Big Google update

Since the 16th of June I have seen a big jump in our traffic, this is mainly because Google has made some changes in the way it returns search results, we will never know how they work things out exactly, but basically they punish low quality websites, or sites that offer duplicate contents. It seems that they have come up with a way of knowing what is a good or bad website.

In our little corner of the web, what this means is that if you copy content in your blog from other sources you better add about 50% 'new', quality content, otherwise Google will punish you, (by that I mean they will make your blog fairly hard, if not imposible, to be found).

For JournalHome as a whole, this is not really bad news as most of the content is unique, I go around and remove all spam/duplicate contents anyway, (thanks for those of you who report sites to me from time to time).

Below is a graph of Journalhome traffic over the past 6 months.

The yellow line is the 1st of January when I started removing all the spam accounts and doing some general clean-up.
The red line is around the time of the first Google 'Panda', we saw a small jump in traffic but that was short lived, but there was still an increase in traffic.
The green line is from the 16th of June when Google Panda 2.2 was released.

You can see a general increase in traffic, I will try and give an update in the next few months so we can see if we were able to maintain a positive .

How can you improve traffic to your blog?

Content, content, content, Google accounts for a large part of our traffic, (Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo, together, are not far behind), so we cannot ignore their rules. And their most important rules are:

1. Update your contents on a regular basis.
2. Quality content, it does not matter what your favourite topic is, as long as it is quality people will come to your blog.
3. Don't copy from other websites! Ever!

If you do those two points, traffic to your site should follow quickly...

12h52 - 6/28/2011 - post comment

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