Google Update Effects Web Businesses
There is a thread at Digital Point about web publishers who were kicked out of Google or lost significant ranking during the lastest Google “Jagger” Update. Some of those publishers are claiming substancial loses which brings back memories of the “Florida” Update years ago when Google finally cleaned up their index and booted a good amount of sites which used questionable results manipulating tactics (different from SEO). Here’s a rundown of reactions in the Cost of Jagger:
Will.Spencer : “I went from ~$500/day to ~$200/day. I estimate that it will take Google 30 days to fix this screw-up, which will end up costing me ~$9k in profit.”
AroundDelhi : “Traffic and bussiness down 60%. I can bear the loss for even a month but will the thing comes back to normal (as before) after all this. Strangely my lower sites, really uncared ones have moved up while the one I really care for is really down.”
DKalweit : “About $300-400/day down to less than $100/day here… Yahoo, MSN, and some repeat customers are keeping me somewhat alive… One site was hit 9/22, the rest Sunday/Monday… If we have a full 30 days left, I’d say it’s over $10k lost(since 9/22).”
Of course, there is always the other side of such an update, where sites which were not turning very much of a Google powered profit may now be enjoying the riches of first results page listings.
I can’t say that I’m going to lose much sleep over the people complaining about the Jagger updates. The Internet is a dynamic place which gets somewhat statically indexed and ranked by third party companies such as Google. When these “updates” occur and massive shifts occur, it’s more likley due to the static nature of the indexing/ranking done by Google and not a factor of a programmatic error. Google is trying to hit a moving target and issues like this should be expected and are (i.e. see sites that monitor Google Dancing for instance).
Many sites wnet unaffected by this upgrade so one must question where the source of the problem really is. Sure, we all have to eat and a heavy loss in revenue for some is extremely damaging, but that’s the nature of the beast and an assumed risk when tieing your revenue strictly to advertising and why the business model is inherently flawed.