Google Algorithm update

Last week Google had a major change in their search algorithm. The change has noticeably impacted on many websites.

Google has announced that they made a major change in their ranking algorithm:

"We launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites? Sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.

At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites? Sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

"We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does."

Websites like ezinearticles, hubpages, articlebase etc has hurt the most by Google’s update.

EzineArticles CEO Chris Knight wrote a blog post about how his site was affected, and what he is doing to try and get back up in the rankings. "While we adamantly disagree with anyone who places the 'Content Farm' label on EzineArticles.com, we were not immune to this algorithm change," he wrote. "Traffic was down 11.5% on Thursday and over 35% on Friday. In our life-to-date, this is the single most significant reduction in market trust we've experienced from Google."

To try and get back into Google's good graces, EzineArticles is doing things like reducing the number of article submissions accepted by over 10% - rejecting articles that "are not unique enough". It will no longer accept article submissions through a Wordpress Plugin. They're reducing the number of ads per page. They're raising the minimum article word count to 400. They're "raising the bar" on keyword density limits. They're removing articles considered "thin and spammy", and will put greater focus on rejection of advertorial articles. Submitted articles are required to be exclusive to the submitter (but won't be required to be unique to EzineArticles).

In an interview with On the Media, Google’s Matt Cutts was asked: “You have so much market share; you are so much the only game in town at this point that you can enforce these things unilaterally, without hearing or due process, putting the whole online world more or less at your mercy. Is there any process by which the people who are affected by algorithm changes and updates can make a case for themselves?”

Mattcutts mentioned

We have a webmaster forum where you can show up and ask questions, and Google employees keep an eye on that forum. And, in fact, if you've been hit with a, what we call a “manual action,” there’s something called a “reconsideration request,” which essentially is an appeal that says, ah, I'm sorry that I was hiding text or doing keyword stuffing and I've corrected the problem, could you review this?

And over time, we've, I think, done more communication than any other search engine in terms of sending messages to people whose site has been hacked or who have issues and then trying to be open so that if people want to give us feedback, we listen to that

Cutts later said, “Any change will have some losses, but hopefully a lot more wins than losses.”

Comment me if you had any changes on your website.