Google rolled out a new search algorithm it says should better prevent webspam from polluting its search results. Who won and who lost? Searchmetrics has done a quick analysis. Winners include names like Poynter, Spotify and The Verge. Losers have some surprises like Cult Of Mac and Digg. But as it turns out, these are winners/losers are mostly likely reflecting a previously unconfirmed Panda Update, not the new algorithm change.
We’ve updated the lead and the headline of this story to reflect that this list is more about a Panda Update change rather than the new webspam fighting algorithm, as confirmed by the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts. I also made a few minor changes to the end of the story.
Cutts commented after the original story came out:
Hey Danny, there’s a pretty big flaw with this “winner/loser” data. Searchmetrics says that they’re comparing by looking at rankings from a week ago. We rolled out a Panda data refresh several days ago. Because of the one week window, the Searchmetrics data include not only drops because of the webspam algorithm update but also Panda-related drops. In fact, when our engineers looked at Searchmetrics’ list of 50 sites that dropped, we only saw 2-3 sites that were affected in any way by the webspam algorithm update. I wouldn’t take the Searchmetrics list as indicative of the sites that were affected by the webspam algorithm update.
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