The unemployment rate as released on October 7th is at 9.1%, pretty high for U.S. standards. How does that relate to the SEO industry? Well, it doesn't but it is unusually close to the 9.2% of you who claimed you lost your job because of the
Google Panda Update.
We ran a poll a couple weeks ago asking Did You Lose Your Job Because Of Google Panda? and we had 250 responses since then.
Most of you said, no you are doing fine. But 9.2% of you said you lost your job directly related to the Panda update. That is 23 people who said they lost their jobs.
Not only that, 6.8% said they had to lay off people because of the Panda update. So while 23 people responded they lost their jobs, at least another 17 people lost their jobs or more. Layoffs typically mean multiple people.
A shocking 25% of you are "afraid" you may lose your job or may have to layoff people because of the Panda update. That means, business is not good, traffic is down or your SEO client is blaming you for their downgrade in rankings.
Here is the distribution of answers to my poll:
Some of the comments we received within the poll include:
- Facing serious challenges with clients!!!
- Major Lost Revenue
- have had to go and find extra work to make up for lost income
- Lost clients
- Got a job doing SEO because they got hit
For more on this topic, see our Google Panda topic.
Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.
Image from Lasse Kristensen/Shutterstock.
Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.
