On February 24th Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer posted that Google had made significant changes to their search algorithms. You can see their post here: googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html.
In their post they say:Earlier this month Wired posted an article in which they interviewed Singhal and Cutts about the update. You can see that article here: www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. 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.As noted above, there have been many reports regarding individual websites that have shown the effect on individual sites can be very dramatic. So, since we are now four weeks out from that update, I thought it would be a good time to ask what changes GPWA members have noticed in their web traffic over the past month versus the month before. Anyone who uses an analytics package to track traffic on their site should be able to get a very precise answer to this question. Just be sure to compare exactly equal time periods and days of the week.This article begins with the statement: Google announced a new update last week to its search engine that addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to users. This major change affects almost 12 percent of all search results, and the web is still buzzing about its implications, which include dramatic losses for some companies (Mahalo, Suite 101), and gains by some established sites known for high-quality information.
For example, compare the four week period 27 January 2011 to 23 February 2011 to the four week period 24 February 2011 to 23 March 23. But, be sure to wait until tomorrow if you do that comparison since February 23rd is not quite over with yet.
So, how does your traffic compare? Are you happy or unhappy about the effect of the Google Panda / Farm algorithm update? And if your traffic has changed significantly, can you attribute the change to Google organic traffic?
Michael