"To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time" (Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts in the googleblog post)
Does anyone know whether this means the ranking change only affects USA web sites or that it only affects queries from the USA?
If the latter we might be able to compare the new and old results by using different servers or different "gl" values. |
Well, what Google is targeting only concerns pages in English language. I've never heard bad feedback from Google users about low quality page in French language... excepted when it's made with content spinning!!!!!!!!
Google spam team should better focus on that. |
From the WSJ:
<< Google Inc., long considered the gold standard of Internet search, is changing the secret formula it uses to rank Web pages as it struggles to combat websites that have been able to game its system.
The Internet giant, which handles nearly two-thirds of the world's Web searches, has been under fire recently over the quality of its results. Google said it changed its mathematical formula late Thursday in order to better weed out "low-quality" sites that offer users little value. ... >> |
SISTRIX analyzed the recent changes to Google's rankings.
http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html
It says that it is based on a data set of one million keywords. As I understand the description, they seem to not have actually analyzed a document's change in position on the results pages. They analyzed a click through rate.
James Temple at The Technology Chronicles discusses that analysis.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=83970
He discussed the impact of that ranking on pages from Google's rivals. |
Oh, BTW, my website Zorgloob.com looks to be also considered as a farm content.
http://i.imgur.com/mdskS.png
WTF? |
Ouch! That doesn't look good, Tom, but give it a few more days before you panic, just in case it's an extreme but random fluctuation.
Your graph is puzzing, because Google says the changes have only been rolled out to the USA. But if you get (say) 50% of your traffic from the USA, your USA traffic would have to disappear completely to give the kind of drop shown in that graph (assuming your rest-of-the-world traffic stayed the same).
My own sites seem unchanged, except for my Knol pages which have dropped by about 50% (but Knol is a content farm of sorts anyway). |
Hmm that's not good indeed, but do you get a lot of traffic from the US? |
Only 5 or 10% of the traffic is from the US. So there is no much change in the traffic stats ;-)
This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools, the blue line shows the number of time Zorgloob has been displayed in the results. Nonetheless, I see a little drop of US traffic. |
