In the last week of February 2011, Google announced a major change to its search algorithm, designed to wipe out low-quality content from its top search results. But instead of wiping out low-quality content websites, Google’s so-called Panda Algorithm wiped out big players from the SERP. See Danny Sullivan’s article from SearchEngineLand.com — he explained it very well. And Amit Agarwal from Labnol (one of my favorite blogs) was also marked as a ‘content farm’ by this new Panda Google algorithm.
And this blog also got the impact of this new algorithm. From Google Webmaster Tools, my search queries are down about 50% in Google search results. See the screenshot below:
This impact indeed reduced my visitors, since 75% of my visitors come from the Google search engine. I know my written English is not very good and below standard (but I’m trying to get better every day). Is bad English writing skill also counted as low quality content?
As I’m writing this article, I’m also following a Google forum thread. Wysz, a Google employee, says: “Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that is just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”
Please note the bold statement: “low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole”. Seriously? If I write something that’s not very useful to others, but is useful for me (probably a story of my life), is that considered “low quality” content? And will it impact my website as a whole? Should I remove it?
Until now there is still a lot of debate in the forum. There are many users complaining that they dropped from the search results even though they write original and good content, while scraper websites rank higher than them. There is a lot of disappointment with this new Google algorithm.
So tell me what you think. Did your website get the impact as well? Leave a comment below!