During this week, Google announced a significant algorithm-update which aims to increase quality in Google’s search results. Domains containing low-quality content are supposed to be found less often, high-quality pages are to achieve better rankings. At the moment this update is active in the US-Index, more countries are about to follow.

Quickly named an “Anti-Demand-Media”-Update, I couldn’t find any real data proving this claim. I’d like to change this with this posting: Based on a dataset of one million keywords, which were checked before the update and yesterday I can determine the biggest loser of this algorithm-change. The SISTRIX Visibility Index is an index value calculated from traffic on keywords, ranking and click-through rate on specific positions. Let’s start with a list of the 25 biggest losers:

# Domain Change SISTRIX (before) SISTRIX (after) # KWs (before) # KWs (after) 1 wisegeek.com -77% 121,58 28,22 74.024 21.940 2 ezinearticles.com -90% 65,08 6,65 184.508 54.277 3 suite101.com -94% 54,04 3,28 178.373 36.904 4 hubpages.com -87% 55,16 7,40 152.998 50.178 5 buzzle.com -85% 43,25 6,55 86.472 24.423 6 associatedcontent.com -93% 38,29 2,57 216.429 53.512 7 freedownloadscenter.com -90% 30,26 3,01 42.486 7.992 8 essortment.com -91% 25,73 2,32 27.501 7.459 9 fixya.com -80% 28,78 5,83 62.034 36.167 10 americantowns.com -91% 24,88 2,18 26.000 9.799 11 lovetoknow.com -83% 25,75 4,28 49.544 17.833 12 articlesbase.com -94% 19,96 1,16 82.274 31.365 13 howtodothings.com -84% 21,20 3,39 33.222 7.601 14 mahalo.com -84% 20,49 3,23 33.875 9.740 15 business.com -93% 17,24 1,13 21.556 4.813 16 doityourself.com -77% 20,89 4,90 23.256 6.870 17 merchantcircle.com -85% 18,43 2,67 93.347 34.681 18 thefind.com -83% 18,95 3,27 74.506 45.495 19 findarticles.com -90% 16,98 1,74 64.810 20.189 20 faqs.org -91% 16,52 1,46 33.648 11.142 21 tradekey.com -89% 16,83 1,79 37.364 16.268 22 answerbag.com -91% 12,93 1,11 67.314 26.054 23 trails.com -87% 12,05 1,62 38.346 8.511 24 examiner.com -79% 10,54 2,19 70.781 31.272 25 allbusiness.com -88% 8,86 1,08 16.457 6.034

The table shows the domain, percentage loss, SISTRIX before and after the update as well as the number of keywords found from the one million dataset for this domain before and after the algorithm-change. It is sorted by the biggest absolut loss in SISTRIX Visibility Index. Comparing these results with the announcement from Google, they seem to have reached their goal: a whole lot of low-quality domains lost significant visibility in the US Google-SERPs.

Let’s see in detail what Google did to the affected domains. The first conclusion is quite straightforward: the number of keywords these domains are ranking for dropped dramatically. Looking at mahalo.com as an example, it went from 33,875 keywords before the update to just 9,740 keywords after the update went public – a decrease of more than 70%. These were keywords like “zealand air“ (3), “digg“ (8) or “tax check“ (4) where the domain fell out of the top 100 results. The second outcome deals with the remaining keywords. Here is a chart on which Google result page the keywords of mahalo.com were to be found before and after the algorithm-update:

It’s eye-catching that mahalo.com did not only lose more than 70% of their keywords – the remaining keywords are also ranking much worse than before. More than two third of all keywords for this domain could be found on result page 8, 9 and 10. That’s the reason the SISTRIX value fell even more than the raw count of found keywords.

And how about Demand Media? Well, there is no sign that Google tried to downrank ehow.com. Ehow.com even gained SISTRIX value (from 270 to 310) and Keywords (from 317,320 to 324,021) during the algorithm-change. Looking at the SERP-Distribution chart from above for ehow.com, you’ll notice the difference. Quite a statement from Google regarding the quality of Demand Medias’ content, isn’t it? If you are interested in a full list of 100 Domains suffering from this update, please drop me a short notice.