14 DAY TRIAL // Google has started coming down hard on content farm sites, with a couple of big algorithm updates that affected quite a lot of "low quality" websites. While Google never outright said it, most people thought of Demand Media and its websites as one of the main targets.
The first "Panda" algorithm update didn't really affect Demand Media and its largest properties, like eHow, all that much, in fact, some reports showed that some of the company's websites gained in the search rankings.
But it didn't go so well after the second Panda update. Reports over the weekend indicated that eHow in particular was a big loser, dropping significantly in website visibility, aka, how well it ranked for various search terms.
"We generally do not comment or speculate on changes by major search engines, as these changes can happen nearly daily. However, recent third-party reports attempting to estimate the impact to our search driven traffic, including one projecting a 2/3rds decline in eHow.com traffic, are so significantly overstated that we decided to comment," Demand Media EVP Larry Fitzgibbon wrote in a blog post.
"We currently expect that in Q2 2011 our owned and operated Content & Media properties will generate year-over-year page view growth comparable to or greater than the year-over-year page view growth reported for Q2 2010," he said.
Demand Media continues by not only de-emphasizing the impact of the update, but also the importance of search in general over Demand Media traffic.
The company says that it gets traffic from a variety of sources, Facebook Likes are becoming increasingly important it seems, so any search engine change won't impact it that much. While it may be true that Demand Media gets traffic from plenty of places, search and Google in particular should still be the biggest.