Webmasters who spent their time gaming search engine results with low-quality content farms and scraper sites have been hit hard since Google's latest algorithm change last week.
In a February 24th, 2011 post on the official Google blog, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts stated:
Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. 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.
Although a CNN Money report cited a number comments made on the WebmasterWorld forum about the traffic and business-killing nature of this latest change, I've personally noticed that are just as many statements to the contrary by webmasters who don't rely on content farms to drive traffic to their sites.
I too have seen traffic increases to my sites in the past few days, ranging anywhere from 15.2% to 82.36% and 125.5%.
So, no complaints here.
As always, follow Google's guidelines regarding quality content and your sites will do fine. Try to game the results and you could find yourself looking for a job offline.
So… did your traffic increase or decrease since the latest Google Update?
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