Well, yet another crackdown has started by Big G and there are manycasualties this go around caught in the cross fire. Some people found out the hard way when they checked their rankings, only to discover they are completely gone from the top 5 or 10 pages. Some of the big players like Ezine Articles got slammed according to a posting by Chris Knight. They analyzed and tracked their before and after results and wow, did they take a hit in just 2 days after the changes. More on that later.

If you are involved with any kind of online internet business, then no doubt you have probably heard about Google’s algo update on Feb 23,2011 that will affect approximately 11.8% of their search queries. That’s a huge amount of search queries and it means many have lost a ton of money this past week.

There have been a number of key changes in the algorithms in recent memory as well. For example, the Mayday update as people refer to it, along with Google’s new Caffeine new indexing system have seen many additional casualties. But, I believe this is one of the bigger changes that has been far more sweeping and dramatic based on the initial results. Is this a good change? Time will tell, but I am glad to see these types of changes going on and will outline my reasons further on in this article. Personally, I think G needed to reset many of the companies on the list below and more.

Why is Google introducing such drastic changes yet again?

There are many reasons why they have taken this type of stance. The problem continues to be a sea of low quality content and/or spam showing up in the top results. It has always been and in my opinion will always be a problem (to some degree), no matter how good the search engines get at filtering out results and removing crappy sites from their index. The key though, is to get most of the right results back most of the time. You will never have a 100% perfect system, but you can always make improvements.

The bigger question to ask yourself, is this really the underlying concern with Google, or is there something more obvious that they are concerned about? Hint: $$$$

Perception is Everything

Part of the problem it seems to me, is that Google’s been taking a beating lately in the media. Perception is everything, especially when its negative. Your perception is your reality. If you suddenly have enough people perceiving that Google no longer provides valuable information or the right results back, you can loose market share quickly. In this day and age, where information is available in micro seconds, this can snowball rather quickly to actually create the perfect media storm for G. They are a huge company, but no company is immune from the tens of millions of people online suddenly leaving en masse.

For instance, the New York Times reported recently about JC Penny and how their SEO’s were trying to manipulate their rankings and results. This allowed them to bring in, perhaps millions more during the Xmas season as a result. Google, once the story hit mainstream media, hit back and JC Penny quickly fell out of love with G and positions. Ya, it took them over 4 months if I recall correctly to make the changes. Did G take so long because they were busy, didn’t know or because it took something like the New York Times to rat them out? Better late than never I say.

Since Google first came online with their unique approach to search engine results, they have been battling the spammers on a constant basis and people trying to game the system. As time and technology have improved tremendously, so to have the algorithms. The bottom line to any search engine, is they want to provide the best, most relevant and useful information back to their customers as fast as possible. Google has made no bones about what they have always wanted in their results – Quality Content.

In addition to the latest updates, there were major updates last year, including a new indexing system called Caffeine that provides “50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index”.

Here’s a short quote from Google: Source

“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.”

“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.”

If you are new to any online internet business, then you need to understand this is huge. The rollout started in the US, but will roll out to other countries in the coming weeks and months. This is not a small little change to their algo’s, but what I and many others online would consider a major change to their search results. The repercussions have been swift and will last a long time to come for those directly impacted.

Lets examine some more specifics on who actually got impacted and some thoughts about what all this means. Sistrix, crunched through 1 million keywords that is says it has before and after placement data about. This is not a list you want to be on. For starters, here’s a breakdown of the top 25 sites that were the biggest losers. Images reproduced with permission from Sistrix – Google Farmer update quest for quality

“The SISTRIX VisibilityIndex is an index value calculated from traffic on keywords, ranking and click-through rate on specific positions.” The top of the table is in German. The corresponding top portion is what each word translate to.

Domain Change SISTRIX (before) SISTRIX (after) KWs (before) KWs (after)

Click on image to enlarge Diagram

Let’s examine a few obvious things first from the diagram above. Google kicked some serious ass and its obvious that many of the content farms lost hundreds of thousands of keyword positions. That translates into a lot of revenue and yes, potential staff layoffs. Imagine for a moment, you are the owner of one of those companies, everything is moving along nicely, revenue is growing and bam – suddenly the next day you lost 70 to 90% of your revenue. Owners are hitting the panic button like never before and for good reason. Its happened in the past, present and will happen in the future.

The Google Ripple Effect

There are some interesting ripple effects that happen as a result of major updates to Google’s algorithm changes. Although most people were not affected, consider the overall mental fear factor that results from this. Imagine if you own a big article directory site (or any site for that matter) and have been nurturing your site for years and adding low quality content. Say, your making good money, but now you are really getting nervous about the latest changes.

What do you think this will do to you and many other’s online with so-so content on their site?

Worse yet, what happens if you are one of those that scrap content and you have a lot of duplicate content on your site that doesn’t belong to you?

Yup, I would be nervous right about now. Although you got missed this time, its just a matter of time before they (the spider bots) catch up with you and suddenly you get the big de-index because of the lack of quality controls on your site. Is it really worth all the investment of your time and money to build up a so-so site, just to risk it down the road?

The main thing is not to panic like many are and over reacting if you are one of the lucky ones to not be affected. But, its time to sit down and really prioritize what you are going to do with your website(s). There is still time to clean house and get organized before more updates. That includes, deleting crappy content from your site if necessary and adding the best content you can possibly do.

Consider this fair warning by G, because I believe they will eventually find your site or sites in the digital world. I know of several people personally, during the Mayday update in 2010 that got spanked hard and lost thousands of dollars a month over night. Don’t think it can’t happen to you, because it can and likely will, if you continue adding crappy content trying to game the system.

Here’s a little snippet of a quote from G from their Blogspot.

“And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

The points you should take from that small quote are copy others content and have low original content on your site. Look, Google is not stupid and they know what’s going on. Lots of people gamed the system quite easily several years ago and many still try and game the system today. But, its only going to get harder to fool the search engines. In the past year, there is definitely a shift in the online internet community talking about ways to adjust to all the changes the Google and the other search engines makes each year. The answer has always been right in front of your eyes.

Develop the best damn content and be the final source or destination of information where people come to get answers. It takes a hell of a lot longer, but its the safer way to go to build out a viable and long term business. Look, if your content is good enough, people will find it eventually and your content will go viral as in people will naturally link back to you because they like your article. I honestly used to believe that was pure bullshit, but after doing some sole searching and hours of research, I did a complete 180 on this issue.

I realized that is exactly what I should have done from 5 years ago when I started this online journey. Its definitely not the easiest or quickest way to make money online, but its a far better way and its in alignment with what the search engines want and expect. Does that mean I don’t do any link building. Of course not. For example, I recently had a press release done for my internet marketing tools page to get some natural exposure on it. I did some revamping on that page and simply wanted to give some extra attention. Will I be doing any link building for this article? Nope, not one bit. I will let a few people know about it on Facebook, but otherwise, it will just go viral and natural. There are tons of ways to get links without having to forcibly do it.

Here’s another example from Sistrix from the same article above. “Looking at mahalo.com as an example, it went from 33,875 keywords before the update to just 9,740 keywords after the update went public – a decrease of more than 70%. These were keywords like “zealand air“ (3), “digg“ (8) or “tax check“ (4) where the domain fell out of the top 100 results. The second outcome deals with the remaining keywords. Here is a chart on which Google results page the keywords of mahalo.com were to be found before and after the algorithm-update:” Sistrix

Click on Image to Enlarge Diagram

Basically, Mahalo lost about 70% of their keywords. What’s even worse, look at the before and after results and the increased remaining keywords ranking on pages 7 to 10. You might as well not bother. If you are not on page 1, its essentially useless to be back on page 5 or 10. Nobody is going to see your site.

Demand Media and eHow – How did they Escape The Wrath of Google?

If you pay close attention, you don’t see eHow.com on the list. Interesting, given that its owned by Demand Media and one of the most prolific players online when it comes to adding thousands of articles everyday to the internet. They recently went public and now have a valuation around 1.5 Billion dollars. This is not to say that their content is poor because overall they have some in depth quality content. I know some have added they fall within the content farm label, but in looking over some of the information and associated websites, its pretty good content.

It’s interesting to note, that with all this noise going on, how quickly Demand Media was making a Blog post about supporting Google’s move to better quality content showing up in the top results. According to Sistrix, “Ehow.com even gained SISTRIX value (from 270 to 310) and Keywords (from 317,320 to 324,021) during the algorithm-change.”

Click on Image To Enlarge Diagram

I am not sure how the update didn’t catch eHow and as more data becomes available, I will be sure to report it back here. Was it deliberate that they got missed? More importantly, if they didn’t get included this time around, what’s on the horizon for this big company? If you read some of the Blog posts and press releases at Demand Media, you will quickly glean that they are ticked or I would use the term pissed at just the thought of being tagged as a content farm. Is that a fair assessment? Well, who really knows. But, perception is reality. If G thinks you are a content farm, your basically screwed.

But – here’s something that has always bothered me

Here’s the thing about websites that do very well and bring in tons of money for both the owner of the site and Google. Its in Google’s best interest to not piss everyone off either because they rely on the profit from Adsense and for some sites it can represent millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars per month back to G. Do you honestly think that Google doesn’t look the other way on occasion if it suits them? Think about that one and you can make up your own minds about that statement.

Here are a couple of other links and places that have a thorough analysis of what’s been going on and their own individual take on the impact and effects of the latest changes to G’s algo’s.

For some detailed analysis, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine land provided a great insightful article that is worth checking out here.

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book, also wades into this with a detailed analysis too. I like his take on that people are only looking at all the losers, but who were the winners in this update. Anytime you have someone loose positions in the search engines, someone else is going to be replaced automatically.

Sites with top traffic gains:

1. YouTube.com
2. ebay.com
3. Facebook.com
4. instructables.com

What are other Search Engines Doing About Content Farms?

Google is not the only company that has been raging an online war against so called content farms or spam sites. In fact, search engines like Duck Duck Go has started “hard wiring” wikiHow as the first result on its search engine results pages for how-to queries. Plus, Blekko has made it known as well, they were eliminating a number of so called content farms from their search engine as well.

The Google Chrome Extension To Block Sites – What’s Up With That?

OK, let me get this right. If I add the extension to Google Chrome, I can block sites that I deem spammy for whatever reason and those results get reported back to Google. Hmmmm, I get a little worried about this one being gamed by some of the bigger SEO players and how they could affect their competitors.

I don’t want to sound all paranoid, but this could have an impact, although a low impact at that. I believe G realizes this could be easily manipulated. I guess that’s why they have hundreds of signals to take into account when ranking websites accordingly.

New Chrome extension: block sites from Google’s web search results “One of the signals we’re exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results.”

I must admit that by them introducing this, one has to wonder about how good their quality controls really are? What I mean by that, if they need people to manually do this for them, then does that mean they really don’t have a good handle on controlling spam like they give us the impression that they claim to do? I realize that Matt Cutts and his team are doing their very best to get the right search results back most of the time, but this to me just smells a little of desperation. But, that’s my take on it and I am sure other’s will chime in about it too.

The other question that comes up in my mind while playing devils advocate for a moment here, is the following. How do you really program a spider bot to decide on what is good quality versus poor quality. So, on the one hand, you have G and their employees going about trying to keep the junk out by making adjustments and tweaks to the algo’s. While, on the other side of the equation, you have potentially hundreds of thousands or more like millions of people trying to figure out a way to take advantage of their new updates and to look for any weaknesses in their updates.

Food For Thought

Here’s an interesting analogy to help you understand more about G’s position in terms of them wanting the best results at the top. Imagine you are sitting down at the dinner table, about to eat your favorite meal, only to discover that your spouse added to much salt and pepper, making the dish taste different. In other words, its not what you were expecting to taste.

You see, eating your favorite dinner, no matter what it is, usually consists of quality ingredients and fresh herbs and spices. Now imagine if you put them all together in balance. The result, you get the perfect meal. Everything is added in balance.

The same applies here with Google and their desire to return only the best results for you and everyone else. If just one element or in my example, one herb is off just a little, the results differ. Sometimes the results can be really bad too.

Is Article Marketing Dead As a Result of Google’s Update?

Based on who got targeted and hit and the subsequent losses, ya I would say article marketing is dead. Although Google won’t confirm they were targeting sites like Ezine Articles, when you look at the list of the top 25 companies that were impacted the most in the above image, clearly it was designed to reduce the footprint and content farms ranking for literally tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of keywords.

Let’s look at one in particular at Ezine Articles. The owner, Chris Knight published a Blog post about the recent changes and the impact on his company. Below is a quote from his post describing some of the fallout and how its impacted their results in just 2 days. Remember, according to analysis done by Sistrix above, they lost about -90% of their ranking for keywords.

“While we adamantly disagree with anyone who places the “Content Farm” label on EzineArticles.com, we were not immune to this algorithm change. Traffic was down 11.5% on Thursday and over 35% on Friday. In our life-to-date, this is the single most significant reduction in market trust we’ve experienced from Google.”

Ezine had about 184.508 terms they ranked for according to Sistrix index. After the update, they went down to about 54.277 terms. What that translates to in real numbers according to Search Engine Land, ezinearticles.com lost positions for approximately 130,231 keywords (130 hundred thousand) which equals about 71% overall. There main source of revenue from what I can tell, is based mainly on Google Adsense. So, imagine for a moment if you are Chris with 70+ plus full time employees and you just got hit big time and lost a major source of your revenue.

I don’t care who you are, is you loose those kinds of numbers overnight, its going to impact your business in a serious way. Additionally, if they can’t recover their revenue, then in a short period of time, I would imagine employees will have to be let go.

Are you starting to see the ripple effect?

Now extrapolate what I mentioned above, combine that with all the companies that are affected and you have a recipe that is going to cause ripple affects for years to come. Google has potentially caused thousands of people to be laid off with this just one major change. What about all the other major changes that occurred in the past, say 18 months? How many other’s have had to lay off staff or close up shop completely?

The easiest way to avoid many of the above problems or at least minimize the potential problems that those other sites have experienced is the following.

For starters, I would forget about using the Hubs and Squidoos or any other 3rd site to build up your fortune on the internet. The problem remains, they are not your own assets. The best advice I have is that if your Hubs and Squidoos are doing fine at the moment because you back linked them the right way, great keep those obviously. But, the better thing to always do is invest in building up a few quality, big kick ass sites that you can dominate those niches in a 1 or 2 years. If it takes longer, so be it. The point is, you want something that will stand up to the changes.

Add value added content that truly helps people with their problem and helps them move their business forward. In other words, you have probably seen the movie, Field of Dreams – right? In the movie, he talks about building it and they will come.

Honestly, there couldn’t be a better analogy than that. Build it (your site) properly and you will eventually have lots of people finding your information, linking to your content and ranking for terms over time in a natural way. The other big benefit, you become the ultimate source of information that people come to when they want something. Do it the right way and you won’t be dependent on the whims and changes of Google or their algo changes. This method takes way longer, but man oh man, it just is a safer road traveled.