Google’s Algorithm Change in 2011 And Its Impact From Ez Article Link
On 24th Feb 2011, Google announced a major change
in its search algorithm. This time, the target of this change are
those content farms.
I’m not going into
the details of the change. You can read it
here.
Following the change, I receive lots of
inquiries all asking about its impact on our
Ezarticlelink network. Well, I’ll come to that later. But first,
let’s take a look at some interesting research I’ve done.
Who Are Hit By The
Change?
Following the announcement, Matt Cutts (head
of Google’s Webspam team) said, “Google has been thinking for quite
some time about how to deal with content that isn’t obvious spam but
is clearly not designed with the best interests of the user in mind.
Google needs to be open to ways where we can improve.”
When I read this, my immediate feeling was
Matt is referring to sites like Ezinearticles and other article
directories, which have been gaining a lot of traffic under the new
Google Caffeine system.
You see, these article directories are not
spam, neither are they qualified as a great resource. Yet they seem
to be dominating Google’s search result, simply because tens of
thousands of webmasters are working very hard to build contents as
well as backlinks for them.
Is my feeling right?
You bet!
Take a look at the traffic stats for the 3
highly popular article directories: Ezinearticles, Associatedcontent
and Buzzle.
As expected, all got hit! But taking regular
fluctuations into consideration, Ezinearticles got the least hit of
all.
My next suspects are Squidoo and Hubpages,
since they work like article directories in many aspects. Here are
their traffic stats:
Hubpages is obviously hit by this new change.
Taking regular fluctuations into consideration, Squidoo’s impact is
not really significant.
It does seem that the new algorithm is doing
what it should do, i.e. to penalize content farms.
But is that really the case?
Well, let’s take a look at another content
farm, one that I absolutely salute to – Bigresource.com
For those who don’t know about this site,
Bigresource is a mega website that scrapes contents from all over
the net, from forums to blogs, organizing them into related topics
and then present them in its own search engine optimized pages.
Technically speaking, this website has no
unique content at all. All its contents are short paragraphs from
other websites on the net. Take a look at
one of its pages to see what I mean.
I expected this website to be heavily hit by
the new algorithm, but take a look at its traffic stats:
There is no significant impact!
Finally, let’s take a look at the articles
published in our article directory network.
Below is a screenshot of Google’s search
result for a term that I searched.
The results can be summarised below:
#1 & 2 position – 2 articles from ehow.com
#3 & 4 position – 2 articles published in our article directories
#6 position – article from articlesbase.com
#7 position – article from hubpages.com
#9 position – article from ezinearticles.com
It seems that the articles published in
our article
directory is still doing pretty well in Google’s search result.
Something to note about the 2 articles in our
article directories is that they are spun version of the same
article. You can see their similarity in the screen shot above. This
suggests that spun articles are still considered unique under the
new algorithm.
My Guesses…
From all the information I’ve gathered, here
are some ideas I arrive at:
1) It’s not the end of the world.
What I mean is the content farms are hit, but
they are still getting tons of traffic from Google. So it’s not the
end of the world for them and many other webmasters.
2) Content duplication is still okay.
I say so because Bigresource.com is relatively
unaffected by the new algorithm, suggesting that content uniqueness
is still not a big deal.
But do note that Google evaluates duplicated
content based on the overall web page. This means if you put 30
paragraphs of duplicated contents, taken from all over the net, as
what bigresource.com does, you’ve got unique content! I believe this
is still the case under this new algorithm, as evident in the
studies above.
3) Backlinks are still more important
From the studies above, you can see that
Ezinearticles and Squidoo are less hit by the new algorithm. What
could be the reason?
Is it because they have better contents? I
don’t think so.
What I do know is most marketers, when
publishing contents in article directories and social publishing
platforms, will only build backlinks to selected sites. In the case
of article directories, most marketers will only build backlinks to
their articles in Ezinearticles. In the case of social platforms,
they will only build backlinks to their Squidoo Lenses.
What that means is these two sites not only
have a high site authority, but also have lots of backlinks to lots
of their internal pages, as compared to other sites that have
equally high site authority but relatively less backlinks to their
internal pages.
Could that be the reason why these sites are
less hit? Well, that’s my guess. What’s yours?
Ez Article
Link
