Commerce and Google Organic Drop in April 2008

Dealing with a large, unexpected drop in Google Organic Traffic is a very philosophical time. You go through six of the seven stages of grief: Shock, Denial, Bargaining (with any authority you still believe in who’s higher than Google), Guilt, Anger, Depression are all part of the scene. But as a business person you have to stop just short of the last one – Acceptance.

In March/April, there seemed to have been a reverberation of a Google algorithm change affecting commerce related sites. We identified a number of product/commerce sites that were materially hit…some were scrapers, some were amalgamators, some were creators of original content. They ranged in size to the oldest/biggest to the newest/innovative. We know of sites who lost up to 90% of their Google organic traffic, including this post I found on webmasterworld.

The best we can tell, there have been and continues to be changes that seem to take a stronger position in devaluing duplicate, widely distributed shopping content. Two thoughts on why the algorithm might have changed:
1) Google is trying to surface commerce innovation better by weighing unique content much heavier than before on commerce sites. Sites that use widely affiliated shopping feeds, content amalgamation or scraping other sites may need to work harder to distinguish their value-added service to the bots.
2) Google is trying to provide the best search experience for product price on Google Product Search, so could de-weight other providers whose price algorithms are based on being paid by retailers. (This, of course, only is a greater good if GPS doesn’t rank retailers by getting paid.)

Of the few we’ve spoken to directly, we believe all regained their traffic. In one case it was within a week, in other cases a few weeks. The changes in those sites were basically to:
1) ensure that the bots see, very clearly, any original content that you create
2) that you use minimize your page dependence on content that is duplicated throughout the web, whether it be from API feed partners, or from other methods
3) you keep a closer eye on the bots and how often they are crawling you, lest they find that some of your content is duplicate and not worth looking at
4) you follow Matt Cutts… even his old stuff. Plus he just opened up his Twitter feed. (oh, and so did i!)