Shock waves… shock waves… Its Google again!
To cut the long story short: Google has made changes in its notorious algorithm to ensure better results for its users. It is one of the very biggest changes in the history of Google’s Algo changes. The biggest impact of this change is on the whats knows as ‘content farms’ or ‘anti- demand studio’ sites or in Google’s words PANDA Algo update ( its too innocent a name for such a wicked change!).
Sistrix did an awesome job with numbers and listed the winners and losers of ‘after-Google –change-math’. That analysis helped me put up some hypothesis and some anti-thesis to my own and industry wide- hypothesis.
Hypothesis 1: Google does not want to show ‘Spammy- looking Sites’ in Search Results
According to our analysis, (and Google’s too) the spam site is one with following characteristics or you can just go through http://www.wisegeek.com/people.htm. This site is one of the biggest losers in the run. So is http://ezinearticles.com/ ( for all the same reasons!). Note: Both these sites have PR 6 and Ezine articles is the Top 60th site in US. (surprised?!)
Bad Looks: If you thought Google is not biased toward looks, well it is! Google likes the sites that its users like. The good looking, user friendly sites. Even if they are content farms e.g. www.ehow.com! Voila!
Low Quality Content: Sites with low quality content includes sites that have excessively used keywords, rewritten content from other posts, doesn’t state opinions, doesn’t even have a line or two of unique content and the length of the content is less than 200-300 words. The anti-thesis here is the Ezine Articles site; it has stringent rules and regulations for accepting articles, even good content gets rejected. Yet it’s a big loser.
Ads: Google allows three ads on a page; however, many ad networks have no restrictions on the number of ads to be placed on a site. Also, it is not just about the number of ads, it is about the placement of these ads! A great example http://www.fixya.com/support/t8601034-ds_lite_will_charge! There page can really offend a viewer with ads poking everywhere! Well done Google!
Internal Linking: In order to improve site stickiness website owners decided to use internal linking i.e. they gave all sorts of related information on the landing page; related topics, related tweets, related articles, recommended articles, related tags etc. etc. so a user stays on the site and gets lost in the site. But guess what, everything in abundance kills the purpose. These ‘related’ links can make a site look spammy, especially overdo of internal links or ad links within the content. For example: http://www.howtodothings.com/family-relationships/how-to-leave-your-tween-home-alone (yikes!).
Hypothesis 2: Generic vs. Specialized Content: Specialized wins
These days there are nail saloons not just saloons, we have magazines just for teenagers and not for the family. Google has also decided to take a leap towards supporting specialized information sites. This is the reason why big sites like Hubpages got hit. It has generic content; random thoughts scribbled by people, just to earn a few dollars. Similarly sites like ‘How to do things’?
Popeater.com, the biggest winner after the Google algorithm change is all about specialized, niche content.
Hypothesis 3: User Usage Info
Click through Rate: The CTR shows a user interest in a particular link i.e. the number of times it is clicked. Google is tracking it! I am telling you.
Bounce rate: Bounce Rate shows whether a user found the page interesting or not! Now since Google is going all lala over user preference. This factor i believe plays an important part. What to do? Improve page stickiness but don’t put too many internal links! (tricky eh!)
Time spent on site: Considering the short concentration period users have, time spent on site is one hell of a matrix to improve. That’s a tough standard by Google! Good luck to all.
Hypothesis 4: Automated Landing Pages
Which means the pages that are created automatically on a certain keyword. A good example here is that of another big loser i.e. suite101.com. Its pages are automatically populated for a particular keyword through tags (in blogs, in posts). These automated page has search results from the same site. This page gets indexed and ranked for a million and a half searches. All done by one time effort of a smart developer! Ofcourse, Google will hate it.
Hypothesis 5: Brand Name Worth
So why didn’t Demand studio got hit? Or even eHOW. Is it because people love them? eHOW is ranked at 36th in Alexa US traffic ranks. If you look at eHow’s model, it’s by my definition a spammy content farm. But it has a lot of following. If you have a question with a HOW attached to it, you will think of eHow. Brand name worth is playing its role here!
Hypotheses 6: Google doesn’t want people to earn easy money.
Considering the latest economic pressure, I don’t know why this can be counted in a noble cause by Google. Most of the ‘content farms’ are enticing people through certain payments on a large number of page views. This model resulted in writing optimized content (rather than just content), the topics surrounded around hottest keywords with highest CPC. Hub Pages got million dollar fundings on the same model.
Hypotheses 7: Everyone will be a winner EVENTUALLY
Why am I saying this at the end? Well, as the whole drama continues to unroll, will the losers be losers for good? Not too sure. ezinearticles.com ranking are already improving. *smiley*
Hypotheses 8: ALL THE ABOVE applies
All said and analyzed, each of the above factors has some weight-age or the other in making or breaking a site’s search engine ranking. Each factor plays a vital role. The changes in SERP are drastic because of the amalgamated effect of the factors mentioned above. Many algorithm changes were done previously but didn’t have such massive effects for the same reason.
So tell me, what do you think. Any hypothesis you agree or disagree to? Enlighten me!
Posted In: Search Engine Optimization
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