Google annoucnes big change today

[sitetruth]

Supposedly Google made a "big change" in their search results today. See this press report. (http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_17474527)

I'm not seeing much of a change. "New York City locksmith" looks about the same. "San Francisco carpet cleaning" moved the biggest carpet cleaning company in SF down to 10th place. Other searches still show "ehow" and the other usual junk sites.

What are others noticing?

[qwidjib0]

Most of my sites, nothing. One in particular got shot back dozens of pages today on everything on thousands of terms from the looks of it, though it's a lot younger (youngest in my portfolio), and has had temporary recalculations sort of like that in the past. It is a nice clean site, I'm hoping it comes back soon.

[sannyhenry]

You shared really good news here. Thanks for it. I have to read it carefully.

[qwidjib0]

This gave me some better context: http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071

My site that was effected is a very large, mostly machine-generated site. I would say that the content is good and not illegally scraped, etc. Time to get to work on making that content look prettier I suppose.

[sitetruth]

The best discussion of this seems to be at on Webmasterworld (http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4261944-15-30.htm). Article directories took a huge hit. There's a theory that Google is hitting sites with too many pages that have incoming junk links.

Among the little guys, one says they're laying off 12 people due to the traffic decline, and another says they're laying off 10.

eHow and "thefreedictionary" seem to have been given a pass.

[AussieWebmaster]

there has been some major drops - am working on article and will link here when done.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/top%2025%20drops.JPG

[onlineseo]

Google goes blah blah again :)

[AussieWebmaster]

article is here http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110226-184951

[B-Double-U]

Great article Aussie.

Has anyone heard anything on specifics about changes?

Unfortunately our site took an 81% hit. All of our pages are hand created with as much content as humanly possible.

Since we sell product, there are tons of other vendors that have the same content for those products, but not us, we write our own, just using their dimensions, weights and the pertinent info.

We got killed on this one and we are 100% whitehat, so I am wondering if things like people scraping us and trying to do the built for adsense sites using our content, are having an effect. Like possibly we are getting hit for duplicate content, when the content is really being stolen from us and republished. I am looking at all pages that took a hit and it's so widespread and without regard, that it makes it seem like we really missed a threshold of some sort...

Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!