Last week Google announced a change in its top secret search algorithm, adjustments aimed at placing “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites” lower in Google search results.
Over at the high value global literature site Complete Review, Michael Orthofer noted that the change has reduced his traffic by 10 percent. While the change is aimed at improving search results and punishing websites that scrape other sites for content, it appears it can have a negative impact on useful sites as well.
Have any other literary sites been affected? Here’s more from Complete Review: “Searches drive most (ca. 80 per cent) of the traffic to the complete review, and Google is responsible for the overwhelming majority of that traffic (over 92 per cent in 2010), so any ‘Google dance’ has a profound effect on the number of visitors to the site. While daily traffic fluctuations make it difficult to say precisely what the immediate impact was, it appears that, despite only affecting US searches, traffic was immediately down some 10 per cent at the site.”