Algorythm Impact: Google Changes Cause Lay-Offs At Web Firms

Google announced it was declaring war on 'content farms' due to practices that generated lots of spam and false leads. Lest there was any doubt about Google's power in the market place, those changes are already having an impact on some of the firms targeted.

Dam Schroder reports in Mashable:


"Mahalo, the human-powered search engine and directory, has been hit hard by the recent algorithm changes by Google, site founder Jason Calacanis wrote in an e-mail sent to employees.

“The Google changes have led to a significant dip in our traffic and revenue. It’s hard not to be disappointed since we’ve been spending millions of dollars on producing highly professional content,” explains Calacanis. Due to the dip in traffic, Mahalo will be laying off 10% of its staff and temporarily halting its freelance content production.

Google’s recent declaration of war on content farms was welcomed by users, but the way it affected Mahalo shows there is a fine line between quality content and useless SEO-optimized text usually found on content farms. Starting out as a search engine and a competitor to Google, Mahalo later turned to cheap Knol-style content creation, often being criticized for spammy practices – for example, creating hundreds of landing pages for very similar topics.

While some of its pages do seem very SEO-oriented and shady, it’s obvious that Mahalo has taken the concept of “landing page” and “content farm” one or two notches above the usual definition of the term, taking precautions to always provide at least some degree of useful information in its articles and to avoid being too repetitive.

This is exactly the type of controversy we knew was going to happen after Google’s algorithm changes. Google’s immensely popular search engine has created a huge ecosystem of content that lives by its rules, and you can easily find examples of content farms that touch both ends of the spam spectrum: from complete and utter garbage to solid, but slightly generic content.