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In an effort to deal with the perceived issue with low-quality content spam in search results, Google updated it algorithm last week. While that sounds all well and good on the surface, it has caused a headache for some legitimate sites that got caught up in the dragnet. Sites like Cult of Mac and Buzzle have found themselves with little remaining Google Juice. Google has said it is aware of the issues, and will work to correct these issues.
Independent analytics firm Sistrix compiled a full list of the winners and losers, and while most of the changes seem reasonable, that doesn't come as much comfort to those sites that were downgraded without cause. It is not clear just what criteria Google used to downrank sites, but some have speculated Cult of Mac's extensive publishing of "How-to" articles got them flagged by the Google bot.
Currently, Cult of Mac is reporting that their ranking has improved, so it seems that El Goog is already trying to put things right. The danger is that future sited could find themselves with poor Google ranking because they resemble the spam sites in some way. Do you think Google will be able to clear things up without too much collateral damage.
Comments are closed on this article
Danthrax66
March 02, 2011 at 4:29pm
Honestly google has been sucking lately all of this new stuff has really ruined google a lot for me. I liked the old algorithm and the old look a hell of a lot better.
richeemxx
March 02, 2011 at 4:29pm
You know no matter how many times I've seen the reported, and re-reported (by myself even) and no matter how many times I've read it I haven't seen any mention that Google has actually said they will 'help' site owners. In fact from the quote below it looks to me like its the exact opposite??
“We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem,” Singhal said. “However, we don’t manually change anything along these lines.”
I guess I totally missed the second line
“Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent.”
