Ouch! Well This Hurt...

[bigcat1967]

I was dominating one of my niches. I had an article on hubpages at #3 (first page), my main site's internal page at #5 (first page), ArticleBase article at #8 (first page), EZA article (first page) at #9. Then I had an article on InfoBarrel at #3 (second page) and another article on another web 2.0 prop that I can't remember that was ranking at #4 (second page).

All these articles did relate to the niche and were uniquely written. They were not spun but were pretty much about the same subject. They were there for a good six weeks and yes I provided some backlinks to them - but not much.

Anyway - got up this morning - and all but two of them slipped off the first and second pages. Just wondering if Google thought the content was the same (in which I would disagree with). Or maybe they found out it was from the same person which would be me.

Any ideas or guesses on what happened?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Possibly those article sites lost ranking due to the new algo change that was supposed to affect sites Google thinks are content farms.

More info: http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...gorithm-change-cracks-down-content-farms.html

 

[djbaxter]

That seems like a plausible explanation, Linda. I don't think anyone is clear yet exactly which sites are affected by the new algorithm but a sudden drop in sites linking to bigcat1967's site woul certainly account for was observed.

 

[djbaxter]

See http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...ho-lost-google-s-farmer-algorithm-change.html for confirmation of Linda's suggestion.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Oh wow, I was just making an assumption, but it was a lot of the big article sites as well as a lot of other pretty big names.

 

[djbaxter]

That's not the whole list but yes, it appears the article sites got hit pretty hard.

And in truth, although that's going to make some things tougher for internet marketers, it's really long overdue. Most of the articles in these article depositories wouldn't be missed by anyone except the writers and the site owners if they ball disappeared tomorrow. The quality for the most part is pretty weak.

The only real certainty with anything on the internet is that it is going to evolve whether you like it or not and, if you;re going to survive at all, you have to keep current with the changes and adapt to them.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Ya now that I think about it, article sites really are the ultimate content farm. And why do people post articles on those sites? They do it to try to boost their rankings which is what G is trying to squelch.

 

[djbaxter]

Exactly. And all these article spinners don't help the situation at all.

Now, if Google can do something about all the spam on Google Local....

 

[Linda Buquet]

Ya no kiddin' that would be nice!

 

[janellelk]

the company i work for saw the same thing around the same time google made the switch in algorithms. very frustrating.

 

[seoptimize]

I would maybe do a little bit of backlinking to see if that helps at all, if not, try to replace that traffic with efforts in other areas. It is unfortunate that the algo change dropped a lot of article pages/sites, but it's the natural process of things - the linking/traffic methods that get taken advantage of will eventually be wiped out, then something else will come along, etc.

 

[djbaxter]

then something else will come along, etc.

And then that too will be spammed to death and Google will algorithm that new thing out of practicality, and then something new will come along, and so on and son on.

There are always far too many people looking for shortcuts and quick money.<!-- / message --><!-- sig -->