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The recent update from Google to their search algorithm seems to have hit a few sites rather severely. I can't say for sure that this change is responsible, but the traffic graph from Skeptics looks rather convincing:

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Traffic dropped by 40% around the time Panda 4.0 rolled out.

Gaming SE (Arqade) also got hit by the update:

enter image description here

Web Apps got hit really hard, traffic is almost halved:

enter image description here

The reason I post this here is to figure out why certain sites were punished by the change, and if possible find a way to avoid the penalties Google seems to be applying.

Some sites like Server Fault profited substantially from the change, so this is not an SE-wide adjustment.

Does anyone have some data on why these sites specifically might be downrated and how this could be avoided?

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  • 1
    Noticed a decline on CogSci too...Assumed it was just seasonal though.
    – Nick Stauner
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 22:00
  • 2
    Isn't it same reason as this one here, just the other way around?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 22:01
  • 6
    @ShadowWizard I'm interested in more specific reasons why Google penalized those sites, and whether there is anything we can do to avoid this.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 22:03
  • And you are positive that this is not a result of schools getting out and summer starting?
    – Travis J
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 23:25
  • 2
    Upon further inspection, I think I agree with you. This is the lowest traffic has been to that site in over a year and previous seasonal changes did not seem to be during summer (mostly during december/january).
    – Travis J
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 23:35
  • Pure speculation: google altered the weight of domain name age.
    – Travis J
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 0:03
  • 5
    Here's a list of all network sites and their percentage change in traffic since May 20th: goo.gl/tSnc7l
    – Cat
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 13:07
  • @TravisJ Can't be that simple, otherwise SO would be hit the hardest by far.
    – badp
    Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 20:52
  • 1
    It's really obvious on Seasoned Advice - the traffic dropped about 25% and never recovered. There's some evidence that the March update hurt too, although not as dramatically - perhaps a 10% hit. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Google got wise to SE's shady SEO tactic of putting a bunch of different, independent, sites all under the same domain name, and is now treating each of the subdomains as its own site, thus only ranking high the ones that actually have high traffic and a lot of content. Some new/small sites may have appeared to benefit, but the trend is too noisy to be sure.
    – Aarobot
    Commented Jun 14, 2014 at 5:27
  • 2
    "shady SEO tactic"? You know better than that @aarobot.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Jun 18, 2014 at 7:47
  • 1
    @JeffAtwood: To the contrary, having worked directly with so-called SEO experts for some time now, I know precisely how much sway SEO can have over dot-coms - frequently to the extent of overruling long-term architecture and usability concerns to effect very short-term gains in traffic. I'm not saying that there weren't other valid arguments against vanity domains, but I find it hard to believe that SEO wasn't the trump card. We can debate it 'til the cows come home, or we can just agree to disagree.
    – Aarobot
    Commented Jun 20, 2014 at 23:19
  • 10
    @Aarobot speaking as a co-founder of the company, SEO had utterly zero to do with our decision making. An explosion of incomprehensibly hard naming decisions, and utter confusion resulting from 100+ different random disconnected domain names, however, absolutely did.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 6:36

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