From the Trenches: CanadaOne Shares Insights into How to Recover from Panda
By Julie King | June 1, 2012
Introduction
On March 3, 1998 CanadaOne.com launched with just 50 visitors a month.
At the time, less than 10 per cent of Canadians were online and we were filling an important gap by providing Canadian business information on an Internet that at the time was very global, with most business content being specific to the United States.
In our early days our survival depended on search optimization (SEO) and being able to reach people through the leading search engines of that time.
Originally we worked to optimize CanadaOne for the now-defunct Alta Vista. We can still remember the day that we found a “cool little search engine” – Google – which really loved our content and put us at the top of its rankings for all kinds of searches related to the core principles of CanadaOne: starting and growing a business in Canada.
As the search world transitioned we did as well. CanadaOne went on to survive the big “dot.bomb” meltdown of April 2000, as well as the subsequent 9/11 retraction and then the recession that started in 2008.
Throughout the past 15 years in business one thing has kept us strong: our commitment to creating high quality, highly relevant content of interest to small business owners in Canada that over time – in accordance with our original business plan that was the overall winner in the 1997/98 SIFE Young Entrepreneur Award Competition – has developed into a just-in-time business information library.
Yet in the past 18 months something has gone drastically wrong.
On April 11, 2011 we saw our search ranking plummet as Google rolled out its Panda algorithm update to the English-speaking world. After our intervention and a seeming recovery in the fall of 2011, we found CanadaOne being penalized again in the spring of 2012.
The irony is that Panda should allow high quality sites like ours to rise to the top. After fixing the obvious things,even with our strong foundation in SEO, we knew we needed outside help, so we hired Reliable SEO to perform a search engine audit to help us identify the signals that had caused our rankings to slip.
In this report we share key findings from Reliable SEO, as well as things we have discovered, in our journey to understand and recover from Google's Panda algorithm update.
Page 1:Google Panda Report: Introduction
Page 2: Google Panda Report: Understanding How Google Views Duplicate or Thin Content (next)
Page 3: Google Panda Report: Site Focus
Page 4: Google Panda Report: Site Architecture
Page 5: Google Panda Report: Site Clean-Up with Google Webmaster Tools
