Man, this is annoying. Some blundering oaf at Google has dreamt up an algorithm designed to hoof out dodgy ‘content farm’ type websites from the rankings, but screwed it up so badly that loads of legitimate sites have been blackisted – including urban75.org.
Doh!
The idea was a great one: rewrite the way that Google works to ensure that low-quality or “shallow” websites were downgraded, giving a better chance for users to find the sites with real, honest-to-good content.
Seeing as urban75.org contains nothing but ‘proper’ content – there’s tens of thousands of pages stuffed full with unique and original content, research, photos and information here, all put together with love and hard work – I didn’t think for one second we’d be lumped in with the spammers and scammers.
But thanks to Google’s castrophic cock-up, a host of bona fide sites have also found their search rankings plummeting downwards, with their traffic following swiftly in its wake, and yesterday we found ourselves on a list of unfairly downgraded sites which included well established sites like the British Medical Journal, Cult of Mac, Songkick and more.
Mightily miffed. Oh yes, indeedy
Traffic immediately plummeted by 20 per cent on urban75.org and I’m fucking furious. I’ve already emailed/Tweeted/shouted at every relevant person I can find at Google and asked them to reconsider the site ranking but heard bugger all back.
Hopefully, things will even out again when the site is re-indexed (that may well take month) but it’s incredibly frustrating to be put in this position in the first place.
Read loads more here: Google cocks up catastrophically: claims BMJ and urban75.org are ‘content farms’
Related posts:
Map shows off the brightest 350,000 stars of the web – and urban75 is there!
urban75 supports the Stop Sopa campaign to protect internet freedoms.
Checking out the Google Web Lab at the Science Museum
urban75.com is down for a short while
More urban75 stats
urban75 camping trip to WoWo in Sussex, September 2011
The Guardian bigs up urban75
A selection of strange search terms used to find the urban75 boards
I’ve seen a lot of this around and I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment.
Perhaps, however, it is a blessing in disguise. Too many sites are too reliant on the traffic generated by Google, which they can take away on a whim.
Google Dances always leave winners and losers, and there’s nothing the common man can do about it…