It was quite an eventful week.

First my Facebook account got hacked and on the same day, Google rolled out a major change in their algorithms designed to push down the search rankings of content farms or sites that have low-quality pages.

Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote on the Google blog:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Unfortunately (and surprisingly), this change has had a major impact* on organic traffic flowing through Google to Digital Inspiration as well. See this chart from Google Analytics.

Google has rolled out their new algorithm in US only but once the changes are propagated to other country-specific Google sites - like google.co.in and google.co.uk – the organic traffic from Google to Digital Inspiration would take an even bigger hit.

The AdSense-centric business model of this blog, where online advertising revenues are more or less based on the number of page-views, will obviously suffer because of this change in search engine rankings.

However, what makes me more sad is the fact that Google algorithms have labeled Digital Inspiration as a ‘content farm’ despite having tons of high-quality and original articles. And there’s little I can do about it.

Tough times ahead!

PS:To know if these recent changes have had any impact on your site’s ranking in Google, go to Google Analytics – > Traffic Sources – > Search Engines and choose “Google (organic)” as the traffic source.