SEO: How the Panda update affected AlternativeTo

This Monday we noticed a sudden drop in traffic from Google.com on AlternativeTo.net. I and my colleague have tried to figure out why all week and finally we found the answer. In the Google Webmaster Blog, there is a post about how Google is deploying its new spam filter (named “Panda”) to all English-speaking markets. And that should have been a good thing for AlternativeTo because when the filter was introduced on the US market we noticed a 10% growth in traffic from Google.com. But there are ups and downs with this blog post.

In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

And yes, we noticed this and we are now back on almost the same traffic as before the introduction of “Panda”. And I guess this is a good thing. We gained a positive effect when the filter was introduced the first time. Now they have trimmed the filter and it’s probably filtering out some really bad sites and we have maybe gained 1-2% more traffic from Google (it’s hard to measure such a low percentage compared to natural changes from day to day and so on).

Here is a little graph from Analytics that is Google.com traffic from US visitors.