My Thoughts on the Newest Google Algorithm Update [w/ Results]

On Friday, Google officially announced an algorithm change that is one to pay attention to.  Typically when Google updates their algorithm, it is something so minor that you wouldn’t really notice a huge increase/decrease in your traffic and organic rankings.  However this update is a change that will surely have an impact on how people look at their Internet Marketing content strategies.

From the Official Google Blog:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. 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. 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.

To put it simply, Google is going to place less weight on content farms and low quality sites like article syndication and Web 2.0 sites.

To all you Squiddo, HubPages, Ezine Articles, GoArticles lovers out there….you may need to rethink where and what content you publish.  Personally I am extremely happy about the update.  When was the last time you went to a Squidoo lens or ezine article and actually got REAL value out of it?  Let’s just say it’s very rare.  Usually it’s just Internet Marketers who are trying to publish some spun content with a few optimized links back to their site.

Publishing Regular High Quality Content [w/ Real Results]

Over the past 3-4 months, I have been created a number of niche blogs, where I create regular high-quality content that is 100% unique.  Something I have noticed over the past week or two is that my unique visitors from organic traffic have doubled over night!

Website #1

The first website is a niche blog that I have had running for about 3 months now.  I publish around 2-3 new blog posts a week to this blog and have been receiving around 30-40 unique visitors…not bad.  However over the past 10-14 days, I have see a noticeable increase in traffic.  Recently I have seen around 50-80 unique visitors a day, mainly coming from organic search.

Website #2

Let’s look at another blog I started around the same time as website #1.  For this niche blog, we usually publish around 1-2 posts a week.   About a month ago, I was receiving around 20-30 uniques a day, but as you can see it is slowly increasing each day.  The funny thing is, I haven’t posted any new content on this blog for a few weeks not but it keeps going up.

My Conclusion

Personally from reading the official Google algorithm update release and monitoring a number of my blogs, I think that Google really has shifted their algorithm to reward the websites that are making an effort to providing unique, valuable content on a REGULAR basis.

I am sure that publishing good content on Web 2.0 sites and article sites is still a good strategy for improving your rankings, BUT focusing more on your own blog content is starting to gain more weight.  Is this a shift back to on-page SEO?

What are your thoughts on the new update?  Does anyone else notice the same results that I have seen, like in the two example blogs I show?