The changes ushered in by Google to its ranking algorithm last week are having an immediate impact. In response to the plummeting page views, some sites are laying off employees and otherwise repositioning their models. Briefly, last week Google alerted users and search marketers that this change, expected to impact 11.8% of its queries, would reduce rankings for sites that copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.
Dramatic Drop
One week webmasters are complaining that traffic to their sites have dropped dramatically, in some cases by 40%, according to CNN. Not all though: Demand Media, perhaps the name most closely associated with content farms, says it has not seen a material net impact - at this point in time. "As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results," Larry Fitzgibbon, the company's executive vice president of media and operations, wrote in a blog post. "It's impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term."
Mahalo was more direct about the impact: according to an account in Center Networks CEO Jason Calacanis laid off 10% of his staff in response. "The Google changes have led to a significant dip in our traffic and revenue," Calacanis said. "It's hard not to be disappointed since we’ve been spending millions of dollars on producing highly professional content."
New Policies
He also said the company is re-evaluating its freelance content production, "pausing it in the near term and determining how to best produce the high-quality educational material we aspire to in the long run. We are not, however, diminishing our video production efforts."
Coincidentally or not, another site sometimes associated with content farms, HubPages, has just launched an ad program that should impact freelance compensation. Its HubPages Ad Program will give its writers access to the premium ad rates, it says, while retaining all rights to their own content.
Postscript…Want to test the change? The IP address 64.233.179.104 displays Google search results as they would have appeared before the recent algorithm change, according to several webmasters posting to the WebmasterWorld.com forum. (via CNN).
