Last week some major wire services, such as PRWeb and PR Newswire, lost a lot of traffic overnight. It looks like Google dropped the hammer on most wire services with its latest algorithm update. And it’s bad. Really bad.
What happened?
After Google announced it was rolling out Panda 4.0—the latest update to its ranking algorithm—there have been numerous stories about big sites taking a major drop in search rankings.
According to traffic data, we can see that PRWeb.com (an arm of Vocus) has lost nearly a half-million daily sessions, reducing traffic to a fraction of what it was getting before.
The above chart shows a significant drop in organic search traffic starting May 28. Most Google algorithm updates have an impact on the organic traffic, but these drops are stunning. For some sites, we are seeing an overnight drop of over 80 percent.
Why, Google?
The overall trend of Google’s updates is to make it harder for webmasters to try to “game” the system. Google’s goal is to keep searchers satisfied, and one way they do that is by ensuring searches present relevant results that carry high-quality content. Content farms and sites with low-quality content get shut out.
Check out our previous post 5 Ways to Catch a Journalist’s Eye
With this latest Panda update, Google is simply following through on what it has hinted at for a while.
Here’s a quote from the blog of Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team: “The objective is not to ‘make your links appear natural’; the objective is that your links are natural.”
Google is not our enemy. It’s a smart company that reminds us time and time again what people want: great content, natural distribution.
To read more, view the original story here.
