Mass Hysteria and Google Updates
You may or may not have heard, but Google rolled out a major update to their search engine algorithm last week.
It’s impact is being felt by thousands of online businesses and marketers, many of which went from huge amounts of free traffic to next to none.
It’s being talked about all over the web and although I usually don’t have too much to say about Google algorithm updates there seems to be an almost ‘mass hysteria’ about this one.
I’ve been getting emails asking for tips and questions on what I think about the update so I thought I’d address this here.
First of all, here’s a link right to the “Official Google Blog” so you can read all about it directly from the source:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
The type of sites that were hit the hardest were those that had what they’re calling ‘low level content’ or little unique content on them. Or at least that seems to have been the intention with this update … Google doesn’t always get it right, especially not right away. But that was the main intention with this update.
Here’s their quote taken right off their blog:
“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”
So a few of the sites that saw a decline in traffic included many article directories, the biggest one being ezinearticles.com
That means the folks who were publishing content to article directories and trying to get traffic from people clicking on the link in their resource box likely saw a very significant decline in traffic.
Although it’s a shame, this was never a very good strategy, because it’s always better to invest in your own business (or website), not someone else’s. By writing good content and placing it on a site you didn’t own, you were building up someone else’s business in the hopes of getting a little traffic to yours.
Unfortunately, now the amount of traffic you’d expect to see from this strategy is even lower, making this already bad strategy a real stinker of a strategy now.
So hopefully you weren’t doing this.
If you’ve enrolled in my SEO training I spent a good deal of time talking about this and why it was a bad idea. So I really hope my clients and even those of you who read my blog weren’t focusing on this method of traffic generation.
I’ve also spent a great deal of time talking about how you need UNIQUE content for your sites. This is something I noticed made an impact even as far back as 5 years ago. It’s even more important now.
I know there are people saying their sites with duplicate content weren’t impacted, but the whole goal of this Google update seems to be to knock these sites way down in the rankings.
Google will eventually get it right.
So if you’ve got sites that you’ve invested time building links to, but don’t have much unique content, I’d start getting some written ASAP.
OK, so how were my sites impacted from all this? Not really at all.
The update seems to have been ongoing throughout the month of Feb and most people agree was *officially* rolled out on Feb 24th (that’s also what the Google Blog says so I’m going with it). Here are a few traffic stats from sites during Feb that get ALL their traffic from the search engines…
The average unique visitors to this site per day in Feb was 654. As you can see, on Feb 24th (the day of the big update), my traffic was higher than average.
I put “Friday and Weekend” on the 25th, 26th and 27th because I ALWAYS see a major dip in traffic every weekend. That’s just how it works with the markets I’m in. But according to the screenshots, my traffic came back up on Monday so you can see that my traffic is holding up just fine.
Here’s another screenshot from a different site. This one gets a really similar level of traffic and earns a good deal of money every month…
Average visits per day in Feb for Site 2 was 641. It’s the same deal, my traffic is holding up for this site. I looked at a few others and everything seems fine. My earnings are also stable so everthing’s running along fine.
Here’s what I do though … I have unique content that’s written around keyphrases people are actually searching for. I don’t use ANY shortcuts for this other than by doing extensive keyword research and then pay outsourcers to write high quality content on those topics (I used to write the articles myself, but at this point, I don’t really write anything for any sites other than this one).
I make sure the freelance writers who write my content can write well and will do research on the topic. If the articles I get back are full of typos and errors I don’t use that writer anymore. If the articles don’t include any research or value to them, I also don’t use that writer anymore. The one’s who do those things, I keep giving jobs to, try to treat them right, am happy to be a reference for them, and try to help them out as best I can.
It’s really that simple.
If you’re writing all your content on your own, make sure the content is readable and has some value to it. If you do those things then someday in the distant future when Google gets smart enough to figure out which sites offer value and which don’t (and will be put in the ‘low level content’ pile), you won’t have to worry. Who knows if and when they’ll get there, but that’s their goal.
Here’s another quote from the Google blog that pretty much sums my point up:
“At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
So lucky for me, I’ve been doing this.
I do want to point out that right now it’s easier to figure out which sites have unique content on them than good content at this point, but I can guarantee they’ll get there. It’ll probably happen by Google looking at how long visitors stay on your pages than with the actual content on your site, but that’s a good indicator of the value a site has to offer and something that would be pretty easy to figure out how to measure.
The other thing I do is to build a lot of backlinks using a variety of anchor text. This helps things look more natural. It also gets me a lot of traffic because each page might rank high for dozens of keyphrases, not just one.
Here’s an example of the type of traffic I’m able to get (again, this one is ALL from search engine traffic)…
Average visits per day in Feb was 2629. Some days I get as much as 3,500+ unique visitors a day. Even after the Google update, it’s doing just fine.
Again, I marked Friday and Weekend on the 25th, 26th, and 27th because I always get a dip in traffic on those weekend days. But my traffic was back just as strong if not stronger on Monday.
As you might guess, I wouldn’t have even noticed this Google algorithm update if it hadn’t been for the emails I’ve been receiving. And that’s where I want you to be as well. I hate having to worry about things, especially my income so I try my best to safeguard it. It’s up to you to whether you want to safeguard your business or try to outsmart Google.
Believe me, I’ve tried to outsmart Google in the past, but wasn’t very good at it, so now I just try to think about where they’re heading with their search engine and make sure my sites fit that model.
It’s actually a lot easier 
Another thing I do is make sure I get links from a variety of sources and would like to think most of these sources are on the up-and-up (meaning, I’m not spamming the internet for links). I’m not 100% convinced this update targeted low level link building (despite what I’ve read online in between the bouts of mass hysteria), but I’m sure Google is heading in that direction. They’ll eventually get there too.
I’ve gotten a lot of my links from article directories, but I wasn’t submitting articles for direct traffic, just for linking purposes. There’s a huge difference here. If I were submitting for direct traffic, like I mentioned earlier, I’d be seeing maybe 10 times less traffic right now.
I’ve heard a lot of speculation about this, but it seems to me even if a site like ezinearticles.com isn’t ranking as high as it was, the links you got from it still give as much weight as they did before. I’m 95% sure of this due to what I see with my sites so I plan to still use article marketing as a form of link building.
I’m going to predict that a lot of top article directories will start only allowing unique content on their sites and will have more strict regulations in place for the quality of the content they accept. If they do, then fine, I’ll get unique content written up for the top few and bet that will be worth the extra effort.
And I really only suggest using article directories for backlinks as ONE part of your link building strategy. You should also use directory submissions (despite what you may have heard, they still work), press releases, bookmarking, RSS feed submissions, third party sites, contacting webmasters for links, and other quality link building methods. Plus as your sites start rising in the search engines and people visit them, you really will get people linking to your sites without doing anything as long as you have some quality content.
Ways of getting links that I don’t think are very efficient include; spamming for forum profile links, spamming blogs for blog comment links, and other stuff I probably don’t even know about. These are what I consider to be low quality links and I think they’ll eventually not count for too much. But again, I don’t think this update targeted these. Start diversifying your link building now and you should be OK later on.
Essentially what I’ve outlined here is basically what I’m doing. It’s a crash course taken right from my SEO training — the InlineSEO System. It’s what I’ve been doing for a number of years and I’m sure I’ll continue to do for many more in the future.
I’m not getting penalized by the search engines simply because I’m building sites with value. No algorithm change will EVER be directed toward sites that offer value. So if you get that right, you will always come out ahead in the long run.
All the best…
Lisa
I agree once again with you.
How will this new rule affect rhose who use WL Marketing, Linkvana, Directory Maximizer and other services?
Dennis – I use all those services and I was not impacted at all.
Hi Lisa
I guess its still not a good idea to syndicate your content to other sites/article directories? A lot of article writers recommend to syndicate your content but I believe this will only dilute your content/site which could impact on your SEO efforts. Interested in your thoughts.
I always enjoy reading your analysis. Bought your SEO product last year and still have not implemented all of it in an organized format. I need to get going!!
Arty – I don’t put the unique content on my sites anywhere else. But, I submit different articles to article directories just like I say in the post above. It’s a great way to build backlinks.
Great insight Lisa.. this you talked about in your Content publishing black book… Unique contents wins all the time… I am following you advice.
There was an update? Seriously? Lol
Lisa, if I hadn’t received your email and read this blog post, I wouldn’t have known anything about a Google update.
My sites don’t get anywhere near the amount of traffic your sites receive (yet), but the ones that do get traffic stayed consistent. In fact, I’ve actually seen a bit of a spike as well.
So, yes… like you point out, as long as we lay the right foundation and continue to provide value to the end user, we have nothing to worry about. That’s all Google wants in the end.
Quincy
Hi Lisa
I am glad you were not affected by the algorithm change;thankfully I haven’t been affected either.
In fact I didn’t know anything about it until I started getting emails from “gurus”.
I have been using your “inline seo methods” for the last year or so and my traffic and income is growing and the biggest increase seems to be in the last few days..seeming to coincide with the algorithm change.
I generally just use article directories for back links and just plod away in my own time as I can as I am busy building a legal practice right now.
But I always have unique content and only on my sites and the perverse thing is that the less attention I pay to the Warrior Forum and “tactics” discussed there, the better results I am seeing..
Terry
Hi Lisa,
As always you’ve hit the nail right on the head.
Do you still think that submitting articles to article directories as a good strategy to get backlinks?
Lisa,
Ive certainly become a fan of yours since purchasing your SEO training course last week and I definitely enjoy reading over your blog.
However, I was infact quite surprised at your recommendation of Linkvana within your SEO course. I was using Linkvana for approximately 1 year, up until about 5 months ago, when suddenly, a large majority of my backlinks began dissapearing for certain sites that i was promoting using LV’s service.
Upon investigation it became immediately apparent that a large portion (if not most) of Linkvana’s blog network had been slapped, and slapped hard. (I document everything) Reason being, most of my backlinks werent indexed, and infact, many of the blogs had been taken down or “patched up”. Most of my “blurbs” as they call them were gone, and replaced with basic anchor text links on sites that had 0 PR. It was obvious they had panicked and tried to rectify the issue themselves by rolling out crappy new blogs.
Of course when I realised this, I contacted the team of Linkvana, asking for a explanation. At first they denied any issues (being slapped etc) then, upon further questioning admitted to being slapped and having to “rebuild” a large portion of their blog network. This whole process of email ping pong took about 2 weeks.
I was pretty dissapointed to say the least.
I wouldnt have been so upset and frustrated if they had of explained the situation to me, but the initial denial was inexcusable.
Having said that, I would recommend those considering using the Linkvana service to THINK TWICE. Google isnt stupid, you will get caught, as I did, and your money will go wasted.
Using Linkvana is BLACK HAT. There is no other way to put it.
I am not affiliated with LV, Im just telling it how it is/was.
John
Lisa, these are some critical changes which will affect all of us and our SEO strategies. For about a month, I have been seriously thinking about my SEO vision. And after the last updates by Google, I guess I came to a conclusion: From now on, I will work only on my content, and try hard to create quality content that will likely be shared by my readers. Other than that, I will not build backlinks myself in any way that Google considers to be bad.
In reply to Arty
As Lisa says, do not put your site content anywhere else. Use unique content for that. Why not try using other unique articles for syndication. It may be that with enough good content heavily syndicated out there it will found regardless of what Google says or does and provided it is useful to human readers will be beneficial to you.
The problem with the Google bots is that they can’t tell good quality from bad. So a lot of the moves that article directories do to attempt to improve quality are most probably a waste of time from that point of view. Good for human readers who want decent information though.
Google probably do currently base quality on time on site. The problem there is that there are a lot of surfers out there that when confronted with a lot of text to read will just click away regardless of how good the quality is. Attention span has deteriorated over recent years.
By their nature article directories cannot put photos, graphics and videos in the articles. A combination of these is what holds even fleeting visitors to a page we are told. Stands to reason then why article directories are losing Google love based on a time factor.
I think that if Google keeps on doing what they are intent on, it may be that they become an insignificant player on the Internet. The Net is driven by money. If advertisers are not getting what they want from Google their money will go elsewhere.
So keep on following what Lisa says and does and life will be fine.
Good luck
Tony
Thanks for your view on this Lisa!
As you say Google will get their algorithm 100% right over time – they have some clever people working for them
I have been noticing a myriad of ‘exact match domains’ all over page one of the results recently… and they don’t really offer anything other than a few adword blocks!
Lisa,
great article, thank you.
Would love if you joined our community!
Hi Lisa,
I have been following your advice since I bought your SEO course and the sites I have build “your way” are doing great. My traffic keeps going up even with this update.
According to what I’ve read from other marketers, the people who were really affected by the update had a lot of duplicate content on their sites. And they had been building tons of junk links with xrumer and the like…
As far as article submissions are concerned, I have followed your method to submit the same article with lots of different titles and resource boxes and it has worked (and still does) very well for me. I think this is not an issue. But I’m not spamming either, I maybe submit to 30 directories, high and lower quality ones, and then my submission service also sends my articles to ezine publishers, etc. (which is actually very good to get additional targeted traffic).
I have the same vision as you and I think Google will eventually really be able to filter good sites from poor ones. I’ll keep working on quality and “user experience”.
Very reassuring Lisa. I just completed my first site based on your Content Publishing system and implementing the concepts of the Inline SEO course. I’m working through Affilliate programs and AdSense to put offers on my sight and had an oh crap moment when the Hysteria began.
Was I going in the wrong direction? Was all the work I just did building this site for naught?
I was very pleased to see this update from you. It validated the work I’ve put in and made me confident I’m on my way to profitability.
I was particularly concerned about how the lastest Google update would affect the value of links from article directories (a favorite link building method). Looks like it’s all good.
Thanks Lisa. When the noise around me urges me to buy the next “easy button” solution for big bucks, I just go back and watch the Inline SEO videos and remind myself that there’s no such thing as “instant money.”
Now here’s another question: How do we (or Google) determine if the unique content is a quality content? My guess is that when people starts to link to them. What do you think?
Hi Lisa,i have purchased your SEO inline system.noticed you have started using other link building services like linkvana,…would you please share with us those services and your experience with them.thank you.
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for adding some sanity to this fear and madness surrounding Google’s latest attempt to do what they should be doing after all which is providing quality results when ‘we’ and I do mean ‘we’ use their search engine.
As online marketers we would be the first to complain if while doing our own research Google cam up with a load of crappy results, it would make our job a whole lot harder so I say “bring it on Google”…
Seriously, as always you are right on the money. Produce quality sites and you have nothing to fear, quite the contrary, as the dross falls from the rankings the ‘cream’ will rise…
I too had not noticed anything but as yours was the third email ‘announcing this catastrophe’ I thought I had better take a look at my stats for Feb.
I have just checked 5 of my sites and in all cases the traffic actually went up since the 24th. In fact I have recorded my highest visitor numbers since the 24 on three of them… So like I said, if this is the result of Google’s efforts, “more please”…lol
Thanks again as always Lisa for producing the very best info to help those of us out there who want to provide quality websites for our visitors and who recognize that our ‘bottom line’ is in direct proportion to doing that.
To your everlasting success…
Steve
Ive been reading about this and yes, it is bordering on hysteria just like when google changed things up with google places. My sites only got better. One thing people forget is that news sites syndicate certain news events word for word (like charlie sheen stories or instance) but as long as your overall structure is uniqe, you should be fine.
Carlos – yes, submitting articles to article directories is still a great way to build backlinks.
John – Although I’ve never really talked about my thoughts on this publicly, I feel that ALL LINK BUILDING IS BLACKHAT. You might get the wrong idea from my statement, but honestly, do you think Google wants you to figure it all out as we’ve pretty much done and build links back to your site with the right anchor text? It’s all going to artificially inflate the rankings of your pages.
They’d much rather you get ‘natural links’ from real webmasters who decided your site was so wonderful they had to link to it. But in the real world that’s going to take you forever because no one will ever find your site especially when you first build it.
It is too bad some of your links from linkvana were removed, I’m sure some of mine were as well, but that’s how it goes with link building. Ezinearticles.com will likely start removing some of the poorly written content from their sites as well, so people are going to complain about that too (even though I understand it doesn’t cost … however the cost in time is even bigger when you consider a 500 word article compared to a short blurb you outsource). This is just how it works.
I don’t think just because a link network or a site like ezinearticles.com gets what everybody likes to call ’slapped’ that you’re going to get in trouble for having the links on it.
It’s a shame this is going to get buried in the comments, so maybe at some point I’ll try to write an entire post on my thoughts on this.
Thanks, Lisa
Hi Nail, it really depends on what your SEO strategy was to begin with. I won’t be changing anything I’ve done at this point and don’t suggest anyone who’s followed my program to adjust their strategy. Providing good content and building higher quality, diversified links is going to be a solid way to do things for a long time to come.
Lisa
Hi Joseph –
“Now here’s another question: How do we (or Google) determine if the unique content is a quality content? My guess is that when people starts to link to them. What do you think?”
I think this is a great question and one we could spend hours talking about, maybe another topic for a blog post. It would be a guessing game for the most part, but how will (or is) Google advance enough to decide for sure if you’re content’s any good?
Here’s a few ideas off the top of my head:
1. Incoming links as a sign of popularity – although they’ve been doing that for the last 10 years if not more, but it’s getting more sophisticated (on both sides of the fence … Google vs Us).
2. How long people stay on your page, do they scroll around, or do they just click the back button immediately? Kurt Melvin has been talking about this for years (he’s the first one I ever heard discuss it). He called it People Rank. This may already play a role, but I expect this will play a bigger role.
3. Stuff like spell check has existed forever in programs like Word, I can’t see why it couldn’t be (or maybe already is) part of the algorithm.
4. A lot of people won’t believe this, but Google actually does have REAL PEOPLE checking on sites for certain search terms (very lucrative and popular ones). So real scanners play a role in this already.
Some ideas and again a great question.
Thanks,
Lisa
My problem is the monetization. Since the Google change, much less ads are coming up on the Google search page, so I haven’t been able to apply Lisa’s monetization rules.
Thanks for the reply Lisa. You see, quality is a subjective word. When Google says “quality” sites, they didn’t define what they mean by quality.
Quality can’t be measured, but we can measure unique content. I guess that the only way to measure quality is based on backlinks, bounce rate and manual checking. And I guess that Google is using these as a measure too.
If backlinks + bounce rate are the main factors to measure quality, then our approach should be to continue creating quality content and submit quality content to directories for backlinks.
Finally, I support quality content as I have one of my website ranking in top 5 for a looong time and it’s one of my untouched site for years. My investigation shows that many independent sites link to me and talked about my site as an alternative resource. (And I’m not even an expert in this niche!)
I guess if this is true, then we will have a totally different ballgame where we will want to create quality content that is so good, people automatically link back to us.
I don’t think Google have quite managed to sort the ‘bad’ guys from the ‘good’ guys out yet – properly. There are still websites with a lot of copied content from different websites. No single one of these content published in multiple posts every single day belongs to such sites. They rather get content from forums site etc. and Google isn’t penelalizing the real scumbags yet (Pardon the pun).
I have read and heard about a lot of others who are losing out business because of Google’s ‘unfare’ reshuffling of content results in their search engine.
It’s a mad house. I get the feeling one should prepare himself for an aggresively competitive 2011 and beyond.
Things will simply never be as they were every again.
Lisa,
I feel very similar to your opinions on here. Although I do build many niche sites, they are quality… lucky to have noticed you when I was first starting out a few months ago. My income is coming up nicely and I didn’t even notice any of the the algorithm changes that people are talking about.
Tom
The change moved my site, 100 Fiddle Tunes, from the 4th page to the third listing on page one. I guess I’m not going to complain. Now as I continue through your ebook, Content Publishing Blackbook, maybe I can start thinking seriously about monetizing my site.
I agree with you 100 percent on link diversity, infact, just last night I was thinking to myself, that eventually Google may even catch on to links from blog networks.
The best thing to do is offer value to readers and just as you stated, this will cause others to wan’t to link to your content as well.
It’s great to just get links from every where even if their considered low quality links, i think the objective is to not do spammy like behavavior, by getting a ton of low quality links from forums, and blog comments, and everything should pan out.
Thaks for sharing this with us really appreciate it!
PS. your killing it on the traffic LOL! Wow I may have to pick up your course sometime soon.Lol
I’ve been building sites for about a year and a half now, experimenting with different business models. I started shifting my focus to building bigger, better sites (and less of them) based on InlineSEO and a couple other good resources I’ve found.
The only big impact I’ve experienced is I’ve had 2 sites completely deindexed – - not just lower rankings, gone! Fortunately, those are sites I built early on and were more for experimental purposes, they were never meant to be moneymakers (though they were monetized a little). I had put them on the back burner. The one common denominator? I was keeping them “fresh” with content from SEOLV. I wasn’t just letting them autopost either, I reviewed them and denied any that were off topic or poorly written, poorly spun or poorly formatted and probably only accepted maybe 20% of the articles.
I would have expected a drop in rankings, because much of the content was pretty shallow, but to be completely deindexed was a surprise. It could be argued that the problem was poor content or the outgoing links in that content to who knows where, but I suspect it was directly related to SEOLV somehow, as my content wasn’t terrible (and there’s plenty of terrible content still out there), just bland, and I actually had some good content on those sites from when I first started them, it just got buried under the mundane.
Anyway, I’m not upset, it was a rather inexpensive learning experience, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have spent a whole lot of time on those sites myself, as a consumer.
One interesting note is that according to SeoBook Askthebuilder has actually lost about 87% of his traffic. He’s pretty aggressive in his Adsense placement so maybe that had something to do with it regardless of the fact that Google used him as a case study.
Lisa,
I have your SEO course also. I am still unclear though how website directories would help specific pages you are trying to rank. I can see it helping the website but how does it help specific keywords on different pages?
Lets say your site is acnecreamdot.com and you want to rank a specific URL within your site but not the main page. How can website directories help with that when they are ranking the home page?
I really enjoy your course, but do not see a place to ask questions at.
Hi Aghper – I talk about this in the course. You’re welcome to try out any that you want. I’ve tried most and since I’m not giving out recommendations that should be an indication of what my thoughts are on most of them.
Jivin’ Ivan – Not sure what kind of market you’re in that doesn’t have Adwords ads, but it’s not going to be a good one for Adsense that’s for sure. In that case my ‘rule’ is to avoid that market and know I made that very clear in any of my paid materials. This Google update has nothing to do with Adwords though, just the organic search results. – Lisa
Marie, you can only get links to your home page, but you can diversify the anchor text from most free directories. I talk about many in the course and even have a PDF of where you can get links to other pages of your site including the home page from paid directories. If you don’t want to do that it’s fine, just use the many other methods I talk about for getting links to your internal pages.
There’s at least one link to the support desk on every page of the course, that’s where you can get answers to your questions.
Thanks, Lisa
Jesse –
“One interesting note is that according to SeoBook Askthebuilder has actually lost about 87% of his traffic. He’s pretty aggressive in his Adsense placement so maybe that had something to do with it regardless of the fact that Google used him as a case study.”
That’s interesting so I had to go look and see if it’s true. SEOBook.com does talk about the askthebuilder site, but when I went to alexa I saw a dip on the 24th and then the traffic went right back to where it normally is the next day all the way through today.
So this might not be accurate. Really, the only people that can tell you for sure are the website owners. I don’t know the owner of that site, but wish I did!
Thanks, Lisa