Demand Media has just issued a statement on the roll out of Google’s Panda algorithm and the effect it expects it will have on eHow.com
“Demand Media, Inc. a leading content and social media company, announced today that it is reaffirming its financial outlook for fiscal year 2011 that it previously provided on February 22, 2011.
“Certain third parties that have published reports attempting to estimate the effect of recent search engine algorithm changes made by Google on traffic to the Company’s owned and operated websites have significantly overstated the negative impact of those changes on traffic to eHow.com, as compared to the Company’s directly measured internal data. ”
“Recent search engine algorithm changes have negatively impacted search driven traffic to some of our websites, including eHow.com, resulting in moderately lower year-to-date page view growth for the Company’s owned and operated Content & Media properties compared to page view growth rates before the algorithm changes.”
“Nevertheless, the Company currently expects that its year-over-year page view growth across its owned and operated Content & Media properties in the second quarter of 2011 will be comparable to, or greater than, the year-over-year page view growth achieved in the second quarter of 2010.”
At time of publication, Demand Media stock is the second largest decliner by percentage on the NYSE down just about 10% to $17.90
How many pages did they add? They should measure views per page for a real comp.
Welcome to spin alley.
This PR is just to help stop the bleeding.
What happens when Google makes another “tweak” to their algorithm in 6 mos. – 1 yr? 18 mos.? It’s inevitable.
The only useful content on their site is http://www.ehow.com/how_2075629_short-stock.html
I had the strangest effects in the last days on some of our sites: many of our sites with almost no content or very little received much more traffic(up 25%), other quality sites lost a lot of traffic (up to 60%), however sales and affiliation revenues have been significantly up from these sites.
Not sure what to think of this.
Michael, agreed on not being sure what to think of this. One of the sites I started in 1997 was continuously listed as the #1 choice in Google’s listings based on its content and keywords. Now it’s sometimes listed #1, while at other times it’s in around the #3-#5 spot, with second-rate sites with poor or little content ahead of it. Hopefully they’re not done and will tweak the algorithm, but I’m just a tad miffed about it at this point, seeing a slight reduction in visitors coming from Google.
On the other hand, Bing.com still places the site in the #1 spot with nearly every keyword combination… maybe Google just wants more sites to share that #1 spot… who knows.
I’ve found the Panda update to be particularly counter productive. Some of our genuine authority sites which thousands of high quality back links and original content got nuked and some of our crappy, topic specific blogs got boosted. From this I read, Google likes niche sites and doesn’t like broad themes. So an article on say ‘dog nutrition’ will rank well on a site about dog nutrition (with very low SEO profile in terms of links etc) but not so well on a broader themed site even if that site has hundreds of thousands of back links etc.
Demand Media Employee Gives Account of the Company
http://cjr.org/feature/in_demand.php
As long as you have ‘original content’ you probably improved with the tweak. Almost everyone of our clients shot to #1 after the tweak, and most are on ‘keywords’ what everyone says was killed. Keywords + Original Content that is high QS is what google wants, so all the bs about keywords got killed, yeah the guys that throw up others work and feeds got hammered. But the ‘original content’ developers are all smiling. BIG SMILE here. I love panda.
I loved the boost I got from Google for my youtube video, I reached2M views this last week on one video, and made a over 700 this month on google so far, and sold one of my google earner sites for 2 month revenue (500), so I love am happy with Google this month.