Posts by Brian Wozeniak

Dani, just wanted to let you know Ozzu has been in the same boat as you since around 2010. I actually discovered your website when at one point you had the budget to advertise on our website (as I imagine you were advertising across many channels/websites). Our sites are similar in the aspect that we have both generally been forums (you're more IT focused than we are), and as already discussed here forums have pretty much died (unfortunately). Here are some of the reasons I think that occurred:

1. Social Media - Easier to connect with people you know (FB, Reddit, etc)
2. Stackoverflow - Killed much of its competition
3. AI - Potentially killing stackoverflow, and is just much easier / quicker versus going through forums/QA websites

At least for Ozzu, from around 2001 - 2010, there was a huge community aspect of our website. People engaged frequently just because they met and then knew each other and it was a way to collaborate, make friends, besides communicating all around a central topic (web development in our case). Once social media really took off (particularly FB), I think many realized that the sort of need for engaging with people was better there. If they had 20 minutes to spend, they would rather put the time there than engaging with people they met on our forums; thus, there was no longer a need to get that from forums (such as Ozzu, and perhaps your site Daniweb).

Then the next big thing …

Hitchhiker, I have been following the threads on WMW.

I think it is safe to ignore the comments about India, while some struggle to speak English since it is their 2nd language, there are many very smart and tech savvy citizens in that country.

I have got the feeling over time that the age of a domain is becoming less a factor -- except if your domain is extremely new, that may be a factor in what sort of signal Google sees it as. I see absolutely no reason why Google would penalize websites for being old. You cannot make any correlation to quality based on that. I guarantee there are some great old websites, as well as horrible old websites. Age doesn't indicate where it falls.

This may or may not be related to some of Google's algorithm changes in the last few years, but another thing I think is interesting is if you look at the Alexa charts for Google:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com

it seem like they are slowly losing market share according to that graph. They used to always be number 1 on Alexa, now it is Facebook. They are settling for #2 in terms of global traffic now.

Could it be that maybe, just maybe Google isn't ranking SERPs as well as they think they are? Could it be that maybe they are putting too many ads above the fold on popular searches now (what they told us not to do?). If I type "computers" in Google, the first half of the screen is ads.

Maybe some of this all plays a role into how much traffic we get. More ads, plus less people using Google search would be less traffic for websites. Just an observation, could be an incorrect one. I don't think this has anything to do with what happened in November for UGC sites, but just an interesting note.

I completely agree with you hitchhiker. Also, it is very painful posting in those Google forums. First I hate the interface Google uses, the forum interface sucks there, and the users for the most part seem like trolls. Nobody even wants to entertain someoen elses idea, they are very closed minded. They talk about all this advice they offer, blah blah, and while some of it is good, most of them will still continue to find some sort of trivial thing that they say is the reason for all of the disaster that has struck you. Much of the advice I think is given by users who have no idea what they are talking about. Any website owner who posts there is always automatically categorized as being in the same group as everyone else. Nobody ever actually has a good site, according to them. The problem is never on Google's end, because they are perfect.

I think the only hope there is that the messages we have posted are looked at by a Google employee and gets to the right person. Hopefully your contact with Google can help hitchiker. I still think this entire problem is something Google may have overlooked. I truly feel that this problem is not something we can't really fix on our end. I feel all of our websites offer something useful for our visitors, and I agree with Dani that it does seem like many of the ones who are penalized seem to have gone …

So it sounds like you were affected still before the start of Panda #22, but seems like you were affected on the later edge of that ghost update. You really should participate in this thread since you also run a UGC website being hurt:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/T-4i0yB7CrQ/M7mngz551hgJ

JonhMu has already responded, and the thread seems to be gaining a bit of attention. I think with you posting there it might grab some more positive attention since you were a poster child for being affected once before. I really think your site, my site, and some of these other UCG type websites are in a different group that were affected. I don't feel we fit in with the regular types of sites that were affected by Penguin and Panda.

It would at least be nice to get an answer to what is going on if anything.

As someone who was hit in November (Panda 22) and hasn't recovered since, I was just wondering if anyone actually recovered in April or May with this new Panda format?

Hi Dani,

My hunch is that you weren't hit by Panda #22 as that occurred on November 21, 2012. According to your graph on quantcast you were hit on November 18, 2012 which puts you in another less known group that got affected around that time. Between November 16 and November 18, 2012 a bunch of forums and UGC (user generated content) type websites were hit hard, including ours (Ozzu).

This thread at webmaster world may interest you:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4523365.htm

For the date it happened to you as well as the type of website Daniweb is, I believe you got affected by the same update that many of us UGC type websites got hit by. As far as I know Google has not publicly identified any update that took place during this time, but there are many of us who were hit on these dates before Panda #22 actually really occurred. Here is your graph:

There is some other discussion about this going on here:

https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/T-4i0yB7CrQ/4_j3cGmiCsEJ

This seems to be mainly due to (thanks WMW) Panda 21.5 (referring to the 17-18th nov '12 'quiet update' that primarily hurt us UGC/Forum folk who mostly benefitted from panda in general).

So my opinion is you are in the same boat …

Dani, that is awesome! It seems to show it much more apparent here:

http://www.quantcast.com/daniweb.com

Clear as day that daniweb has had a full recovery. I haven't really said much since this has happened, but I have been following to see if you have ever made any progress. I had a feeling if anybody would get out of it, you would first. I have also been following you in the Google.com Webmaster forum area (many rude and undeserving responses there btw). Do you attribute your recovery to numerous changes you have made, or does any recent change stand out to you more that finally had an impact to get you out of this mess?

Our main website Ozzu was thankfully never affected by Panda, but other websites we run have been and its a nightmare trying to figure out what needs to be changed to get traffic to return to normal levels.

Again, congratulations, I bet you are sleeping much better now!