I remember the first time I heard about it. 
It was sometime in the early-mid 2000s, and I was visiting a pet shop in Bemidji, Minnesota where my friend Eric worked. When he wasn’t running the till, most of his job consisted of cleaning up after a giant Flemish rabbit that had the run of the place. It chewed on cardboard boxes, crapped and peed on everything, and made constant attempts to escape. Worst of all, it wasn’t even friendly. I was probably there buying rat food, as I was keeping rats as pets at the time (I know that sounds weird). Pet shops, which are like strip mall zoos, can be fun places to visit, if you can look past the sad expressions of the animals in the cages. Perhaps they train them to do that to attract customers by playing on humanities natural sense of empathy and anthropomorphism–or maybe they are just really miserable creatures? We were all miserable creatures back then: just out of college, our lives had no direction, we were working stupid jobs to get by, Bush was president, Facebook hadn’t been invented yet, Bemidji liquor stores had a shitty beer selection. But Eric had this thing he told me that he was working on: writing articles about cleaning, pest control, and animal care. It wasn’t quite blogging, it wasn’t quite journalism. He was making money, but I didn’t understand how. He had a friend, he told me, a BSU English major, who ran this website, and this friend was close to quitting all of his other jobs to devote more time to Internet writing.
Who can do that?
It seemed far-fetched. I kind of put it in the back of my mind. The idea kept growing in the years after that, as I heard more and more about these websites and how successful they were becoming. Eventually my brother Nils started writing a few articles for him as well. Evidently this friend of theirs, Jonathan, had worked at Concordia Language Villages, where my brother and I had been employed for the previous seven years. I didn’t recall meeting Jonathan, but there were so many people working there at the time and the villages were so isolated, that such a coincidence wasn’t that uncommon. I still didn’t believe that it was possible to make a living as an Internet writer. Sure a few people had made the jump from blogger to author after being discovered online, but the market was flooded. However, the evidence was right in front of me: he was doing it.
It must have been a fluke.
Maybe he could do it, but it wasn’t something I could do. My writing skills were nothing short of dreadful, a fact that had been repeatedly verified by several college professors. My talents have always been more geared towards the visual. I can draw things very easily, it’s something I’ve always been able to do. While others were making stick figures in elementary school, I was drawing chairo scuro faces. Many of my ancestors had been artists or creative in some way. In my case, though, I think it has more to do with early encouragement and practice than genetic propensity. It certainly isn’t, as my parents would say, a God given gift. In the age of digital photography, drawing skills aren’t worth much, but maybe, just maybe they are the skills that I could use to be a part of this mysterious website business.
Then my opportunity came. My brother, after making some much-needed life changes, had moved to the great metropolis of Saint Paul. His housemate, who I would finally meet (at least that I can remember), was none-other-than Jonathan, the guy who ran the website business. They were working on using Nils’s passion for cooking to create a new recipe based website. This was a pretty exciting idea and seemed like it was bound to be successful. We had a conversation one evening, where I was describing my recent foray into homesteading. My wife and I had just bought a small acreage in rural southwestern Minnesota. We were raising goats, chickens, pigs, cows, bees, ducks, turkeys, and had a huge garden. He seemed interested and saw potential for turning it into a (still unrealized) website of some sort. He asked me to document anything that could be turned into a step-by-step do-it-yourself article. So I did, and have continued to do so. Many of the photos have just ended up on Facebook and I think that’s probably the only place they will ever be seen, now.
I learned that day that Jonathan wasn’t just making a living, he was making serious bank. And it was that day that I really learned how it was done. There was a reason his websites were averaging 100,000 unique views a day. It had to do with the way people search for things on the Internet. They ask their browser questions, “How do I get rid of ____?” This has changed over time as people have learned that often a well-chosen combination of keywords will bring up a better result than a complete sentence. But millions of people were searching for solutions for getting rid of this or that, and millions of people were finding his websites in the coveted first or second place of their search engine results page. This doesn’t happen easily. You can optimize your site to a certain extent to better reflect and match the types of queries users might type into the Google search box, but his site was more than that. It was thorough, well researched, funny, thought provoking, and people really liked it. That means that thousands of people were linking to his domain. They were recommending his site to each other on bulletin boards, technology blogs, and early incarnations of social media. He was even getting some attention in the mainstream media. An article in The New York Times magazine recommended his site as a resource for solving everyday, household problems. That article was hanging in a frame on the wall of their 24th floor downtown apartment. A nice reminder that even someone from a small town in northern Minnesota can have an impact on the world.
The business was growing; there was no stopping it.
Other sites using a similar concept started popping up all over. They saw his success and wanted to copy it and surpass it by exploiting the system. Many of these sites were producing low-quality crap that was often blatantly plagiarized or paraphrased versions of his articles. Every incarnation of every search phrase or keyword had been mined for every penny they could squeeze out of the poor unsuspecting Internet user. Occasionally these competitors would raise in the ranks by using a frowned-upon method of buying or exchanging incoming links from other websites. Google’s original concept for search ranking, in which sites with the most people linking to them signaled relevance, made it easy to game your way to the top. Huge corporations were behind some of these websites. One example, eHow, a subsidiary of the publicly traded company (check out their stock prices post-panda) called Demand Media bragged that it had over a million articles. Even with all of this going on, Jonathan’s websites were still holding their own. This speaks to their quality, I think. Quality being something that Google’s algorithm has yet to master. No super computer can judge the aesthetics of a painting. Sure it could analyze the colors used and probably sense compositional balance. It could compare the painting to other known paintings and give you a probability of worth based upon certain similarities. The same is true of Internet writing. It is certainly true that the software necessary to analyze an article made up of some 1,500 words would be far less complex than the software necessary to judge a painting’s color, however, this simplicity leaves another weakness to be exploited. Website builders set to work reverse engineering the algorithms used by Google to produce their results. What could a computer use to measure the worth of one pile of words over another?
In the winter of 2010 Jonathan’s company, now called Saint Paul Media, embarked upon a new website project. It would cover the
topic of pest control in a simple but comprehensive way. Eric, my friend from the pet store, had also moved to the twin cities, and the site was kind of his baby. I was asked to help with the website by doing some black and white illustrations of the pests to be controlled. I jumped at the chance. I was going to make some money from drawing! This is a rare thing, believe me! I set to work with intensity, drawing over 70 illustrations. I did it the old fashioned way: pencil on paper. The drawings were then scanned into digital files and modified using GIMP (free photoshop) to bring out the contrast and make the negative space match the white background of the website template. When the website was getting close to launch, there were some articles that needed to be written, and when I inquired about writing them I was assigned a list of topics and given a deadline.
I was in.
Writing the first couple of articles was extremely difficult. I labored over research, and I found it tough to balance anecdotes and facts–often erasing great big sections of digressions, inserting and second-guessing myself over jokes and word choice. But I did it. I had written something of value. I had my start. Over the course of the next year I would write another 150 articles on a huge variety of topics, with word counts in the 1,200-1,500 range. It was one of the biggest periods of productivity in my life. After years of performing service after menial pointless service to make a living, I was getting paid to create something; I was motivated; I was making an investment in my future; I was enjoying what I was doing and I was learning a lot in the process. It seemed like it wouldn’t be long before I could make a break from the service industry nightmare in which I had been entrenched for decades. I was getting generously paid by Jonathan for writing each article and my Adsense earnings seemed to keep growing every month. I was amazed and humbled to think about the millions of people who were reading my words. With that brought a certain amount of pressure; I couldn’t screw this up. People were using my advice to try and improve their lives. This is a big responsibility. I took it very seriously, we all did.
I could see it before me: in two years I would be debt free. I could go back to school, we could consider having children, I could work from home and be a stay at home dad. I could participate in Jonathan’s Thailand charity, The Nonsomboon Project, and help people in other countries. My life would have meaning, my parents would be proud of me, I would feel happy, maybe I could lose weight, afford a better car, or get health insurance for the first time in five years. This made me want to work even more, write more articles, spend more time at my keyboard alone, neglecting all else, so that I would have more time later. I made a huge sacrifice because I thought it would pay off. How could it not pay off? The analytical graph that I checked every day showed it going only one direction. It’s when you are focused on one direction so intently that you expose yourself to a hit from behind, a sucker punch, a blindside. And that’s just what happened to me and my friends April 11, 2011. The day which will forever live in infamy. The day Google rolled out its Panda update worldwide. The day the music died.
The Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) is an herbivorous bear native to China. It is unique,first of all, for its black and white 
color pattern, but also for the fact that its diet consists almost entirely of bamboo. They are an endangered species and it is estimated that there are fewer than 2,000 bears left living in the wild. The so-called Panda updates of 2011 were named after an engineer at Google named Navneet Panda, so the correlation between a helpless herbivorous bear and the algorithmic change that ruined my life is entirely coincidental. Another earlier name for the updates was “Farmer” so named because the target of the change was websites that were supposedly farming content. This means that they were mass-producing pages heavily laden with keywords, built in link clout, and tons of advertising for the sole purpose of attracting search traffic to make money. The pages are their crop. Of course, to a certain extent, any web page that attempts to make money (or even cover expenses with advertising) fits into that metaphor. But just like there are good and bad farmers in the real world, there are good and bad content farmers. Google evidently is incapable of telling the difference. In the real world you can basically tell what kind of farmer runs a farm by the way he treats his crop and how he tends his fields. There are farmers who give their animals the best life they can, farming with organic methods, working with nature, and trying to provide the best product they can to their customers. Then there are farmers who just see profits and smell money. They spray their fields with poisons and pump their animals full of antibiotics and hormones. The same is true of content producers on the Internet.
The algorithm changes of 2011 were meant to improve the search results by weeding out bad content. Google employed an army of human website testers to comb through the web rating websites, not to use those rankings directly, but to collect metrics with which they could program a sort of artificial intelligence. For whatever reason, the websites that my friends and I have dedicated our lives to building have been deemed less relevant across the board. Our traffic flow collapsed almost instantly. We were stunned as the summer (normally our best season) went on and our profits continued to plummet. We were left grasping at straws, making huge changes, redesigning the look of the site, erasing articles, resurrecting them, trying to find some reason, some thread of possibility that would lead us out of this disaster. Rumors were flying around the web as to possible solutions. Perhaps isolating lesser articles into subdomains would help protect the rest of your site from demotion? Was the site ranked on an article to article basis or did they see it as a whole? What if we divided the whole site up into subdomains? It seems to have worked for other sites. We’re desperate, we’ll try anything. Within a week of implementing the subdomain solution, our stress level started to go down as our traffic seemed to return. We had solved the riddle, again.
That episode, as disastrous as it was, served to convince me that I could not completely rely on anything as fickle as web traffic and search rankings to pay my bills every month. As depressing as it was, I knew I needed to get another job, and if I keep earning money from the websites, all the better. If not, at least I had my real world jobs to fall back on. Some of my coworkers weren’t so lucky. They had already quit their other careers and invested themselves fully into the websites. When things fell apart they were forced to draw down on their savings. Though many were sensible enough to see the writing on the wall, as I did, and found other work, all the while working on the website and hoping things would return. The subdomain solution proved to be a short reprieve as the fall of 2011 brought further algorithmic changes that not only negated anything we had gained back, they left us in an even worse position. Every month since my earnings have decreased. Every month fewer and fewer people find our pages. Eventually Google will have succeeded in choking our beautiful, helpful, elegant, web business into obscurity. I don’t know if this has been intentional on their part or if we were collateral damage, but I don’t think it matters. They are wrong.
Every new addition Google makes to the way their search engine works takes them farther and farther away from the pure search experience that made them such a success. The more they favor results from entities which they own, such as Youtube, the more they seem to embody the definition of the word monopoly. When you are as big as they are, when you own all of the arms of the octopus, it doesn’t matter who you run over in the process of boosting your bottom line. Google hasn’t been hurt by losing our business and the reduction in ad revenue. Any money and traffic that my company has lost has just been distributed to other people, probably entities in which Google has more control. They seem to favor corporations over content made by users, and I’m not sure what to think about their desperate insertion of Google+ content into the results. It’s so irrelevant that it almost seems ridiculous or even pathetic.
They say that their company’s motto is “Don’t be evil,” well tell me Google, what was so evil about our web business that you had to so completely and ruthlessly destroy it? Even if I had time to write more articles, I have been so thoroughly demoralized by the experience that I don’t know if I could string two words together that made any sense. You made 2011 one of the worst years of my life, Google, and intentional or not, that’s pretty fucking evil.
Pricks.
