Last Thursday, Google launched a new tweak to their search algorithm. It was targeted at content farms, which many consider to be spammy sites whose content are created solely to attract search engine traffic for specific keywords.
I do notice more and more of these sites on Google’s search results. For me, the main offender is ezinearticles.com. Most of the articles I get from there are completely useless. They’re just keywords being repeated over and over again with a bunch of fillers. I can see why Google wants to push those sites further down their search rankings.
On Thursday morning, I’ve noticed that I had a sudden drop in traffic. After four days, I’ve noticed my referrals from Google have dropped by about 40%. A scary drop, but not the end of the world. When I created Wopular, I wasn’t thinking content farm; I was just creating another aggregation site to keep up on current events. But whatever, life goes on. I have new features to work on and stuff to do. Hopefully, their next tweak doesn’t take more traffic away from this site.
UPDATE:
The good thing is I'm a one-man shop, so I don't have to support an entire company like ezinearticles.com.
I kinda agree with WiseGeek.com that they're unjustly affected by this. Their articles are actually decent, although I can't agree with the number of Google ads on their pages. I think they went overboard with them. Sometimes the amount of text in the Google ads equal the amount of text in their articles. That's probably what makes their content seem low-quality. Removing some ads will probably help them in the long run.
REFERENCE:
Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?
Google's Search Cleanup Has Big Effect
