Google has made changes to its search algorithm to reduce rankings of content farms.
Finding more high-quality sites in search
2/24/2011 06:50:00 PM
Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.
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.
Some professional bloggers make a significant portion of their income from advertising. Check out this post as one example of a blogger labeled as a content farm.
Unfortunately (and surprisingly), this change has had a major impact* on organic traffic flowing through Google to Digital Inspiration as well. See this chart from Google Analytics.
Google has rolled out their new algorithm in US only but once the changes are propagated to other country-specific Google sites - like google.co.in and google.co.uk – the organic traffic from Google to Digital Inspiration would take an even bigger hit.
The AdSense-centric business model of this blog, where online advertising revenues are more or less based on the number of page-views, will obviously suffer because of this change in search engine rankings.
I am so glad I don't depend on Google Adsense for income as much as it is another metric to measure how well my site works.
Thanks for continuing to visit the Green Data Center blog. Total traffic is the important if you are focused on advertising revenue. I have different goals that I'll be sharing in more details as I roll out changes in the site.