Panda, You Got Me Again!

The return of Google's Panda resembled having a flashback. I went to bed one night, proud of the stats for the day. Suite101 was steadily climbing higher in both page views and earnings. My sites, especially FM, was growing in page views and revenue.

I awoke the next day and logged on to go through my normal  stat check routine. What can I say? I love watching the FM stats rise. But this site hadn't had a single view. I wasn't too worried; it was still early. I moved on through the various sites that provide my residual earnings and my heart was dropping lower and lower. By the time I made it to Suite101, my heart was somewhere around my stomach. And with the huge drop in my Suite stats, I had succeeded in walking on my own heart.

A quick search proved my gut instinct was right. Panda was back. The latest Panda smack down is pretty bad. I'm not ashamed to admit that my earnings took a swift nose dive into the land of barely nothing and they took my page views with them. I had my very first 0 page views day in 13 weeks here at FM on Friday and haven't made a penny in three days. At Suite101, my page views dropped by 71% and my earnings are close behind at a 64% decrease. Since I combine my other passive income sites into one statistic in my spreadsheets, that group is down about 58%.

I expect Google to make changes often and I figured there would be many more similar Panda attacks before Google was satisfied with their content returns. But I didn't expect it would be so soon or that my stats would be affected so drastically. But I know as quickly as they fell, they will rise again. As long as I continue to publish articles, my earnings will continue to climb. Freelance writing is like a roller coaster and to succeed and finish the ride, you have to be able to stomach the hills, drops, loops and turns.