Well, as suspected, its a bit of swings and roundabouts when it comes to search engine traffic and changes recently.
In fairness, I’d say that Panda is not currently an issue for us, but in making the Panda smile we have (a) lost our position for certain keywords and (b) made our site convert fewer visitors!
So, now for the next round of tuning aimed at doing these two things
1) regain the ground lost for certain important key phrases
2) improve our conversion rate
Whilst not bring back the Panda frown. Tricky one, made even trickier when you consider that our updates, Google’s scan and the Panda runs all happen asynchronously … and we have monthly and annual changes in traffic anyway. This means that seeing if something has worked is a near impossible thing .. it used to be a little easier s the world stayed roughly the same for long enough to see things stabilise, now this no longer seems to be true.
The shock today was to lose our position in Google for “dirty dancing tickets” and “tickets for dirty dancing” where we have always (for a few years) been in the top half of the first page, not even the Panda upset that. Today, all of a sudden, we are not in the first 10 PAGES of results! This fact was made even more curious when I noticed that in Yahoo we went from nowhere to number 7 and in Bing we went from nowhere to number 1!
