Google giveth, Google taketh away
Answers.com CEO Bob Rosenschein revealed this week that his site lost 28% of its traffic in a week, thanks to a change in Google’s indexing algorithms. That news should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who depends on the search engine for traffic and revenue.
And, as it turns out, Answers.com isn’t the only site suffering from a traffic drop: Technorati’s reach of internet users, as measured by Alexa, is also down by 25% in the last two weeks. There’s good reason to cast a skeptical eye on Alexa’s skewed and often downright inaccurate measurements, but Compete’s analysis also shows significant drops in the traffic to both sites: Visitors to Answers.com were down by 10% in June, and at Technorati, visitors were down by almost 14% in June, according to Compete. Ouch.
Will Answers.com’s purchase of Dictionary.com help, as Rosenschein suggests? Maybe not: While Dictionary.com has far more traffic than Answers.com, Compete shows Dictionary.com shedding a whopping 41% of its traffic in June.
Are these sites getting hit by the same Google indexing changes? Or are they losing users for other reasons?
Original URL: http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/08/google-giveth-g.html
