More Farmer Update Winners, Losers: Wikihow, Blippr & Yahoo Answers

As search industry analysts continue to review the fallout from last week’s Google Farmer update, we’re getting new snapshots of what sites were hurt and which ones have survived the crosshairs of Google’s latest algorithm change. One such analysis from SearchMetrics confirms much of what’s already been reported, but also adds several new names to […]

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As search industry analysts continue to review the fallout from last week’s Google Farmer update, we’re getting new snapshots of what sites were hurt and which ones have survived the crosshairs of Google’s latest algorithm change.

One such analysis from SearchMetrics confirms much of what’s already been reported, but also adds several new names to the list of winners and losers.

blippr.com_us

(Blippr.com performance in SearchMetrics’ Organic Performance Index)

SearchMetrics says it continuously monitors more than 55 million domains and 25 million keywords as part of its Organic Performance Index (OPI). It compared the OPI charts from February 22nd (pre-Farmer) and March 1st to put together its list of winners and losers.

SearchMetrics’ Losers List

SearchMetrics lists 24 domains that fell the most in its OPI — I’ll list the six that saw performance drops of more than 90%.

Domain OPI_today OPI_last Difference %
blippr.com 11,024 529,970 -518,946 -97.9%
suite101.com 19,874 263,529 -243,655 -92.5%
tradekey.com 2,970 38,237 -35,267 -92.2%
associatedcontent.com 23,687 281,343 -257,656 -91.6%
articlesbase.com 13,492 157,958 -144,466 -91.5%
helium.com 7,170 83,184 -76,014 -91.4%

Blippr –a site owned by Mashable that offers user-generated “micro” product reviews — is a new one that wasn’t mentioned in the Sistrix
data
that came out over the weekend. The other five above, and several others from the SearchMetrics list, are all included in previous reports, too.

In terms of overall visibility loss (as opposed to percentages shown above), SearchMetrics lists Answerbag.com (a Demand Media site) and Answers.com as the top two suffering sites, with Blippr third. (Note that Yahoo Answers has apparently fared well from the Farmer update as you’ll see below.)

SearchMetrics’ Winners List

The big winner, according to the OPI data, is Wikihow – which gained the most overall visibility and the highest percentage increase, too. (WikiHow, by the way, was created by the same team that owned eHow before selling it to Demand Media.)

Domain OPI_today OPI_last Difference %
wikihow.com 455,031 254,087 200,944 79.1%
answers.yahoo.com 524,056 406,523 117,533 28.9%
instructables.com 80,142 68,685 11,457 16.7%
howstuffworks.com 666,073 574,523 91,550 15.9%
ehow.com 944,950 831,961 112,989 13.6%
huffingtonpost.com 1,262,562 1,173,229 89,333 7.6%
facebook.com 3,157,406 3,094,804 62,602 2.0%

In its blog post, SearchMetrics calls Wikihow’s gains “remarkable” and points out that the site “appears to be a classic definition of a content farm.” It’s hard to argue that point; as I mentioned on Twitter earlier today, WikiHow is ranking No.1 on Google with articles
about “how to eat a banana,” “how to eat a sandwich,” and “how to make toast.” Demand Media’s eHow.com is on the winners list
above, but other Demand Media sites like Answerbag.com and Livestrong.com were both affected negatively.

On the whole, the SearchMetrics data seems to confirm and add to the data that’s already been reported. If you missed that, see our Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change? article. Also see these others for more about the update and the topic in general:


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Matt McGee
Contributor
Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.

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