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Google.com has updated their web search algorythm, this is they claim a part of their ongoing battle to provide good and relevant content to users (you).
Recently they took a backward step and are now serving up rubbish on a platter for you... click farm anyone?
My number of visitors dropped from 700 a day to less than 350 a day just 2 days ago, all the additional visitors were previously from Google search.
I rang a fellow webmaster and asked him if he'd noticed anything - same thing - less than 1/2 the traffic in the last two days.
He was telling me that a quick search for the terms that he used to place well for in google are now all click farms or click traps. This means it is a website with no content except the words you are searching for spammed all over the page in non-sense or little use content with lots of (Google) Ads around the page. The idea being you get to the page, find it is rubbish and immediately click on a more relevant link (Google Ad). Then the crappy site and google both get paid by the advertiser clicked on.
Multiply this by billions of searches a day and it comes up a pretty nice sum of cash, especially for the company who collects on every transaction.
Now I am not saying they are doing this for this reason, but something bad has happened to Google search in the last few days.
Especially considering their last update publicly targetted removing these click traps from the rankings.
I seriously hope this is only a temporary mistake, as google have been telling us to write interesting, unique content and they would look after us, and not to try and cheat the system and make click traps.
:(
UPDATE: About 6 weeks later the algorythm changed again and traffic levels went back up, not to what I had originally but the click farm (arbitrage) websites have been pushed back down.
Congratulations Google on combatting search results crap again, but please don't scare legitimate webmasters like that too often.
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