Content farm site traffic has dropped significantly since the introduction of the new Google search algorithm.

A couple of months have passed since the introduction of a new search algorithm aimed at combating content farms (Google introduced the algorithm in February ). Within a couple of weeks, some content farms said they were suffering significant losses, and a company like Mahalo had to say goodbye to its freelancers . Now it has become known that such a giant as Demand Media is not immune from changes in the search algorithm.

The algorithm introduced by the corporation was named Panda, and began to work in full force only this month. As previously reported, the main goal pursued by Google, introducing changes - the fight against poor-quality sites, which for the most part are those content farms, stamping articles and notes, often not carrying any meaning at all, and "sharpened" only to receive traffic.
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Naturally, visitors, traffic means money, and large companies, like Demand Media, earn tens of millions. The latter was generally recently valued at $ 1.5 billion in IPOs - not bad, you will agree. Immediately after entering the new search algorithm, Demand Media reported that this change had no impact on the company's work.

However, according to Experian Hitwise, the overall drop in traffic on Demand Media sites has been about 40% since the beginning of the year. In January, 0.57% of visitors left Google for Demand Media sites. Now this figure is only 0.34%. And this is only the “average temperature in the hospital,” since some of the sites owned by Demand Media have suffered very significantly. So, the traffic to the Answerbag website fell by 80%, and attendance at the largest resource Demand Media, eHow, fell by 29%.

Naturally, a fall in attendance = a fall in revenue = a fall in the price of a company's stock So, Demand Media shares have already fallen by 40%. The value of the stock fell to a minimum, to $ 14.05 apiece.

As for the above-mentioned Mahalo, traffic from Google fell by 78%, Associated Content - by 61%, Examiner.com - by 51%. It is worth noting that the attendance of some quite respectable websites has fallen - for example, traffic from Google to Mashable fell by the same 40%.

Via yahoo