20 replies to this topic

[scorpioilya81]

I just wanted to say that I still see EHOW (not affected apparently), and merchant circle and other portals still alive and ranking mightily for their millions of long tail searches.............even though merchant circle is clearly listed as a top 25 biggest loser.

When are they going to ban all citygrid apps already - noone uses anything but yelp anyway.

[Jill]

Not every page or article from all the sites that were hit are inherently bad. The fact that many still show in search results shows that this new algo isn't what one would think of as a site "penalty" just more of a correction. Many eHow articles are helpful, which is why they still show.

[piskie]

Yes Jill, I think Google moved away from "Ban the whole naughty site" some years ago.
Nowadays, it seems to have focussed it's Algo far more on how it rates specific Content.
Nowadays, a site has to have transgressed very severely to get completely penalised.

[speakeasy602]

I have been reading a lot of posts about Google's Panda/Farmers algorithmic update lately (as have most of you have I would assume). People are talking a lot about sitewide consistency and sitewide topic relevancy etc... So, I'm not going to go into all of the details, that's not what this post is about.

Does anyone know if Google uses Feedburner subscription data as a signal in their algo?

Here's why I ask: It seems like a pretty solid indicator that if a site has a LOT of subscribers, and those people subscribe to other sites with related topics, it seems like that would be a strong behavioral signal to determine theme/relevancy. Also, if they measure clickthroughs and visits based soley on feedburner info, they could get a good idea of how people interact with the site. If this is something that has been discussed before, I apologize. If you guys have any good links to people talking about this, let me know.

Thoughts?

[Michael Martinez]

Here's why I ask: It seems like a pretty solid indicator that if a site has a LOT of subscribers, and those people subscribe to other sites with related topics, it seems like that would be a strong behavioral signal to determine theme/relevancy. Also, if they measure clickthroughs and visits based soley on feedburner info, they could get a good idea of how people interact with the site. If this is something that has been discussed before, I apologize. If you guys have any good links to people talking about this, let me know.

That would produce what Matt Cutts might call "a very noisy signal", as few if any people actually subscribe to only one kind of site -- and many of us don't intentionally subscribe to sites at all.

[Jill]

I would imagine they would take it into account just like they take thousands of others into account, yes.