It has been nearly two months since we last posted on the blog and a lot of things have happened.

We’ve launched IB 2.0, Google updated their algorithm impacting our traffic slightly and we’ve been feverishly trying to fix every last little bug that has popped up with IB 2.0.

The Launch of InfoBarrel 2.o

Looking back at the launch of IB 2.0, things could have definitely gone smoother.  We didn’t expect there to be as many glitches in the software as there was, but unfortunately it was something we had to deal with and it definitely put a strain on everybody.  We have now cleaned up the majority of the larger bugs and are now focused on tidying up little problems that are less prominent.

In the coming weeks and months, we will begin moving forward with some exciting new features that will help further distinguish InfoBarrel from other sites in the vertical.  Expect to see more elements available when creating content. These elements will give you the ability to create content that is media rich and interactive giving readers an overall better experience.

Google’s Panda Update (Farmer)

As most people are aware, Google rolled out an algorithm update on February 24th code named ‘Panda’.  This update is intended to reduce the volume of low quality thin content within Google’s search index.  As a result of having 60,000+ pieces of content online, we did feel the affects of this update and lost roughly 20% of our overall search traffic. While this was an unfortunate situation we were affected much less than some other major sites that saw their search traffic drop by 50% or more.  We can attribute this to the fact that we are one of the only crowd sourced web sites that has an in depth editorial process.  By continuing to manually approve articles and tweak our quality guidelines we can dramatically reduce the chance of spammy or thin content being published on our platform.  With that said, we have watched our traffic climb back up over the past month, and would estimate we should pass where we were prior to the update by mid April.

Search engine updates are always going to play a large part in online business.  We have been involved in online marketing and business for over ten years now and have seen dozens of other major algorithm roll outs.  Rest assured we will do everything in our power to always stay within the guidelines of the search engines, and will always evolve to make sure we meet or beat the criteria set forth to be considered a quality site.

While people are nervous about the algorithm change, if you are creating high quality content you should have nothing to worry about.

We are still extremely excited about the future of this site and look forward to watching it evolve over the years.

I’d like to personally thank each and every person that contributes for making this place what is is today.

As some people are aware, Google is beginning to crack down on content they believe to be low quality.  As a result we are going to start being more strict on what we consider quality content.

Moving forward all content published on InfoBarrel must be high quality and must provide actual value to the user.  Articles created to be doorway pages for search engine optimization will not be published.  A contextual link within an article that provides value to the reader is not a problem, however an article that talks about “Tips for purchasing pink rugs” that rambles on common sense about pink rugs and fails to deliver on it’s title will no longer be accepted.

Our goal is to create a very high quality database of content that is helpful to people of all walks of life.

If you come across an article that appears to be a doorway page for SEO, please flag it so we can keep this place the best place to publish content.

We are not planning on doing any mass deletes, or anything along those lines, however if one of your articles becomes flagged we will send you an email with the article in question and ask you to resolve the issue within a reasonable time frame.

For more information on what Google considers a doorway page, please see the following page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355&hl=en

Hey everybody,

Over the last month we were starting to run into some server issues thanks to the tremendous growth we’ve been seeing.  You probably noticed the server was running slower than normal and issues were popping up left, right and center.

In order to allow for substantially more growth we’ve completed a major migration to a MUCH more powerful server.  Double the CPU cores, double the RAM and double the hard drive space.  What this means for all the members of Infobarrel should be much quicker load times, and hopefully more people sticking around reading your content.

If you do happen to run into any bugs, please make sure to contact us.  We’ve taken every precaution to make sure this goes as smoothly as possible (outside of the mysql errors yesterday), but sometimes things slip through the cracks.
Thanks!

Ryan