The idea being to reduce the power of the content farm when compared to genuine content written for the purpose of it being there, rather than a quick buck.
The graph below shows the last few months of Hubpages v Squidoo traffic as measured by Quantcast. HubPages is the one at the bottom.
There is a clear decline in HP traffic, and a corresponding rise in Squidoo. It is as if turning down the dial on HubPages simply increased the views to Squidoo. Im not a fan of Squidoo but that cant be what Google wanted.
The two sites are very similar. Content written for marketing - either adsense or affiliate. To me, Squidoo looks spammier but its a choice thing.
Heres the graph...
You can see the divergence in traffic around July, gathering pace in late September where HubPages took quite a knock. As HP goes down then Squidoo rises. All that traffic had to go somewhere, but it doesnt look like it went to individual sites.
Google just took it from HP and gave it to Squidoo.
I wonder if the Squidoo drop at the beginning of November is the next phase of Googles anti-content farm efforts? No corresponding rise for HP, so a content farm drop overall.
This has long been promised by Google, the end of the writing sites that specialise in low quality generic material that serves little purpose. The sites that I have spent my time writing on as it happens.
I havent bothered feeding my blog into Quantcast by the way, it wouldnt even register I should think.
Really, I should stop looking at traffic and just get on with writing. The trouble is, it is so addictive.
Wouldnt it be nice if Google just set the dial higher on our own content and gave us millions of hits each day? That really would be worth blogging about.
