* Search change costs sites real money
* Websites were not expecting the change* One site loses 22 percent of traffic overnight
Google's "mobilegeddon" update last month, which was designed to favor mobile-friendly sites in search results, had no impact on HubPages. But a secretive algorithm tweak soon after was disastrous.
HubPages, a collection of more than 870,000 miniblogs covering everything from the "History of advertising" to "How to identify venomous house spiders," saw its Google search traffic plunge 22 percent on May 3 from the prior week. Of the company's 100 top pages, 68 lost visitors over that stretch.
Unlike some previous updates that hurt HubPages' lower-performing sites, this one was indiscriminate, said Paul Edmondson, founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based company. Furthermore, Google refuses to provide any details.
"It was just a giant whack across the board," said Edmondson, whose 10-year-old company employs professional editors to work with its vast network of independent writers. "Imagine how hard it is to run a business when you see 22 percent of your traffic evaporate overnight."
Edmondson published a blog post on May 11, titled "The Google update that didn't happen." Glenn Gabe, a digital marketing expert and search engine optimization analyst, called it "Phantom 2" in a blog post, because it's the second significant unnamed update in two years.
According to Searchmetrics, which tracks search traffic, there was a clear pattern of a decline in visibility for certain how-to sites, mostly pertaining to those with "thin content," or lacking much value. HubPages and eHow, owned by Demand Media, are two sites that Searchmetrics identified. WikiHow and Answers.com also saw drops, although not as severe.
Edmondson said the change hit HubPages sites broadly, not just the weaker ones. Representatives from Answers.com and wikiHow declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Demand Media couldn't be reached for comment.
Google's algorithms, which take into account more than 200 signalsthat help the search engine predict what a user wants, have been the source of much consternation in recent years. Because Google controls two-thirds of the U.S. search market, its updates with names like Panda and Penguin have led numerous Web-based businesses to see plummeting traffic overnight, siphoning away critical ad dollars.
Panda, which Google rolled out in 2011, ranks sites based on quality and relevance, while Penguin was launched the next year to weed out pages that abuse the use of links to artificially bolster traffic. Last month's mobilegeddon was the biggest algorithm update focused onmobile sites.
About a week after mobilegeddon, emails complaining of mysterious drops in traffic started to flood Gabe's inbox. He began digging into the data, and quickly concluded they weren't caused by the mobile update, because many of the sites were smartphone-friendly.
Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102669423
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