So THIS is what Panda does...

I check my analytics info maybe twice a month as nothing much has changed over these past several months.

this morning everything changed.

checked analytics and right off the bat noticed a 30% plummet in traffic across the board (starting since early november). 50% on some days (but I think some days it might be because of thanksgiving holiday)

Didnt waste time panicking just started going over all my analytics data (entrance keywords, etc) and after about a good hour of going over everything basically this is what is happening: I am not ranking for certain keywords that I was before (big traffic words) BUT I am now ranking for keywords that I never did before too. in a sense everything kind of flipped on me....

here is the strange part...my adsense earning really havent changed much. This is a reason why I never bothered to check anlytics earlier my earnings looked normal from day to day so I figured nothing was wrong.

could it be that the new words im ranking for are better (maybe a better quality of traffic/more targeted?) because 1/3 of my traffic just dissapeared and my earnings havent seemed to take that big of a hit at all.

all in all this panda shit is scary....

Yes, that is very possible. Previously, your high traffic keywords might have been junk keywords or at least junkier than the ones that are bringing traffic to your sites now. Just go to Google traffic estimator tool and set max bid as $5 and see what you get for CPC estimates for the keywords you ranked before and the ones you are ranking for now.

I am sure the new traffic keywords will have better CPC.

There's no way for us to know if the new keywords are better really, but they must be good enough if your income hasn't dropped.

This doesn't actually sound like it's panda that's hit your site either. Panda damage tends to be all or nothing. Either you're not affected or your entire site is crushed.

Panda is a machine learning algorithm with the goal of finding low quality sites that don't provide a good user experience, so it doesn't just drop 1 page and leave others. It's all or nothing.

If your site has a certain ratio of low quality to high quality pages then the whole site gets crushed by the panda and you can't get out of it until the next panda-run.

Just keep on making sure your site is quality, providing a good user experience and make sure your visitors aren't bouncing back to the serps after hitting your page. That's an indicator of a low quality site to panda.

Ramsweb said:

Yes, that is very possible. Previously, your high traffic keywords might have been junk keywords or at least junkier than the ones that are bringing traffic to your sites now. Just go to Google traffic estimator tool and set max bid as $5 and see what you get for CPC estimates for the keywords you ranked before and the ones you are ranking for now.

I am sure the new traffic keywords will have better CPC.

Click to expand...

yeah maybe some low money keywords got thrown out and replaced with good quality keywords in the process. Im hoping this is what happensed.

Maybe it is a result of the new updates Google just rolled out?

We are discussing those changes here

Are you noticing a new trend of long tail keywords ranking, where they weren't before?
Is any of your content duplicate? If so, are those the pages that lost rankings?

SuperLinks said:

Are you noticing a new trend of long tail keywords ranking, where they weren't before?

Click to expand...

YES. In fact some of them are straightup questions like "How do I blah blah blah?" showing up in my analytics for keywords even though is a long question hahaha.....strange.

KeyzDT said:

YES. In fact some of them are straightup questions like "How do I blah blah blah?" showing up in my analytics for keywords even though is a long question hahaha.....strange.

Click to expand...

Same here, but not a big increase. Very long tail.