What has exactly changed? They took into consideration the quality of the content that content farms produce. Huge organizations were built by producing tons of content just for the sake of it. Article directories were also hit, seeing their rankings plummet lower by a great factor.
But does this concern YOU?
Truth is that it depends. If you were an article marketer that used article directories and/or just created pages on Squidoo, without having a main domain to post your own content, I feel for you. The sad thing is that no one told you this thing will happen and chances are, you were caught off guard. The truth is that this couldn't last forever. With the huge growth of the internet and the amazing marketing opportunities for companies and individuals, it's logical that everyone would jump onto the bandwagon. Therefore, for someone without the technical know-how and techniques needed to succeed due to increasing competition, the quantity they produced, had to rise if they wanted to stay ahead.
As the average quality dropped, article directories, blogs and generally speaking the whole internet started to have lower standards as far as content was concerned and therefore, article quality of big sites was impacted.
This thing couldn't last forever and if Google didn't do something about it, visitors would gradually lose their trust in it. As a necessary step, Google decided to manually review sites and also gather feedback from the users too. So even if you were writing amazing articles on E-Zine articles for example, you would still see a difference.
If I have my own blog, will this affect me?
Think of it this way. If you stumbled upon a blog like yours and found the articles useful, then there's no way it will affect you. On the contrary, you will see an increase in visits due to the fact that content farms will lose their powerful rankings.
If I have my own blog but still use article marketing to promote it?
Then you're one of the luckiest losers of this whole situation. You will still get visitors to your main properties and at the same time be able to continue growing your Blog as a whole. The only shift in your daily routine will be that you will spend less time writing for article directories and invest more in your own properties' content, and that's a great thing!
If my only existence in the internet marketing space was through article marketing and all the links were promoting affiliate offers?
Then I would suggest to act now and act fast! You should get your own domain name and your own hosting account and start your own web property. Now you will have to pay more attention than ever to quality and start building from there.
Instead of Writing an article and sending a link directly to the affiliate in order to make a sale, you should Write the article, send the link to your main page (or an inner article page of your blog) and then start writing quality articles that make the sale. You can do the same for the existing articles too! It will help a lot. Don't get me wrong, in the beginning you will lose even more sales but with this method you will:
- Build an audience that you wouldn't otherwise have.
- Build an email list with readers that trust you. And by the way, a list will convert 10 times better than just an affiliate link.
- Brand your self as an authority and not as someone who just wrote another article on the Internet.
- Become your own master and never be affected by other user's greed and sloppiness again.
You could argue with me right here and say that it would be better to start the new blog from scratch, without changing the content farm links and you wouldn't be wrong, but the end result will be much better if you do. If you change the links destination from the affiliate site to your own blog instead, you will lose close to 80% of your sales from those articles, at least in the beginning. The benefit though, is that you will be able to grow your blog much faster than if you were starting from scratch and have visitors even from day one. Keep in mind that the affiliate links on the posts that have already been reposted on other blogs (other than the content farm) won't be changed and therefore you won't lose those conversions. To make a long story short, embrace the change, it would happen sooner or later anyway. It's better now than later on in the future. If you build your new web property, you will soon find out that this was what you should have done from day one. Don't let this change discourage you and work your way to the top with a new plan. And please take my advice, buy your own domain, host it on a hosting account, don't take the easy way again and go to blogger or wordpress.com and host it there; you are being penalized for other people's content already, don't let it happen again! It will be a bit more difficult to set up your own blog from scratch, but it's totally worth it! And if you are the last category of people who used article marketing to sell products, without owning your own blog, while writing one article in 5 minutes, well buddy you were lucky while it lasted, please don't blame Google or Content Farms.
Google announced a major change to its search algorithm, designed to weed out shallow and low-quality content from its top search results. Content farms were seen by many as the target. Were they hit? Who was hit? Some figures are coming out.
If you were expecting these figures to show Demand Media's eHow site to have been harmed -- surprise! Two studies show eHow actually gained. I'm still crunching through some of the figures, but the biggest "content farm" type brand that seems to have suffered are Associated Content.
Sistrix's Visibility Index Losers
Over at Sistrix, the company crunched through 1 million keywords that is says it has before and after placement data about. It then ranked these by a "visibility" index value that Sistrix created, which takes into account the number of keyword positions lost, specific ranking position and estimated clickthrough rate from those results.
Using an index makes some sense, because if you just rank by the percentage of keywords lost, you get some sites with relatively few ranking positions dominating the top "losers" list. Below, the domains that lost the most total visibility, according to Sistrix:
| Domain | Visibility Index Loss | SISTRIX (percentage loss) |
| wisegeek.com | 93.3622 | -77% |
| ezinearticles.com | 58.4273 | -90% |
| suite101.com | 50.755 | -94% |
| hubpages.com | 47.7632 | -87% |
| yourdictionary.com | 39.5044 | -74% |
| brothersoft.com | 37.6418 | -66% |
| buzzle.com | 36.7005 | -85% |
| associatedcontent.com | 35.7198 | -93% |
| freedownloadscenter.com | 27.2522 | -90% |
| essortment.com | 23.4146 | -91% |
| fixya.com | 22.9456 | -80% |
| americantowns.com | 22.6942 | -91% |
| lovetoknow.com | 21.4714 | -83% |
| articlesbase.com | 18.7999 | -94% |
| howtodothings.com | 17.8122 | -84% |
| mahalo.com | 17.2586 | -84% |
| automotive.com | 16.9008 | -71% |
| business.com | 16.104 | -93% |
| doityourself.com | 15.9952 | -77% |
| merchantcircle.com | 15.7573 | -85% |
| thefind.com | 15.6825 | -83% |
| wrongdiagnosis.com | 15.5617 | -73% |
| findarticles.com | 15.2418 | -90% |
| faqs.org | 15.0573 | -91% |
| tradekey.com | 15.0415 | -89% |
Note that the table above is slightly different than what you'll find at the Sistrix site itself. I created the chart using a spreadsheet that Sistrix sent to me (more about that below), sorted by the same factor that Sistrix says it used for its own post. I'm checking on this.
Sistrix: Most Keyword Rankings Lost
Upon request, Sistrix will send people a full list of 331 domains that were found to have lost in its analysis. With Sistrix's permission, here are the top 100 domains that suffered losses, sorted by total number of keyword positions lost. Also show is the percentage loss. For example, AssociatedContent.com was found to have 216,419 top rankings before the change, which dropped to 53,512 rankings after -- a loss of 162,917, or 75%.
| Domain | Positions Lost | % Loss |
| associatedcontent.com | 162,917 | 75% |
| suite101.com | 141,469 | 79% |
| ezinearticles.com | 130,231 | 71% |
| hubpages.com | 102,820 | 67% |
| buzzle.com | 62,049 | 72% |
| merchantcircle.com | 58,666 | 63% |
| wisegeek.com | 52,084 | 70% |
| articlesbase.com | 50,909 | 62% |
| findarticles.com | 44,621 | 69% |
| answerbag.com | 41,260 | 61% |
| examiner.com | 39,509 | 56% |
| manta.com | 36,945 | 48% |
| freedownloadscenter.com | 34,494 | 81% |
| yourdictionary.com | 32,981 | 67% |
| lovetoknow.com | 31,711 | 64% |
| trails.com | 29,835 | 78% |
| thefind.com | 29,011 | 39% |
| travelpod.com | 28,513 | 68% |
| brothersoft.com | 27,594 | 40% |
| docstoc.com | 26,650 | 56% |
| fixya.com | 25,867 | 42% |
| howtodothings.com | 25,621 | 77% |
| mahalo.com | 24,135 | 71% |
| insiderpages.com | 23,346 | 70% |
| faqs.org | 22,506 | 67% |
| prlog.org | 22,254 | 57% |
| kaboodle.com | 21,949 | 39% |
| citytowninfo.com | 21,615 | 86% |
| shopwiki.com | 21,528 | 43% |
| roadsideamerica.com | 21,510 | 73% |
| buzzillions.com | 21,421 | 48% |
| tradekey.com | 21,096 | 56% |
| essortment.com | 20,042 | 73% |
| uptake.com | 19,655 | 58% |
| encyclopedia.com | 19,625 | 51% |
| helium.com | 18,931 | 66% |
| wordiq.com | 18,877 | 77% |
| springerlink.com | 18,625 | 49% |
| livestrong.com | 18,175 | 38% |
| business.com | 16,743 | 78% |
| doityourself.com | 16,386 | 70% |
| americantowns.com | 16,201 | 62% |
| prnewswire.com | 15,162 | 70% |
| cinemablend.com | 14,259 | 72% |
| epodunk.com | 14,190 | 78% |
| vodpod.com | 13,766 | 38% |
| labnol.org | 13,541 | 85% |
| medicalnewstoday.com | 13,426 | 75% |
| mytravelguide.com | 13,340 | 69% |
| highbeam.com | 13,324 | 34% |
| blogcritics.org | 13,312 | 57% |
| chacha.com | 12,900 | 48% |
| retrevo.com | 12,601 | 35% |
| sharewareconnection.com | 12,600 | 54% |
| planetware.com | 12,387 | 75% |
| ptf.com | 12,380 | 41% |
| digitaltrends.com | 12,154 | 67% |
| testfreaks.com | 11,938 | 63% |
| galttech.com | 11,804 | 76% |
| aceshowbiz.com | 11,639 | 67% |
| userinstinct.com | 11,410 | 47% |
| viewpoints.com | 11,191 | 55% |
| destination360.com | 11,167 | 76% |
| topshareware.com | 11,000 | 48% |
| consumeraffairs.com | 10,832 | 80% |
| onsugar.com | 10,699 | 40% |
| stateuniversity.com | 10,560 | 70% |
| allbusiness.com | 10,423 | 63% |
| blurtit.com | 10,331 | 47% |
| everything2.com | 10,298 | 76% |
| kioskea.net | 9,781 | 32% |
| travelpost.com | 9,412 | 75% |
| wrongdiagnosis.com | 9,293 | 52% |
| technorati.com | 9,135 | 67% |
| whosdatedwho.com | 8,986 | 58% |
| entrepreneur.com | 8,974 | 75% |
| slideshare.net | 8,909 | 27% |
| geek.com | 8,632 | 65% |
| gizmag.com | 8,594 | 46% |
| mp3.com | 8,577 | 64% |
| trendhunter.com | 8,539 | 66% |
| fotosearch.com | 8,473 | 48% |
| daniweb.com | 8,316 | 61% |
| iloveindia.com | 8,240 | 58% |
| eventful.com | 7,948 | 55% |
| globalsources.com | 7,927 | 34% |
| songkick.com | 7,908 | 50% |
| eggheadcafe.com | 7,828 | 47% |
| ubergizmo.com | 7,807 | 73% |
| ez-tracks.com | 7,779 | 62% |
| popcrunch.com | 7,728 | 63% |
| ghacks.net | 7,695 | 78% |
| healthcentral.com | 7,660 | 59% |
| 5min.com | 7,652 | 62% |
| famouswhy.com | 7,619 | 63% |
| fanpix.net | 7,445 | 64% |
| ilike.com | 7,401 | 62% |
| torrentreactor.net | 7,252 | 29% |
| bellaonline.com | 7,171 | 69% |
| hotel-rates.com | 7,124 | 67% |
Ubergizmo Disagrees
Look toward the end of the chart above, and you'll see site Ubergizmo listed. However, in the comments below, Ubergizmo's Hubert Nguyen suggests that Sistrix has it wrong. His site's search related traffic has gone up since the change, and he's posted a chart to back that up:
The data is from Google Webmaster Central. What could be happening is that Sistrix is right -- Ubergizmo may have lost rankings -- but it might also be better placed in some other searches where it has retained these but other sites have dropped.
Sistrix: Biggest Percentage Keyword Rankings Lost
Below, a top 25 list, this time sorting by the biggest percentage losses suffered, from the Sistrix list:
| Domain | Positions Lost | % Loss |
| transitionsabroad.com | 3,752 | 88% |
| citytowninfo.com | 21,615 | 86% |
| labnol.org | 13,541 | 85% |
| thedailygreen.com | 6,359 | 83% |
| webreference.com | 2,717 | 83% |
| daviddarling.info | 3,236 | 83% |
| referenceforbusiness.com | 5,468 | 83% |
| webdevelopersnotes.com | 3,229 | 81% |
| 1000ventures.com | 1,354 | 81% |
| freedownloadscenter.com | 34,494 | 81% |
| worldwidelearn.com | 4,326 | 81% |
| educationworld.com | 4,924 | 80% |
| cultofmac.com | 4,535 | 80% |
| cnx.org | 3,657 | 80% |
| consumeraffairs.com | 10,832 | 80% |
| techblissonline.com | 4,590 | 80% |
| madehow.com | 2,964 | 79% |
| suite101.com | 141,469 | 79% |
| fabjob.com | 1,039 | 79% |
| world66.com | 5,966 | 79% |
| guidetoonlineschools.com | 2,281 | 79% |
| petplace.com | 2,662 | 79% |
| forleasebyowner.com | 1,239 | 79% |
| geckoandfly.com | 4,041 | 79% |
| knowledgehound.com | 1,211 | 78% |
Sistrix: Demand Media & eHow Escape!
Interestingly, for an update that was targeted at content farms (in my view, nor am I alone in that view), Demand Media's flagship eHow.com site doesn't make the list. Over 300 other sites saw a "visibility index" drop worse than eHow. In fact, Sistrix says that eHow actually went up in visibility value (from 270 to 310) and increased the number of top rankings held, from 317,320 to 324,021.
A few of Demand Media's other sites did see losses. AnswerBag.com and Trails.com just made the end of Sistrix's top 25 visibility losers (in my chart using Sistrix's data, they'd come in at 32 and 34, respectively. In terms of positions lost, LiveStrong was ranked 39th on a percentage basis but only 293 in total number lost. AnswerBag ranked 10th in total number lost, and Trails.com 16th. On a percentage basis, AnswerBag was way back at 158th while Trails.com was 27th.
Overall, I'd say Demand Media did well in this update, at least according to Sistrix's data.
SEOBook On Losers...
Over at SEObook, Aaron Wall takes the Sistrix numbers above and tries to come up with a winners list. He's come up with a list of sites that seem similar to eHow (which is run by Demand Media, and which is NOT in the Sistrix top ten above but which is considered by some to be a content farm). He then takes that list of sites to see which have had gains and losses in traffic. Top losses:
- ezinearticles.com
- associatedcontent.com
- suite101.com
- hubpages.com
- buzzle.com
And Winners
And sites with top traffic gains:
- youtube.com
- ebay.com
- facebook.com
- instructables.com
Keep in mind this isn't comprehensive, not in the least. There could be -- and probably are -- sites that have gained much more from the update. But figuring that out is hard. Wall's working as best he can within a "content farm" type category.
Dan Abbamont
Dan Abbamont mined about 60,000 queries, if I understand correctly, and compared rankings on Google.com to Google.ca, which is Google Canada. His logic is that since the change is only working in the US, this will show a before-and-after look by using Google Canada.
I'm not sure this is correct. Google Canada will have geo-targeted results that will be different than Google.com. The ranking changes he's seeing might be due to that. But here's a summary of what he's found:
- ezinearticles.com lost an average of 34 positions
- hubpages.com lost an average of 31 positions
- squidoo.com lost an average of 15 positions
- articlesbase.com lost an average of 29 positions
- buzzle.com lost an average of 30 positions
- associatedcontent.com lost an average of 22 positions
- suite101.com lost an average of 33 positions
Abbamont also provides his whole dataset for anyone to analyze as part of his post about the study.
seoClarity's Losers...
From seoClarity comes a report (PDF format) that looked at 60,000 keywords along with before-and-after data to see which sites suffered the most ranking losses. These were:
- TheFind.com
- BizRate.com
- ShopWiki.com
- EzineArticles.com
- HubPages.com
- Buzzillions.com
- Shopping.com
- Suite101.com
- Kaboodle.com
- AssociatedContent.com
And Winners (Including eHow)
The company also looked at those that had the most gains. The top ten:
- Amazon.com
- eHow.com
- NexTag.com
- Wikipedia.com
- Walmart.com
- Target.com
- Etsy.com
- Answers.Yahoo.com
- Sears.com
- bestonlinecoupons.com
BNET Gets Compete Traffic Stats
BNET worked with Compete to get before-and-after traffic data for a variety of selected sites. The summary:
- eHow: seems to be largely untouched
- Livestrong.com: had a drop
- Answerbag.com: had a drop
- Trails.com: continued an existing drop
- Examiner.com: continued an existing drop
- Helium.com: had a big drop
WSJ Gets Comments
Wondering what some of those sites listed above as being hit have to say? The Wall Street Journal has a nice article that did the rounds collecting comments. Some, like WiseGeek, confirmed a traffic drop. Others like Associated Content, said they are focusing on bringing more traffic to their articles directly rather than from Google. Google also said that if its YouTube site gained, that was "happenstance."
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