Has Your Traffic Dropped. It Could be a Result of Google Algorithm Tweaking

After some excitement on webmaster forums about disruption of traffic I may be abled to throw some light on what has been happening.

Google has revealed that it is testing changes to its alogorithm elements that determine SERPS results for for scraper sites and in particular blog scrapers. The company is calling on users to help them.

“We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms,” the company says on a “Report Scraper Pages” form.

I have noticed a few discussions here including a long threat led by my friend stine1 about a recent fall in traffic and consequent drop in earnings. To quote Douglas Adams classic sci fi comedy The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, DON’T PANIC!

When Google is making changes it tends to disrupt indexing of new content and thus our traffic is hit. My own site experienced a 50% drop in traffic after the Panda update in late February / early March this year but was back to normal by the beginning of April. Google’s objective with Panda was to shift SERPS weighting for site content from links and volume to quality. Unfortunately they got some aspects of the update horribly wrong and triggered the pandemic of spam content anyone who owns or maintains a blog will have been aware of over the past few months.

Although Google’s alogrithm is updated almost daily, major changes usually take place in Februay and August. After months of tweaking Google’s Panda Update, designed to improve the quality of search results, there has been a spate of complaints about scrapers and content farms ranking over original work since Panda was implemented. A problem Google has with this worthy goal is in finding a way to enable search engines to evaluate a page for quality.

One way they tried to do this was by rating keyword density but that just ledt to nonesensical posts stuffed with keywords. To demonstrate, a page promoting pasta might read:

Pasta is one of the most popular foods in the world. Originally from Italy, pasta became popular all over Europe, migrants took pasta to the Americas. The far east has it’s own form of pata in noddles. Walk pasta supermarket dry goods display and you will see many kinds of pasta on display … etc.

OK, only one silly joke in there which shows admirable self resraint by my standards, but you get the idea. That paragraph is not good quality content but it would rank highly in listings.

Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts has tweeted extensively about the new initiative.
 
The testing also follows a recent, big refresh of Google’s spam submission process.

This past week, Google shared an interesting video, providing an inside look at the search algorithm tweaking process. While no earth shattering information was necessarily contained, it did provide a rare visual glimpse into the process.

What we all should remember is it takes time for webmasters, from individuals like myself to the managers of big commercial sites like Triond to respond to such changes because they require us to do some important things differently. Be patient, your earnings and traffic will come back. I have never been a fan of Google (as you may read here Don’t be evil, that’s Google’s Job</A> and here<A HREF=”google-algorithm-scam.shtml”>Google algorithm scam</A>) but we all have to work with them.
Be patient with me too, and I will post more webmaster tips as and when I have time.  I was in the computer business for nearly 30 years and now it is not my favourite kind of writing.