A string of well known travel brands – including Uptake and Travelpod – have fallen foul of a crackdown by Google on what it calls “low-quality sites” or “sites that are just not very useful”.
The search giant announced – in a widely expected blog post – last week thatad it was making “big algorithmic improvements” to its ranking system, effectively punishing sites known unfavourably by many ascontent farms – in other words: those lacking a whole lot of original material.
Google says it wants to provide better rankings for “high quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.
Sensibly, Google has steered clear of naming and shaming sites it expected to be hit by such a change in its search algorithm (only in the US so far) – leaving it to the system to calculate and others to work it out.
Search company Sistrix worked on one million keywords before and after the update, ranking them by a search visibility index covering the number of keyword positions lost.
Read the full story at:http://www.tnooz.com/2011/02/28/news/big-travel-sites-hit-by-google-content-farming-clearout/
