Domaining SEO Sunday: Which Content Farms Got Hit the Hardest? The Data has Arrived!

As you all know by now Google made some major changes to their algorithm this past week dealing a fatal blow to some of the top content farms on the Internet. I discussed this a bit in my post last Friday. Well the big question on everyone’s mind now has been – who got hit the hardest? Thanks to Search Engine Land the data is in and I now have the full list of the impacted sites and the size of the impact. Below are some of the highlights:

The top five impacted content farms in order are:

  1. ezinearticles.com
  2. associatedcontent.com
  3. suite101.com
  4. hubpages.com
  5. buzzle.com

The top four sites that received a traffic gain from the change are:

  1. youtube.com
  2. ebay.com
  3. facebook.com
  4. instructables.com

Overall it looks like eHow.com actually received a nice lift from the changes along with Amazon, Wikipedia, and even Walmart. Not all of these sites are content farms but remember, changes like this impact everyone not just the farms. AssociatedContent.com lost a total of 162,917 positions in search due to the change and eZineArticles.com lost over 130,000 positions. What does this mean for all of us…getting on page one might have become a bit easier…but it all depends on the niche.

No matter how you slice it Google made a big move and it’s had a big impact. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I am in favor of this move and it’s already had a great positive impact on my sites. Since I’ve been focused on unique content since day one I’ve been able to edge-out some of my competitors that beat me in quantity but not in quality.

If you’d like to see all the data of exactly how the ranking were impacted make sure to read Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton