Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google’s announcement did not mention content farms. But Mr. Cutts has spoken in recent weeks about the problem and said Google was working on algorithm changes to fix it. “In general, there are some content farms that I think it would be fair to call spam, in the sense that the quality is so low-quality that people complain,” he said in a recent interview.
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. [googleblog.blogspot.com...]
Demand Media Response:
[demandmedia.com...]How our content reaches the consumer – whether it’s through direct visits, social media referrals, apps or search – has always been important to and monitored closely by us. We also recognize that major search engines like Google have and will continue to make frequent changes. We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer. So naturally we applaud changes search engines make to improve the consumer experience – it’s both the right thing to do and our focus as well.
Today, Google announced an algorithm change to nearly 12% of their U.S. query results. As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results.This is consistent with what Google discussed on their blog post. It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term – but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business.
Just before so-called "content farm" Demand Media went public in January at a $1.5-billion valuation, Google said that it was planning to make some changes to its search algorithms to clamp down on the profusion of low-quality results from content farms. Last night, the search giant finally rolled out those changes, and they appear to be a dagger aimed directly at the heart of companies such as Demand, whose stock tumbled on the news.
(Emphasis mine)
"If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits."
...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
my site lost 50% of traffic.
Bewenched: Maybe they're playing around with the algo to let the turds float up so they can be wiped off. I've seen this happen before and I wont be surprised if results havent gotten better come monday afternoon.
why does everyone hate eHow so much?
Well, I submitted a reconsideration request for my client's site. I honestly believe that it was hit as a false positive. I'll let everyone know how that goes.
They have way more questions than they have answers.
Why a reconsideration request? Where you removed from the index completely? Does Webmaster Tools state anything?
[edited by: OldIrish at 10:01 pm (utc) on Feb 25, 2011]
What kind of backlinks did you mostly rely on?
Time to start formulating a more aggressive Google-less website model.
Based on what I'm seeing in my datacenter of results, this update is turning out to be a complete corporate takeover for many search niches. Non-corporate recipe and food related websites under the 1,000,000 page marker are getting hit with a major torpedo due to the new Google "recipes" sidebar widget, a widget which exclusively filters traffic to corporate content farms such as Aboutdotcom, LiveStrongdotcom, eHowdotcom, and all the other usual suspects. Many of the recipe results appearing in the Google recipes section where scraped from much smaller non-corporate websites. My website does not appear in this section for even it's own domain name, and yet scraped content from my site is appearing slapped up next to AdSense ads [thank you for that LiveStrongdotcom].
So Google, your multi-million page corporate content farm buddies couldn't "out domain me" [I own the premium .com for my main keywords], they couldn't "out quality me" [I am the global authority for my subject matter], but nevertheless you found a great traffic bi-pass mechanism. Just route the traffic that would otherwise end up on my site and instead send it to your AdSense driven Demand Media type websites. Well done... and by the way, I thought this update was directed at content farms, strange but not unexpected that I'm seeing the exact opposite.
I'll take my 40% traffic loss with a cold beer. Time to start formulating a more aggressive Google-less website model. It's also time to start aggressively promoting other search engines.
I have not found anything useful on an eHow site for a decade.
It's also time to start aggressively promoting other search engines.
