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 the list of winners and losers.

(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%.

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.)

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:

• Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update
• Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?
• Google Trying To Minimize Collateral Damage From “Farmer” Update
• Are Manual Solutions The Answer To Content Farms?
• Mahalo’s Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race
• Demand Media & Being “The Best Click” On Google
• Google: We’ve Made No “Significant” Changes To The Farmer Update
• Your Site’s Traffic Has Plummeted Since Google’s Farmer/Panda Update. Now What?