Significant Google Algo Update

[agerhart]

Impacts scraper sites

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4259541.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4261944.htm

[grnidone]

Bit late to the part, Andrew:  http://th3core.com/talk/threadwatch/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update/

[Rooftop]

Thanks for posting it out here for us commoners

[rcjordan]

Google: "But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what's going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

"we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. "

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html


Demand Media: "at this point in time, we haven't seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business."

http://www.demandmedia.com/blog/a-statement-about-search-engine-algorithm-changes/

[eurotrash]

Based on a dataset of one million keywords, which were checked before the update and yesterday I can determine the biggest loser of this algorithm-change. The SISTRIX VisibilityIndex is an index value calculated from traffic on keywords, ranking and click-through rate on specific positions. Let's start with a list of the 25 biggest losers:

http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html

[4Eyes]

thats interesting ET

Seeing how much Ezinearticles, and the like, got hit, I wonder what the knock-on effect will be for sites relying on links from them.

Anyone seen anything?

[eurotrash]

Good point 4Eyes - hadn't thought of that one but should have.  Luckily don't visit that many of them and definitely don't have any dependence at all on links from them.

Just noticed Aaron's really good article, which takes the whole thing a bit further.   Aaron just thinks and writes really well.

http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors (great graphic at the end)

I like his little dig at JasonC

[rcjordan]

Thanks, ET, that Top 25 is far more meaningful than all the google-kills-the-boogey-man chatter out there.

This comment caught my eye: "Wait a second - the change punished all of these sites but not eHow? That's arguably the worst offender of all!   hhh!

[thesaintv12]

thats interesting ET

Seeing how much Ezinearticles, and the like, got hit, I wonder what the knock-on effect will be for sites relying on links from them.

Anyone seen anything?

Yes, I did. 

The only sites I didn't see a hit on were those with link exchange as a high percentage of the link profile.

I also noticed that sites with adsense on got hit the hardest ( and not just MFA sites).  I am going to test removing adsense on a few and see if they bounce back.

Sadly I have never taken the time to exactly analyse the link profiles to my sites, so can't be as specific as I would like.  I will start doing this now though I think.

[Gurtie]

Picking up on a dazzlingdonna comment on seobook, has anyone got any data on fair sized SME sites which have content provision - the sort of 'experts in their field' articles and blogging which a lot of businesses have been using for longtail and differentiation lately? It sounds like some of these may have got caught in the crossfire?

I have no proper US data tracking at the moment but I'd like some warning when this rolls out over here if all those longtails currently sending traffic are going to ditch, and also I have a few links coming from quality articles (but lets face it, quality in the eyes of google is what counts here) on sites which I wouldn't call content farms exactly but might well end up in the collateral damage field when this rolls out worldwide, so if anyone has info on whether the links are taking a hit when a site drops rankings, that would also give me something else to worry about....

[thesaintv12]

thats interesting ET

Seeing how much Ezinearticles, and the like, got hit, I wonder what the knock-on effect will be for sites relying on links from them.

Anyone seen anything?

Yes, I did. 

The only sites I didn't see a hit on were those with link exchange as a high percentage of the link profile.

I also noticed that sites with adsense on got hit the hardest ( and not just MFA sites).  I am going to test removing adsense on a few and see if they bounce back.

Sadly I have never taken the time to exactly analyse the link profiles to my sites, so can't be as specific as I would like.  I will start doing this now though I think.

Sorry, to requote my own post, but it is almost like the big G were reading it and decided that, yes my sites do provide value! 

During the day today, all the sites I had that were hit have returned to almost the same positions.  I must stress that I changed nothing on these sites and did no extra link building. 

Anyone else seen a change today (I can't help thinking that those in the 'inner core' might be far ahead of me on this one)?

[agerhart]

http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html

[4Eyes]

Why did EzineArticles do so well in the years leading up to Thursday?

Simple: Our Expert Authors DELIVERED great content that caused visitors to either click on a link back to their website or on an advertisement (how EzineArticles stays free to our members) instead of bouncing back to Google or any search engine to look for a better result

LOL - My article elf, by her own admission, doesn't have great English - she has been delivering them partly spun articles written partly by her, and partly by bottom dollar sub-elves for a couple of years now. 'She' was accepted as an 'Expert Author' and in two years has had just one article bounced.

How long will that take before traffic recovers and climbs again? I have no idea. I'm hopeful that Google won't allow sites with even lower quality content to take the positions that our members previously had occupied.

- what a give away.... "even lower quality content"... surely they meant to say just 'lower quality'.


Credit to them for a spirited defense, but perhaps if one of their 'experts' had checked it first they might have worded it better.

[Rooftop]

Has anyone seen/got any inciteful analysis on how G is judging this content quality yet?  Few people seem to be suggesting more weight being given to clickstream. Likely?

Also, everyone is talking about the big losers in this (and I think expecting most of them to get hit in advance).  Does this seem to be mostly affecting large content sites, or is the content itself being dealt with whether it is on large or small sites?

[ergophobe]

The Sistrix data is amazing - ezinearticles down 90% and Squidoo... untouched. Really, what's the difference?

This line from the ezinarticles blog post blew me away:

Expect to see our current article rejection rate (40.6%) climb by another ~20%.

I'd hate to see what makes up the 40.6%.