Google Announces Major “Algorithm Improvement”
Google changed its mathematical formula late Thursday in order to better weed out “low-quality” sites that offer users little value. Google is going to reward unique content that is high quality and offers real value to site visitors. It will continue to give relevancy and weight to authentic inbound links. Excellent! As it should be. I personally was about to turn to Bing for my searches if they didn’t make a BIG change and SOON. 🙂
What’s the fallout? These “low-quality” content farm wesites are used by SEO gurus to post keyword rich articles for their clients. Imagine you had contracted with one of these SEO gurus. By Friday morning your web traffic would have plummeted by as much as 65%! Today you’d be back to square one… Ok, maybe square two — but still you get the point.
Why? What they do is send articles rich with your top keywords to one of the big content farms best known for churning out tons of crappy useless content with website URLs — hence the term content farm.
Some people are calling this a shift back to “on-page optimization” – whatever you call it; just make sure you learn the lesson – Adding quality, unique content and authentic inbound links from real business directories and strategic partners to your site and blog is always a good idea – for the engines and for your site visitors.
Who’s affected: http://www.quora.com/SEO/Which-websites-dropped-the-most-in-the-Google-algorithm-change-of-February-2011
WSJ article: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704150604576166390281747136-lMyQjAxMTAxMDIwNTEyNDUyWj.html