Sophie Lee got a shock when she checked her website's statistics data on 24 February. The number of visitors to her site about irritable bowel syndrome, IBStales.com, which she has run since 2003 and relies on for her income, had dropped precipitously. "It was so sudden," she says. "They had halved overnight." Some examination quickly showed what had happened: Google's engineers had tweaked the company's search ranking system, in what later became known as the "Panda update", and demoted Lee's site so that rather than appearing, as it had, among the key first 10 results when people put "IBS" or "irritable bowel syndrome" into Google's search box, it was now about 300th. And being on that first page is crucial: a recent study showed that 89% of clicks are on those 10 results. Suddenly, Lee's site – which is her livelihood – had effectively vanished from the sight of searchers in the US. Worse was to come: a couple of weeks later Google extended the Panda update to the UK. And in October it tweaked its search algorithms again, as it says it does constantly – and Lee saw another fall in visitors. "We were crushed by the Panda update, and the site is now gasping for breath," she said. "Traffic is down 75%, revenue is down 90%, and I'm getting seriously worried about the future." She has never bought adverts on Google, and isn't thinking of doing so now. "Everybody says not to rely on Google, but there's no way around it," she says. Source and full article :- guardian.co.uk
Even though Panda is old news, but its still haunting and torturing webmasters like Lee and us here on DP... Waiting for next algorithm update to see the rise or fall of sites...
Three months after the Panda debacle, Google posted news of a 30+% increase in their return from Ad sales without any significant increase in running cost. Of course the news was to encourage more investors and frankly that's all they are interested in. Yet they have and will always claim that their modifications are in your best interest and for quality of search results. Yawn...
Google didn't know this stories behind every site, if the site is going to be affected, so be it if they didn't pass the standard, especially on the legitimacy and originality of content vs stolen contents. Too bad but Google pursue this reality, the worst is not all being affected doesn't follow Google guidelines, they are who deserved to rank but being hit.