Matt Cutts, Google's Principal Engineer, confirms it in his personal blog post. In the post, Matt updated the news by saying, "My post mentioned that "we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content." That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week."
He also added that "This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site's content."
The impact of the algorithmic changes seems to be evident as well. A Webmasterworld Google SEO News and Discussion Forum, has various SEOs and webmasters reporting traffic drop from Google. A webmaster commented that "Something really BIG changed yesterday about midday. We are still in triage mode here covering our basics. We saw a huge 10-20 drop in almost all positions for our biggest and oldest site.," another said, "We have lost 40-60% traffic in several sites, all same time yesterday. Very frustrating and to see server idle now."
Most of the complaints hint that the traffic upset set in on 26 or 27 January. Affected site's webmasters are most unimpressed at Google's latest changes. Who will be? When you are watching your site's traffic from going great to a sudden death like transition. More updates and reports can be expected from both Google and webmasters in the days to come.
Many thanks to Navneet Kaushal of PageTraffic for the content of this article. If you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog
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That is why original content is kink and always will be!
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