Jan 2011 Google Algorithm Changes - There Was More To The Story

On Jan 21st, Matt Cutts of Google announced a new round of high profile algorithm changes around the next bend. He announced changes that had been made to combat search engine spam and changes that were coming soon.

Of course, those who reported the announcement tended to only focus on one small part of the overall announcement that Cutts said Google was "evaluating": " 'content farms,' which are sites with spammy, shallow or low-quality content."

However, the actual announcement additionally included mentions of the following changes to Google's algorithm:

• Increased both size and freshness of index in recent months.
• Launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly, like self-serving blog comments.
• Radically improved ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010.

On Jan 28th, Cutts announced that the proposed changes were initiated the day before.

He insisted that the new change would only affect 2% of all keyword search queries and only 0.5% of queries would demonstrate significant changes in the SERPs.

Many people speculated that these changes would spell the end of article directories.

One of my bigger sites is an article directory, so I was curious how this would affect my traffic.

There was an effect, but one that most people would have not expected...

The day after the Content Farm update, my traffic spiked from an average of 1270 unique visitors per day to 1685 unique visitors on Friday Jan 28th -- the day of the second announcement.

Typically, Google only accounts for 35% of my daily traffic. On that one day, Google delivered twice the normal amount of traffic to my website, increasing from around 400 u.v. to 800 u.v. on that one day.

The day after saw my traffic return to its normal average of 1270 u.v. per day.

I guess that means that Google does not view MY article directory as a low-value website containing spammy, shallow or low-quality content.

But then, why would they have considered mine spammy or low-quality? I don't accept low-value or spammy articles to my article directory.


p.s. This is not a joke thread. But the next one might be.