Google Slapped Content Farms Resulted in Average 17.8% Traffic Drop in March!

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It’s been a month since Google announced it’s ‘earth-shaking’ algorithms update where they started slapping domains with low quality content and supposedly ranking high quality sites.

Previously, there are many people talking about it, and fears were flying around in the air. But exactly how bad is it? Are your websites affected by the Google slap?

Back in February, Sistrix.com published a research based on the websites rankings of specific keywords in Google. However, their research is done using the change of rankings of the keywords of the content farm sites. This may not be highly accurate in reflecting the kind of traffic these content farms are losing because some keywords have lesser search volume compared to other keywords.

As it’s now one month since the change in algorithm, I decided to do a research on exactly how much is the damage. I did the research by using Alexa.com as Alexa toolbar is one of the most popular toolbars out there in the world. And here are the results -

Take note: A negative traffic change would mean that the site has a decrease in traffic. A negative Alexa change would mean that the rankings of the site has increased.

If we just compare the top 10,000 Alexa ranking sites, Alexa.com can provide an accurate picture of the traffic change and their Alexa.com ranking change. As traffic statistics are confidential information for these websites, Alexa.com is the best that we can do to get an estimate of the traffic changes.

If you have no idea what an Alexa toolbar is, it is a toolbar that will track their users’ movements in the web. When you visit a site, Alexa would record your pageviews to the site and give the site a rank based on the total amount of pageviews of their visitors compared with other websites.

Taking a closer look at the results above, we can deduce a few conclusions:

1. Average content farm traffic loss - Google earlier has mentioned that they had a ‘pretty big algorithmic improvement in their rankings -  a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries’. Just how much it affect the content farm sites? From the results above, taking an average of the ‘losers’, i.e. sites who have a negative change in traffic, we have an average of around -17.8% impact for the content farm sites.

2. Analysis of worst content farm sites (at least traffic change of 25% and above) - associatedcontent.com, freedownloadcenter.com, essortment.com, americantowns.com, howtodothings.com, answerbag.com, trails.com. If you take a closer look at these sites, most of these sites have low quality content – some articles are just 1 or 2 paragraphs, like answerbag.com, americantowns.com, freedownloadcenter.com etc. Essortment.com and howtodothings.com have longer articles but when you read, you know that it is written by some freelancers who do minimal research.

3. Surprisingly, sites like ezinearticles.com, wisegeek.com aren’t hit too badly – In an ezinearticles.com blog post posted earlier in February, Chris Knight mentioned that they are expecting March’s traffic to be reduced by half of 57 million. This means probably around 2 million a day.

If the Alexa toolbar is accurate, ezinearticles should be serving 47 million unique visitors in March. That would equate to 1.5 million visitors a day. If you look at the latest update from their blog, on 14th March, ezinarticles were still serving in excess of a million visitors.

4. Less Affected Sites – It seems like sites like allbusiness.com, tradekey.com, about.com, business.com, squidoo.com are the least affected. Tradekey.com is the one that confused me. It doesn’t look like the content is good enough to prevent getting slapped by Google. My guess is that it’s content is probably valuable to many businesses.

About.com is a site that seems to escape this slap, as they hired professional writers and experts in different fields to write for them. However, they may have spent even more to pay these writers for the content they are writing.

Other sites like ehow.com and wikihow.com seems to benefit from this Google slap. If you look at the search, I find some of the wikihow search jumped aggressively to the top (I lost my battle to wikihow in one of the keywords).

5. Winner – Naturalnews.com - From above, you can see that NaturalNews.com has an increase of over 20% of traffic. If you take a look naturalnews.com, it is all about news worthy content. Content that are backed by research and up to date information. With so much content pumping out by Mike Adam himself every single day, it is no doubt that the content is extremely high quality (even though some people may doubt the credibility of his writings).

6. Bloggers - I did a check on these 2 bloggers – Problogger.net & Smartpassiveincome.com, and their traffic seems to be stable and not affected by Google farmer slap. In fact, I think they have benefited from the slap.

For problogger.net, my opinion is that they are slightly affected as I feel that are too many guest posts up there and most of them are not high quality enough. On the other hand, SmartPassiveIncome.com by Pat has many valuable content that attracts his readers to read his blogs over and over again. And I think that is why his traffic has increased by this algorithm change.

I would like to hear from you your opinions and questions regarding this research. If you like this research, click on the share button below and support my efforts!

Cheers!

Tags: google slap, search engine optimization, seo