Andil

If you’re looking to add some advanced filters in Google Analytics for example, you’ll no doubt need to use Regex Characters from time to time to filter out items appropriately. This is more for my reference than anything else (the scrap of paper with this stuff noted down is getting scruffy now…) but feel free to use for your own work!

Some examples of when these characters need to be used, is for example if you need to filter out URLs which end in numbers – for example a client site of mine: their products URLs end in numbers, so to determine some figures from Product Pages specifically, I could use \d$ to filter results to only show URLs ending in a number.

Anyway, without further ado:

By all means this list is not complete, but it’s complete enough to fulfill my needs as an SEO – I’ve never needed any Regex characters outside of this list, so in that regard it seems fine. However please, if you think something in this table is incorrect or something needs adding, tell me and I can get it sorted.

It looks as if Google are starting to really up their efforts in regards to advertising Google+ to the masses. Ever since Google+ launched, it’s been mostly tech and internet industry people who used the service, and to be fair, it still is.

Despite Google’s efforts with trying to promote their social network on the front page of Google, and even going to efforts of redesigning the navigation within their products not once, but twice, it certainly feels like they need a much bigger and more public push to get people to notice.

Cue David Beckham, international football superstar, sure to get Google+ kick-started, right? …Right? For what it’s worth, this video is being advertised on the intros of Youtube videos at present. The Hangout with David Beckham is on the 19th January at 17:00 GMT.

Perhaps one of the most painful to read error messages on any website, if it’s your own at least, is the ’500 Internal Server Error’ message. It’s a pretty generic and therefore frustrating HTTP Status Code meaning no more than “something’s gone wrong” – you might come across them fairly regularly if you’re trying to be especially clever rubbish with htaccess, for example.

This post isn’t just a look at why 500 Errors are bad, that’d be too obvious, but sometimes 500 Errors can be on your website whilst the site appears to be functioning normally. This is therefore a small case study at an example of how your users could be reporting no problems, but the search engine is left wondering why your site is screwed – and your search traffic therefore tumbles as a result.

When A 500 Error Is Bad For Both Users And Search Engines

While irritating for you and your site users, it’s especially irritating for search engines. They can’t crawl pages with 500 errors, at all. However these Server Error pages are usually pretty easy to come across. Normally your site will be plastered with a beautiful “Internal Server Error” message in wonderful black and white.

If your site has enough regular visitors, hopefully you’re likely to know about this fairly promptly and can get on the case via the “Please help, the internet is meaningless to me without your site being up” type of emails.

However, 500 Errors aren’t always as simple as that – sometimes your site, as far as you can tell, is functioning completely normally… except for the 500 Error hidden within the page, making search engines cry. You might not notice the damage till you next log in to Analytics, only to find that your search traffic has ground to a halt. One page might not be a big disaster, but it could be that the error is being generated in a template used across your entire site for example; then you’re really in trouble.

When 500 Errors Are Sneaky

Or in other words: Sometimes, 500 Errors can be generated whilst the page loads seemingly as normal.

This is where the previously mentioned case study comes to point. Someone with a fairly active site purely through natural search had come to ask for advice on why his site had simply stopped generating traffic from search engines. Some pages were still ranking normally, but others had just stopped receiving traffic in entirety. In fact, those pages had been completely de-indexed. A large percentage of his content had been scraped onto multiple sites and our first worry was therefore that Panda had been overly brutal to him, or there was some other major penalty, and we’d have to go through to pain of resolving what could be a hugely extensive issue.

This was till after a lot of head scratching where we stumbled across a cheeky little error message displayed in the footer of only certain pages. This was generating a 500 Error for every page using that particular template. However the pages were still live, readable and fully loaded; no luxury of the horrible “Internal Server Error” black and white page making things obvious. This had meant that while those certain pages were still useable, the internal server error was resulting in Googlebot hitting a brick wall. After a couple of weeks of that, Googlebot had got bored of the brick wall and just de-indexed the pages altogether.

As you can see from the Analytics graph above, traffic from search engines had dropped off progressively as search engines decided to give up on more and more pages, de-indexing them one by one.

So How Do You Check For This Stuff?

There are tons of tools which will scour your website from top to bottom to allow you to see any errors. Xenu, for example, is a great tool often used for 404-Hunting, but can equally be used just as well for 500-Hunting. Xenu will look for links throughout your entire site, and then report back on the status of the resulting pages. That is, unless a high order page of your site is containing a 500 Error, in which case the tool will become just as stuck as Googlebot and will be unable to crawl any further. So if your home page contains a 500 Error for example, then this is no good for finding pages deeper than your front page. However you’d at least know that your index or main category page contains a 500 Error and you therefore have a major problem. Screaming Frog will do the job just as well too, but ironically their site is down with a 500 Error as I write this.

Ouch.

Google Webmaster Tools too, if you have access to that, will display any 500 Errors on your site from the ‘Unreachable’ tab of the ‘Crawl Errors’ page.

Ok, So I’ve Found Some Errors – Now What?

I’m not going to turn this post into a ’500 Error Checklist’, so if you’re not a web developer or don’t know what’s wrong, get someone technical onto it as soon as possible. The 500 Error can be pretty vague, so it could be a whole bunch of things which are potentially wrong. If your site is displaying a server error for long enough, search engines (Bing too) will just de-index the pages, they’re ruthless like that – so sort it sooner rather than later; you don’t necessarily know how long that page has been 500′ing for.

Once you’re happy the problem is solved, run Xenu or ScreamingFrog (or similar) again and make sure all is good.

From there, you need to tell search engines that the page/s is/are back up and running – as far as they’re concerned, the page is broken until they happen to stumble across it at a later date. Depending on how often search engines crawl your site, that could be weeks. This is when I point you across to a great post on the SEOmoz blog a few weeks back – Accidental Noindexation Recovery Strategy and Results. While that post is written from another perspective (pages which have been noindexed via a robots noindex tag), the recovery strategy is entirely relevant – follow those same steps and your traffic ought to return to normal within a couple of weeks.

Like so:

It’s the latest form of Social Networking, and Google are more than keen to let their new service grow to huge proportions. However there’s another reason for the search giant wanting to see their Google+ product grow and grow. It’s not just to beat Facebook, and it’s the main reason why the social network will hugely influence the work of SEO.

Social Search

For years, SEO experts have been predicting that Social, in light of Facebook, Twitter and other social services, will become a huge influence in the world of search. Whilst some factors such as the amount of Tweets or Likes received by a page, have been proven to be fairly influential in terms of search position already; this would be nothing on the scale of what Google would like to create in the long term.

Personalised Search

To stay ahead of its competitors, and to always be able to provide a good search result for its users, Google needs to constantly adapt its algorithm and take in whatever useful information it can, to decide which page should rank where.

A great source for deciding which page you’d like to read, therefore, comes from social media. You’re far more likely to want to read a page, or buy from a service, if your friend or someone in your social circle has recommended it to you. You’ve probably also got fairly similar interests too, so Google can be fairly confident that a recommendation from a friend is what you want to see in a search result.

Currently in Google search results, if you’ve linked your Google Account with your Twitter or Facebook, you’ll see recommended results appear mixed in with natural results, such as the example below:

However with the introduction of Google+; links shared by people you follow will equally appear as recommended results within search. This hugely expands social media directly into search.

Whereas previously you’d have to make the choice of linking your Facebook or Twitter account to your Google account in order to be able to see personalised results, you’d not have to do that if you were using Google+ – it becomes active automatically.

Google+ uses your usual Google Account, meaning that if you’re signed into the social network; the next time you go to make a search, still signed in of course, you’re going to see your search results still appear fairly similarly; but with personalised results scattered around the place.

A Benefit for SEO?

Perhaps not a direct benefit for SEO, but Google+ could certainly become a great way of driving your sites further up search results and seeing additional traffic.

The more influential you are on Google+, or in other words, the higher the amount of relevant people following you, the more influence you have on search results. For example if Stephen Fry were to join Google+ and bring his millions of followers with him, he’d suddenly become one of the most powerful individuals in the search industry overnight. Any link he shares would then be recommended and displayed higher in search results, to each and every one of his millions of followers.

If Stephen Fry joined Google+, he’d become one of the most powerful individuals in search, overnight.

Of course, relevant followers are the most important part: There’s no point in having thousands of followers if the majority are bots or never even use the service. Otherwise the sites you share on Google+ end up being recommended in search results to no-one; you have no influence. Buying +1s for your site is therefore a tactic of extremely limited value. Google are highly unlikely to put much weight, if any, behind a tactic which can be so easily abused; don’t waste your money.

This is all assuming Google+ takes off with the masses of course, as it’s currently, despite now being out of beta, still only popular with (mostly) the internet industry.

Google’s idea of personalised search being the default needs a highly used and extremely popular service, akin to the level of Facebook, in order to work. If people use the social network only occasionally, it defeats the point. People will need to use Google+ so regularly that they are virtually always logged into their Google account, resulting in personalised searches being the norm for the majority of internet users.

This is a Guest Post from Raja, who is a Journalism major and blogs about all sorts of stuff. If you want to guest post, you can contact me through social media and we can talk!

Journalism isn’t quite the oldest profession in the world but the news that we read, watch and buy are indeed the result of several thousands of years of evolution. Suffice to say Journalism has come a long way from its gossip mongering and town-crying ways. With the advent of the Internet, Journalism has again undertaken an evolution, this time however, of unprecedentedly massive proportions.

Journalism is the profession that works primarily in attaining news which is deemed newsworthy for a specific medium or media in exchange for monies. The Internet has become one such medium. It is everywhere nowadays, and accessible to everyone almost everywhere. With the constantly increasing on-the-go mobile now-now-now modern life of the 21^st century, news agencies and the press have begun to go online to tap into seemingly infinite amounts of customers who want the latest news on-the-go and indeed, now-now-now.

The result of tapping into such a market can be seen plainly just by surfing the web. For a normal newspaper, there is an online mirror of it in the Internet, catering for an increasingly paper-friendly and tech-savvy society. It goes without saying that online newspapers can be easily accessed, and read anywhere, for a small subscription fee, and sometimes not even that. More often than not, it’s free, and people like free stuff.

Ease of Research

The evolution of Journalism however, is not most pronounced in its online medium, but in how easy it is to research things with the Internet. Need to investigate human trafficking? Need to come up questions for an interview with the president of Peru? Google it. A journalist needs to write a feature piece about the Italian Wars? Google it. The Internet also provides easy communication across vast distances, from journalists in the field to the news room and editorial panel, or even to interviewees and informants across the globe, allowing journalists to submit their news quickly via data transfer using the internet instead of rushing back to the news room to submit it, saving time and ultimately working at speeds never before seen before the rise of the Internet. Researching and communicating have been made easier a hundredfold just by going online, and indeed by tapping the massive resources of the internet a news agency also expands its own resources and information archives. Homework has never been easier for journalism.

Ease of Access

Everyone can be a journalist nowadays. As long as you can spell, use paragraphs; and can actually do considerably more than 5 minutes worth of research, you’re pretty much eligible for the job. You can even start your own newspaper online. It’s somewhat similar to how American Idol evolved the singing industry. Now everyone can sing, and everyone’s a judge. Similarly in the field of journalism, now everyone can take pictures, and everyone can caption them.

Conclusion

To sum it up, the internet has evolved journalism and has made it harder, better, stronger and faster by demanding the latest news immediately, forcing the media to keep pace with demand. It also opens doors for online writers to pedal their trade, or start a news company or website of their own with little to no cost but with almost certainly more profit. Everything is faster and more up to date, and everything is accessible anywhere.

This week, Google added a few interesting new features to its Search. The purpose of this post is to look at the Google Search By Image feature, and how you can use it to enjoy tons of link building opportunities.

The Obvious

First things first: the most obvious way of link building with this new awesome tool. Take your brand’s logo, and hit search. Simple as that, you’ll have a ton of sites show up which use that logo in some way. Maybe they sell your products, maybe they’ve made a review of your stuff. Whatever the situation, it’s a link building opportunity, without a doubt. If they’re mentioning your site in any way, you can be sure that a link may well be welcome on that page too. So get those URLs into a spreadsheet for research later – check if they already have a link elsewhere on the site, and if not, throw them your best link building email and sit back – these are some of the easiest links you can ever make. The example below is for the BBC logo, where over 19,000 sites were shown to be using the image! This basic search is particularly useful if you’re working on the site of a large company, for example a manufacturer, where the logo is likely to be used all over the place – but often, without a link!

Performing this basic search for a relatively small manufacturer whose site I work on found me nearly 100 link opportunities, from companies who use the products, talk about them, even use the logo, but don’t link! That’s not the end of the story though. It’s all well and good searching for your own company’s logo, but you have to think deeper than that.

The Less Obvious

The initial search is great if you’re running a large site with a load of people talking about you already. But what if you don’t have that sort of authority yet? The next step: What other logos exist on your site? Especially if you’re working with an ecommerce site, you’ll be sure to have a ton of these. Think of the products you sell, the brands who make those products, or the suppliers your company works with – all of these will have their own logos. Stick those logos into Google Image Search, and again, these are all great link building opportunites. Of course, a lot of these may well be from competitor sites using the logo themselves, but equally, a lot of these links will be for other intents, for example:

• Product Reviews – If a site is talking about a product that you stock, chances are you can get a link. Think about ways you can encourage the site owner to link to you – why should they link to your site rather than anyone else? Check key points: Is your site cheaper than what’s listed in their review? Do you stock the newer version of the product? Etc.
• Bloggers – Typically when someone buys a product and has something to say about it, they won’t mention the company they bought it from, but the brand itself. Again, if they’ve used the logo for a product which you stock, you may well be in luck.
• Etc.

Additionally, rather than logos, why not try product images themselves? Google has been proven to be pretty good at telling one image apart from another, so it’s likely that it will be able to find bloggers or other sites writing about a product (with an image!) that you sell, or something of the sort.

The Much Less Obvious

See what I did there?

Something less obvious, but probably the best link building opportunity of all which can come from this tool: What about old logos? Sites who are using old versions of your logos (and again, this works with your company logo, as well as logos of the brands and suppliers you work with), are also likely to be using either: a) Outdated links, or b) No link at all. This is why these opportunities are the best of all.

Ok, maybe not quite this old... but you get the point

What’s more, if a site has been talking about, or has been associated with your company (or brands) for long enough for the logo to go out of date, then chances are the relationship there is pretty strong. Jump in on that strong relationship and grab yourself an easy link.

Seems as though Google have started testing longer descriptions for search results as of today for long-tail terms. For example, try this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=long+tail+searches+show+more+of+the+description – or click the image below to expand the search results.

From having given this a quick test this so far, it looks as if the longer descriptions are only triggered once a phrase gets to five words or more.

While search results don’t seem to have changed (will need confirmation on this, I don’t tend to keep an eye on long-tail results all that much), the description length certainly has – with some entries now having up to four lines of description per entry. Surely this isn’t Google trying to improve it’s long-tail results by such a lazy method as just giving the user more to read to determine their choice?

This is actually an interesting change, as Google seems to have got much worse at handling long-tail results after the Panda update, in my opinion. Or at least, I haven’t been able to find the result I’ve wanted via a long-tail search since Panda rolled out, very rarely at least.

What’s perhaps slightly concerning is the apparent belief from most SEOs at the Search Marketing Expo in London yesterday and today is that Google is actually better with long tail terms than Bing. With the state of Google’s long-tail results at present, that’s a cause for concern for the Bing developers if their product is even worse.

Today at the first day of Google IO presentations, it was announced that the much anticipated +1 Button of Google’s was due in a matter of weeks. Considering this was only announced a month or so ago, for myself personally, this is much earlier than I’d expected (which is great).

About the only thing I despise about the whole feature is the icon/button Google have chosen to use – unlike Twitter’s Tweet or Facebook’s Like buttons, it doesn’t sit quite as nicely on the page and is ugly to say the least. Fussy mini-rant over.

One thing I do wonder, however, is how much impact the +1 button will have on search results. If as is (sort of) expected, it has a more direct effect on search results than Tweets and Likes, then I could somewhat see it overtaking Twitter and Facebook in terms of most-used sharing facilities. Considering Twitter and Facebook are shown to have a good level of correlation on search results, but were said to have little effect on search results themselves, I can’t see it taking much for +1s to overtake Tweets and Likes. Google are going to want their version of the like button to be the most popular one, so it makes sense to do this too.

Actually most importantly, Google can’t afford another product of theirs to fail – if +1 falls in the same way Buzz did, they will be in big trouble and will have their reputation on the line. I’m therefore expecting some heavy promotion of the feature, and I hope it will be as easy for anyone to use as possible. For example, it won’t go well if Google insist on having a Google Account in order to +1 something – not many people actually have those, and of those who do, how often are they actually logged in? If there’s a login feature involved, it won’t work – keep it plain and simple where everyone understands it, regardless of their level of internet expertise (Seriously, go ask your parents what a tweet is, then once you’ve explained it, see if they can manage to pull it off). If someone who comes online once a week can understand how to use it, and can use it without having to fill out a form they’re not interested in, it’ll be a great success.

The only thing then to battle are those who will inevitably be out to spam the crap out of the buttons. However with simplicity in mind, if the vast majority of internet users can, and do, use the +1 button, great sources ought to rise to the top naturally regardless. More to it than that though, of course, but that’s one of the main reason I hope logins are kept well away from the +1 button itself.

This brings me to my thoughts on this – while Twitter and Facebook are great to build your community and bring in positive traffic, neither traffic gains come anything close to what can be achieved with natural search. At least in my experience, a good tweet can bring a big jump in traffic temporarily, and might earn you some good links in return, but why work on these sort of “ifs” when the +1 button ought to be a direct gain in search results and therefore organic traffic?

I run a web forum where despite being an online community, a huge percentage (99%…) of users don’t use Facebook, let alone Twitter. Getting pages upon pages of comments in topics? No problem. Getting users to tweet or like a topic when they comment on it? Nigh on impossible. The only reason is that they aren’t signed up to Twitter or Facebook, simple as that. Another reason therefore that a login-less +1 button would be great.

Make social easier, for those who aren’t social (yet).

If +1 was without logins, rather using cookies instead, this is why it would be a great success. Suddenly those who comment on a topic on a forum, on a blog, on whatever, can hit the +1 button without having to sign up to something they don’t want, and suddenly that great topic/post that they felt inspired to reply to, can get some indication to Google that it’s a great resource too. Twitter and Facebook are great methods of finding quality information, but it’s quite limited even these days to a quite specific range of users; the very-regular internet-goers. I feel it’s quite a tight-knit niche of users who use social share functions regularly; and therefore I feel it’s important to have a very generic method of showing a page is of importance, without having to go link hunting. Make social easier, for those who aren’t social (yet), and If Google +1 is like this, fantastic – if it’s a pure copy of Tweets or Likes but in a Google-form then frankly, who cares, no one wants to sign up to be able to click another button.

If it’s the former, however, I might even go as far as removing the Tweet and Like buttons from my site, and slap a big +1 button there instead. One button, press it if you like what you see, et voila. A lot of communities have a huge member base who aren’t so tech-savvy and therefore get very little benefit from Tweets and Likes, purely because the niche of the community couldn’t care less about it and don’t want to get involved.

I’d be interested to hear what others think though – I honestly feel that if Google involves a login via Google Accounts (or similar) to be able to use the feature, it’s going to crash and burn – not to mention the fact that we simply already have enough like/tweet/favourite buttons – take social sharing in a different direction is the way to go.

By the way – there is some further information about +1 over at Search Engine Land, including the sort of things to be expected of the button via Google Analytics, all of which was shown in today’s Google IO presentation.

…Without being in their face about it.

Today I stumbled across a great widget, which I’m honestly stunned to say that I’ve never seen in use before. Hence this post, because I feel it deserves being written about! Ok, I say stumbled; I was looking, but I didn’t expect to see something so perfectly set up and easy to use – I expected some hacked together rubbish, which after all my effort, probably wouldn’t work properly anyway.

Instead I came across Like it? Tweet it! – which simply put, allows users to post a tweet, straight from your website, but without being intrusive on user experience. I hope Andy Grauland (creator) doesn’t mind me using this video, as it shows pretty damn well what Like it? Tweet it! is all about. This all loads in the corner of your browser so you can read and tweet, by the way, something which isn’t shown in the video.

I was looking for something quite specific, which would do just this. I wanted to be able to load a small window in the corner of the browser, which allowed visitors to post to twitter without having to open a tab; or in other words, without having to move away from the site. As well as causing a potential distraction, driving them away from the site, people are also lazy: having to copy a URL, or head off to Twitter by themselves, to write their message, just isn’t going to happen. Sure there are other things like Tweet buttons which do most of this for you, but they’re hardly as intuitive and as memorable as Like it? Tweet it! In comparison, this allows the user to sit on the page, reading the post, while they tweet.

For me personally, I run a forum where I’m trying to encourage my moderating staff to contribute more to our quite frankly, dwindling, twitter account. Only problem being that none of them use the service, at all. So getting them to do that is a right pain in the… y’know. We have a global twitter account for the forum, but without making things completely readily available for them, none of them are ever going to use it. Basically I wanted a service which would allow the moderators to be viewing a topic, a blog post, an article, and when they think; “Oh, this is cool”, they post it on twitter. This allows that to happen. Sitting in the bottom right corner of the site for them is now a link to open the Like it? Tweet it! widget. Instantly they are connected to twitter via the forum twitter account, and immediately they can share what they think is a cool post. It’s just a click away, no new windows to open, no new tabs, so simple.

In fact speaking of simple, the whole thing is so easy to set up too. So long as you’ve got jQuery installed on your site (and if you don’t, that’s virtually a copy-paste job anyway), it’s literally a case of copying three lines of code, and, uh, that’s it. Really.

What’s also great is that the widget by default adds an uneditable link to the tweet for the page that you’re currently on. So no fuss about that, and no worrying about getting the link wrong either. You can even specify your own link shortening service for the widget, so it’s pretty awesome. And what I really love about it, is how tidy it all is. As I said at the beginning of this post, I completely expected to see something either way over the top, or barely usable, and this is neither of those things. Even when the widget is completely open, the user can still scroll through the page virtually unhindered, able to read more about the post, and write their tweet with the information right there in front of them.

Maybe I’ll write a new post in a couple of weeks, or add to this one, to see how well it kicks off. Honestly I’m really impressed with this widget and stunned that I’ve not seen it in use before, and I think it should work wonders!

On February 28th, Google rolled out it’s Farmer Update of the search engine, which at the time only affected searches made in the US. It’s otherwise known as the Panda Update, after a Google Engineer who implemented the algorithm change. Today, April 11th, the update rolled out to UK searches too – which for myself, where a huge percent of traffic to my sites comes from UK searches, is great news.

The Panda Update, for those of you not in the SEO-know, affects sites which: a) Frequently use content which is duplicated elsewhere; otherwise known as a content farm, hence the name – and/or b) Displays Ads aggressively across their site (not so farmer-y)

For keeping search results actually looking genuine, such an update is vital. At the beginning of a post on SEOMoz today, there is a great example of how poor search results have become; and it’s not just for this example – search anything these days and you have often have great difficulty telling a genuine listing apart from something which has been forced there. I know that definitely in the past few days when I’ve been searching, specifically for some longer tail keywords, it’s been nigh on impossible to find what I actually want. I shouldn’t have to give up because the search engine simply can’t find me a decent result.

So, as much as a pain the update might be for some of you SEO people; it’s entirely your own fault if your site gets affected by this. I’ve seen competitors of my main site content scraping from blogs for years, and it’s about time they get what they deserve. If content is copied once in a while because it’s of genuine value and you want to highlight how great an article was; maybe the site it’s hosted on is a bit poor and the article could do with a bit more exposure; then fine, so long as you give the credit. But when your site is generating hundreds of pages of content which is completely duplicated from other blogs, posting to your site automatically when they make the post, come on, this is not what you deserve to be ranking with.

Anyway, the point of this post was that I wanted to highlight what happens when the Farmer/Panda update brings benefits to a site. There’s a lot of negative blog posts about the update, showing traffic in massive decline for sites; but as I say, they somewhat deserve it. In comparison, a site of mine has seen some great traffic gains – not because our positions have improved in search results (although I suppose, technically they have), but because the competitors who did all that content scraping, have fallen. I’ve always been of the belief that if you see something that you think is dodgy on a site, but is making them rank, you shouldn’t copy their methods. One day the PhDs at Google are going to figure out a way to clamp down on their dodgy methods, and you’ll come out on top.

A forum of mine has seen some great results since the update hit for US results. For the week after the Panda Update hit the US servers, search traffic from US visitors nearly doubled from Google. I hope the graph below indicates that fairly well. The green dot is the week where the Panda update took effect.

As a result, the month of March was easily a record for the site. Visits were up a huge amount, having again almost doubled in comparison to any month previously. I have to stress that no SEO work (nothing out of the ordinary) was done on the site in the period either; so we’re looking at gains entirely from Panda. The site isn’t hugely active, but it’s been noticeable with the activity of the forum as a whole. In February and previously, we were looking at around 700 unique visitors per day. From February 28th onwards, we’ve been looking at 1500-1700 unique visitors per day. I love Panda.

The US contributes for just over 40% of the site’s traffic; the UK only 25%. However if the algorithm update in the UK can have anything like as much effect as the US version, then it’ll keep me happy for months to come. If you’ve got a similar story, I’d love to hear it!