Google's Phantom Update Affects How-To Sites

Most likely the pages that where affected are mini-site that has "how-to" articles only answering one specific question only. If you have a good articles that provides a lot of value even if it's a how-to guide then you don't have to worry about it.

This won't impact quality sites. Pretty much the same thing - in different forms - has been happening for years. (EZA, anyone?) You can game G, certainly, but not in the long-term. And in that long-term, the real secret to successful SEO? Doing what Google wants: delivering a quality user experience. Like most marketers, I didn't always believe that, but if two decades has taught me anything at all, it's this: respect your audience and Google will respect you.

Tom

I was just thinking about HubPages the other day, wondering if they ever bounced back from the beating they took a few years ago. Guess so. Then they got hit again.

I'd find a new business model. I personally dumped 400+ articles on that site back in the day.

As far as Google keeping visitors on their site longer, it's BS. They do it for quite a few queries now, and then throw our sites out of the index for scraping and spamming. G just does it better, that's all. ;/

These Google updates REALLY freak me out!

Just when you are getting comfortable with where your stuff is ranking, the newest update comes out and wreaks havoc. At least it seems to do so with mine.

I remember the Panda/Penguin update from a few things ago causing my high ranking blog to fall through the floor for a couple months before it began to regain steam again.

If this newest update is anything like that one was then were all in for a rude awakening.

You have to realize what HubPages really is in the first place though-

1) They have zero quality standards...almost anyone can write for them.
2) They focus on local niches and sub/niches, which means lots of similar content to artificially rank.
3) Content can be about anything and in any niche....just like ComLuv, Ezine and the others who recently got obliterated.
4) They have tens of thousands of writers with their own agendas.
5) A lot of their content has become highly promotional.
6) Google said two years ago that ALL SITES meeting those criteria would get spanked.

So is this a shocker by any stretch of the imagination? No. It's simply good Internet police work getting spammy content off of the first page of Google. HubPages is just another form of guest blogging where standards or content types don't necessarily matter, and punishing them and sites like them is a very good thing for everyone.

And if you look a little closer, sites like SearchEngineLand took hits as well...which is another community of guest bloggers promoting their own agendas. Did Hubspot get hammered though? Did Moz? Did the Content Standard? Nope, because they focus on quality over quantity.

So as long as you're putting out solid content, this update can only help you as some of the long-standing trash sites begin to drop out of virtually every category there is. And from a marketing standpoint, that is a very, very good thing.

I noticed a long term 20% boost in traffic or so around the start of this month after a while of inactivity on my site. However I did get a couple good back links from some new's type sites and bloggers.

I feel like anything that dominates is going to get burned. Their is no reason for one company to dominate another companies business. If I owned google, I wouldn't mind burning some traffic from bigger sites.

Google is all about web development and web development is all about diversity. The internet is a platform of creativity. The internet favors developers not marketers. It's the fundamental principles of it's creation.

Marketers favor working around an algorithm they can never beat but can always game. The way I see it is so long as you're not spamming the internet like marketers did 8 years ago, playing the game is a-okay!

This post about the "Phantom Update" spiked my interest as I suffered from the previous Panda/Penguin
changes.

My site was originally floating between 1 - 5 on page 1 for my keyword, unfortunately I was unable to take any action due to the fact I was based in China. After 12 months I arrived back in the UK my site was down to page 15?.

So I then like a lot of other people looked for solutions such as backlinks, SEO, PBN etc. I did a lot of reading around the Panda/Penguin problem, but I never got around to implementing any changes. So my site is still in the same state it was 3 years ago. Yet my site is now back on page 1 between 1-3 and has been for the last 9 months.

The reason I posted this info, is that it led me to question all this SEO stuff, backlinks etc

PS
The competition is aprox 115,000 for the keyword

I must be one of the last remaining internet users that never uses Google to search. I never "Google it". I use Yahoo or Bing, usually Yahoo.

Thank for the info^^

That's why I don't even play the SEO game any longer. If I get ranked, it's just icing on the cake. But to rely on it is just insane.

I started noticing that Google itself started providing information on many queries. This is a pretty good deal for users who are looking for a brief but meaningful answer. And you'll notice that most answers fit a mobile device very well.

Heck, look at their current commercials, They are not just cutting out the middleman, they are eliminating the need to go to any website. But this trend might bite them in the backsides since who's going to click on an advertisement if they already get the answer direct from Google.

According to comScore the number of mobile users surpassed desktops and laptops users in 2014. Google (and others too) ads don't work so well in the mobile format due to lack of space and format. This is an issue for everyone doing Internet Marketing direct or as an affiliate.

Google is searching for an answer just like the rest of us on mobile users.

I had one site hit by, I believe, this update. Except impressions in webmaster tools for it started going down around April 28th/29th. I read on searchengineland or somewhere similar that many sites that were hit reported traffic dropping around these same dates, as opposed to May3rd or 4th when the update supposedly was released. Anyone else?

Always interesting to see how people panic after each Google update. It's like setting fire to an ant hill and watching the poor guys run around with no sense of direction - whatsoever

Anyway, does anybody know if ehow's been affected much? They usually don't have much content in their how-to's.

Hey guys... this wasn't targeting any site in particular, this isn't a filter, therefore this has nothing to do with penalizing low quality sites at all.

It's a core algorithm change, meaning before any filters, which impact the way Google detects quality.

Think LSI but instead of an on page metric it is used off page for co-citations and co-occurrence. It's impacting backlinks, since you're technically getting "backlink" credit for nonbacklinks lol, and true backlinks aren't judge by authority or "juice" it passes as much anymore as it is the context and common occurrence of phrases and descriptions, hence, the rising power of co-occurrence in SEO.

Nothing to do with hitting, slapping or penalizing sites. Also has nothing to do with the mobile update.

How-to sites really aren't effected overall.... most how to sites are doing just fine. Hubpages, they should be used to the game now.

If this does target how-to sites, it's about damn time. It goes to show how far Google is behind the times.

eHow, WikiHow and the other "How" junk sites have been an issue for the last 3+ years.

About time, G.

Google phantom update more similar like what panda was exactly does. This update impacted many websites like HOW TO content websites like hubpages, answers.com,ehow and wikihow etc., Link issues seems to be the main factor for this update. It penalize websites with low quality,thin contents websites, also penalize sites with too many ads, stacked videos, pop ups, pages difficult to navigate.

It's really not make sense to drop how-to type