding how many employees to fire & if you should simply file bankruptcy and be done with it.
Anytime I read any SEO complaints against Google, I notice this huge sense of entitlement that the authors and commenters have, as if Google owes them something with respect to search engine rankings just because they might be paying for AdWords or some other Google service. You have the full right to complain if your ad campaigns do not work as advertised. But it's your own fault if you have to fire employees because Google changed their primary search algorithm which tanked your traffic. Sorry. Google does not owe you anything even if their statements are contradictory.
> And the truth is, this sort of shift is common, because as soon as Google openly recommends something people take it to the Nth degree & find ways to exploit it, which forces Google to change.
The author hits the nail on the head right here and even suggests the proper method:
> The only ways to get clarity from Google on issues of importance are to: * ignore what Google suggests & test what actually works
Don't try to read too much into how Google works from a comment by an employee here or an official blog post there. Just do what your site needs to function properly and most importantly offer something that people want.
I used to work for an ecommerce site. Over 60% of our traffic and sales came from google. To handle those orders we hired people, then if we lost ranking in google we would have to fire them. How would that have been our fault?
Because you did not diversify strongly enough. Certainly, Google is a great way to get lots of traffic but if 60% of your sales comes from a single source with whom you do not have a signed contract, it is your own fault if you cannot handle your business when the sales tank. It is no different than putting 60% of your investments in a single stock and seeing the company fail, wiping out 60% of your savings. Sure, you didn't cause the company to fail but you did plan very poorly. People keep blaming Google when this happens. But who told you to rely on Google for 60% of your sales, especially when you haven't paid them or signed anything with them with respect to search engine rankings?
Please note that my reply is directed more to the owners of the ecom site than you personally.
I agree with your larger point, but let's be honest, when people are shopping for things online they usually type it into a search engine (if they don't go to amazon directly). Depending on the type of product you are selling you may not be able to get around this.
As web browsers replace address bars with search boxes the search engines in a very real sense act like a utility the redirects the traffic flow through a page with ads on it. If you rank fine then no big deal, but if you don't show up for your own brand then that is brutal.
Of course most the sites hit by Panda were not hit so hard that they don't show up for their site name (unless their site was named after a generic commercial keyword where there were lots of other competitors already) but in the cases where it was a lot of those businesses were just hosed. It is yet another way to boost big brands...not only put weight on brand related signals, but make the generics more likely to get clipped by the algorithm at some point.
That forces non-brands to build brand assets & re-enforce them display ads and such. Google is even buying a ton of display ads that advertise display ads. And a lot of those ads highlight how display ads have increased branded search queries for the brands that are buying them.
Matt Cutts isn't claiming here that subdomains are better than subdirectories, just that they are treated differently (which should come as no great surprise -- "different things are treated differently" isn't exactly a shock.)
Suggesting to someone that they try something different when their first approach doesn't seem to be working out is hardly revolutionary or headline-worthy.
But somehow this short quote manages to get a whole blog post hung on it, with the eventual conclusion that "the average webmaster is told to "sit and spin"".
The author took the lazy way out, appealing to emotion and outrage, rather than actually doing the experiments to see how google differentiates between subdomains and subdirectories.
Also: All we know is that it has been close to a half-year since Panda has been implemented, and in spite of massive capital investments virtually nobody has recovered.
Well, of course.
Panda was aiming to lower the rankings of certain kinds of content-suppliers. These sites weren't supposed to be able to just make a few changes and recover; they were supposed to be permanently affected.
Panda wasn't an assault course that Google built just so that a few webmasters could test their skillz.
That presumes that the algorithm behaves consistently across sites & that the author of the article has dozens of sites that were hit by Panda to do a variety of scientific subdomain tests on it.
Of course, neither of which are actually true.
If this is a matter of certain SEO-reliant websites being sent to the back of the line and not being able to figure out how to cut in front of everyone else again, well, good.
And the Google index is still plenty spammy, as we discussed just recently on HN. There was also an article about lead generation sites crowding out genuine local businesses for searches like "locksmith emergency portland". Google needs to be trying more changes, not less.
EDIT: oh, read some replies down the thread and feel the love for the SEO guys. I get it - heavy SEO and outright search engine spam at this point is more annoying than email spam ever was.
Here is a message for the SEOers: "Nobody wants to hear you complain. Nobody cares. Nobody sympathizes." I say we google-bomb that and make it the first result for "SEO". [That was a joke.]
You could only see those sorts of hidden costs after the fact, when waves of innovation appeared quickly out of nowhere. Held back for decades, a half-century of innovation appeared in little more than a decade.
How do you calculate the cost of that? In Tim Wu's book titled The Master Switch http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-Borz... he highlighted that AT&T example & asked a person to imagine some company deciding to hold back email for 10 years & trying to guess the incalculable astronomical costs.
Now, to be fair, I wouldn't say Google is anywhere near as anti-competitive as AT&T has been historically, but they have certainly grown more adversarial over the past 3 or 4 years. Compete.com shows over 5% of Google's downstream traffic going to Youtube & that traffic flow was up 18% in a single month...after lots of other user generated content sites got whacked. Think Youtube is different & better than the others? In some ways it may be, but if you read the comments below the video they are about as low quality as they come anywhere across the web. Something like 30% of Youtube pages have "Bieber" in them.
site:youtube.com search on Google = About 621,000,000 results
site:youtube.com bieber search on Google = About 203,000,000 results
The other big issue (at least inside the United States) is the large companies are not hiring that many people domestically...so most of the job grow must come from small businesses.
A lot of the companies that were wiped off the search results were not "evil SEO spammers" of some sort, but rather small ecommerce shops & such. The drastic shifts in business do increase risks (perceived & real). How much innovation & economic prosperity that destroys isn't something that is easy to calculate.
I am doing better now than I was before Panda, however a lot of people who are not SEO experts who run small businesses just lost their business. As search keeps raising the bar on the number of steps required to be good enough to be in the game a lot of small businesses get torched, because who has time to know their craft & jump through 30 hoops for Google? Of course that is no big deal to the SEO pro who focuses on SEO...but to the small business who has to do everything from accounting to taking out the trash such a large shift in traffic & increase in complexity in search is devastating.
And, if we go back to why the update was even needed, it was primarily driven by Google funding MFA content farms/factories like Demand Media's eHow & "answer" scrapers like Ask.com.
I can show you one HUGE example of the search results looking nastier...check out some of Google's product search integration in the search results.
I just searched Google for "necklaces" and the products they showed cost $60, $8, $19, & $5. They are not widely representative of the diversity of the category, look ugly, and are generally of far lower utility than the affiliate sites & smaller specialty ecommerce sites that got torched & are now considered spam by "the algorithm".
There are also cases where some original content creators had their sites whacked, whereas the file hosting warez sites violating their copyright outrank the original source. Search can't create a much more damaging ecosystem then penalizing the creative sources & directly funding their parasites.
A parting thought here...we are generally the most unique where we are the most refined & we are generally the most alike in how we are vulgar.
As the web moves from specialty shops to big box stores (aka: big brands) a lot of that diversity & beauty becomes less accessible. Google is/was one of the few counter-weights to the big business walled garden interests onlin...
A lot of the commenters seem to feel that Google doesn't owe webmasters anything. I disagree. Every time a SERPs page shows up with my site in the results, Google is selling advertising on top of my content. I gave them permission to use snippets of my content in return for sending whatever traffic they think should be sent my way. It's a mutually beneficial relationship (though they definitely hold most of the power), but it's certainly not a gift. We can both pull out of the deal at any time, but there's no reason to since we're both profiting from it.
I run sites to help college students find jobs and internships. One is called One Day, One Job and the other is One Day, One Internship. Every day I write about a new company. It's usually 400-600 words and I talk about what the company does, who they are, why they're interesting, and what kind of entry level jobs or internships they have. I get thank you notes from readers every day. I've helped put dozens of people into jobs they never would have found without my help. I get a ton of praise from college career services offices. There's certainly a consensus that my content is extremely high quality, useful, and something that Google would want searchers to find.
I've made SEO an important part of my strategy. I've optimized my pages, reworked my site architecture, and built a ton of high quality links. I've also done a lot of keyword research to try and better understand the psychology of a job seeker whose main tool for finding jobs is the Internet. I've tried a lot of other marketing techniques. I keep coming back to SEO. It's the absolute best way to reach job seekers. I've always followed Google's rules as closely as possible. I keep up with what Matt Cutts is saying and what Google is posting on their Webmaster Central blog. I'm not trying to game the search engines, I'm just trying to make the most of the opportunity that they offer to expand the reach of my content.
One Day, One Job got hit by Panda on February 24th. One Day, One Internship was never hit. Because the sites are nearly identical (including a lot of posts that are 90-95% shared content), it seemed weird that one would get hit and the other wouldn't. I figured out quickly that it had to be some sort of duplicate content issue. For a long time Google has said that duplicate content was not something that would be penalized--they'd just filter out anything that looks to be a duplicate. I found that One Day, One Job would rank for job related queries, and One Day, One Internship would rank for internship related queries. Rarely would they both show up on the first page for a given search term.
The reason that I built two separate sites was that I thought it was the best choice for my users. Job seekers and internship seekers are looking for slightly different things, so why not build separate sites and e-mail lists for them. I'm not trying to manipulate anything. I'm just trying to serve two mostly separate audiences with very similar content. Google assured me this wasn't a problem--and if it was they'd just show the user the most relevant result.
Google messed up with Panda. Even though One Day, One Job always gets the content first, has more and stronger incoming links, and has been around longer than One Day, One Internship, it got the penalty. One Day, One Internship is not the canonical source, but Google thinks it is.
So far I've been unable to fix this. I tried linking all duplicated posts on One Day, One Internship to the corresponding post on One Day, One Job to tell Google that it was the original source. I gave this over a month to set in, yet saw no results. Now I've used rel="canonical" to give Google a strong signal that One Day, One Job posts should be seen as canonical. It killed my One Day, One Internship traffic, and One Day, One Job has not seen any benefit yet. I'm waiting to see if it will eventually start working, but I'm not very hope...