Google's Search Cleanup Has Big Effect
By AMIR EFRATI
Google Inc.'s move last week to lower the search rankings of websites that the company said offer little useful information appears to be having a dramatic impact, according to firms that study search-engine data.
Google has changed its search algorithm in an effort to filter out data from "content farms" in search results. Marcelo Prince, Jessica Vascellaro and Simon Constable discuss how this affect site rankings and revenues for businesses.
Many websites that previously ranked highly in searches for certain keywords on Google dropped sharply following the change in the company's search algorithms, the firms found. Some of the sites that were hurt defended the quality of their content, arguing that they had been unfairly lumped with bad actors on the Internet.
Meanwhile, some well-known social-networking, retail and news sites emerged as apparent winners, rising in Google's rankings.
Google has said the change was aimed, among other things, at sites with what it calls "low quality" content: just enough information to appear in search results and lure users to pages loaded with advertisements. It estimated that the new algorithms would affect about 12% of U.S.-based search queries and would expand to non-U.S. queries in the near future.
"It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down," Google engineers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote in a blog post Thursday night. They said sites with original content "such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on" will move up.
A Google spokesman said Sunday that "user feedback has been positive" to the change and mirrored the feedback it received from "human raters," hundreds of people outside the company hired to evaluate changes on a regular basis. Google has said it often measures whether users click the "back" button quickly after visiting a search result, which might indicate a lack of satisfaction with a site.
David Harry, a Canada-based consultant who helps websites rise in Google's rankings, said "there's a fair amount of collateral damage" from Google's changes and that "perfectly legitimate sites are being hit, thus it's hard to say search quality overall is improving." He added that "ultimately people may be losing their jobs as revenues change" at the affected companies.
Many sites rely heavily on Web traffic from Google searches, and even a small drop in the rankings could have a large impact and might reduce revenue they generate from ads on their pages. Google didn't name any specific sites that would be affected by the changes.
A study released over the weekend by Sistrix GmbH, a research firm based in Bonn, Germany, attempted to show which websites dropped and rose in search results for one million search queries, such as "credit" or "real estate." Several owners of sites listed in the study agreed that it assessed the impact of Google's moves on their search rankings accurately.
Denis Grosz, president of Conjecture Corp., is the owner of one such site. He said his site, WiseGeek.com, took a "substantial hit" in traffic, though it was "hopeful that could be changed." Some WiseGeek articles ranked as the fifth result rather than the second result for certain queries.
"We got unfairly lumped with a lot of players that had much lower-quality content," he said. "We're not perfect, but I vouch for the quality of our content."
WiseGeek, which pays writers at least $10 to produce articles on a wide range of topics, including trust funds and apartheid, "rejects anything that doesn't meet our standards," Mr. Grosz said. The site,which has more than 124,000 articles, relies on search engines for the majority of its traffic, he said. He called on Google to provide guidance "on what to do and some assurance that if we improve quality we can get back to where we were."
A Google spokesman said in an email: "As always, we have a variety of methods for site owners to raise their questions directly with us," including through Google's "webmaster central" site.
Other sites that were identified by Sistrix as being hurt by the Google changes included information sites EzineArticles.com and Mahalo.com, as well as TheFind.com, which helps users shop for products online.
Jason Calacanis, who runs Mahalo.com, said the site's mission of "creating high-quality, expert-driven" articles and videos "aligns us perfectly, in the long-term, with Google's changes." He said he's "been through changes like this before" while at other sites and his experience shows that Google's ranking system "can be brutal in the short-term but it gets it right over time."
Chris Knight, chief executive of EzineArticles.com, on Saturday said in a post on his company's blog that the Google change might cut the traffic to his site, which got 57 million unique visitors over the last month, by half. He listed a slew of actions the site is taking to climb up the rankings, including reducing the number of ads per page "to improve the perceived user experience" and removing thousands of articles from its site that are deemed to be of lower quality.
TheFind declined to comment while it reviews the study and compares it with the site's own findings.
Associated Content, which offers more than two million articles on a wide variety of topics, was also on the Sistrix list of sites hurt by the Google changes. A spokesman for Yahoo Inc., which bought Associated Content last year, said Yahoo's strategy is to make sure that more traffic to Associated Content articles would come from users of Yahoo's content sites rather than from search-engine users.
The study by Sistrix, which provides data to companies on how they and their competitors rank in search results, also showed that many well-known sites rose in Google's rankings. Those sites include social networks LinkedIn.com and Facebook.com and news sites of Time Warner Inc.'s Time Inc., News Corp.'s Fox News and the New York Daily News. Retailer sites, including those of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and eBay Inc. also rose in rankings, the study found, as did Google's own video site, YouTube. (News Corp. also publishes The Wall Street Journal.)
John Cantarella, president of Time Inc.'s digital news operations, said in an email that "it's really too early to tell" how Google's changes would affect the company. "We applaud this change that gives preference to high-quality original reporting," he wrote.
An eBay spokesman declined to comment. Representatives of the other sites didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
A Google spokesman said that if YouTube had benefited from the changes, it was "happenstance." He said the algorithm change didn't single out any specific sites.
Buy.com is one shopping site that says it is seeing greater traffic following the Google change. Neel Grover, Buy.com's chief executive, said in a statement that he was "delighted" that the new Google ranking algorithm "is helping naturally improve the search rankings for 'actual' relevant companies, including ours."
Demand Media Inc., which some industry observers had thought was a target of the Google change, appears not to have been hurt overall. Demand's eHow.com site, which gives users information on how to build fires or cook eggs, among many other things, rose in Google's rankings, Sistrix found, while a couple of Demand's smaller sites fell. A Demand Media spokeswoman declined to comment. On Thursday a Demand Media executive said the Google change had no material impact on the company.
Johannes Beus, Sistrix's founder, said in an email that many of the sites that appeared to drop in Google's rankings had what the Web industry would call "low-quality" content. "Google aimed at low-quality pages and it looks like it did succeed," he wrote.
By AMIR EFRATI
<Sent from Ralph Paglia's iPad>
Ralph Paglia
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