Google revision takes away traffic from some websites

SAN FRANCISCO — Google can give websites a lot of traffic. It also can take it away.

That's what Valerie Whitmore found out recently.

Whitmore runs CDKitchen out of her Austin, Texas, home with husband Brent. She started the website as a hobby in 1995 and named it after her 100-pound Dalmatian, Chili Dog. With Google's help, the mom-and-pop shop grew into one of the most popular cooking sites on the Web.

But traffic to CDKitchen, which features free recipes and cooking columns, plunged 39 percent on Feb. 24, knocking it "into the abyss," Whitmore said. That's when Google, which delivers 70 percent of the site's traffic, made a major change to how search results are ranked.

Google won plaudits for promoting original research and analysis, and banishing pages littered with second-rate content or overloaded with advertising.

But the revision to its secret mathematical formula that determines the best answers to a searcher's query also caused an uproar as hundreds of sites complained to Google they had been unfairly lumped in with "content farms," which churn out articles with little useful information to drive more traffic to their sites.

Google won't discuss which websites it was targeting or how it revised its algorithm.

"Our primary goal is to make sure we return the best websites we can," said Matt Cutts, who leads Google's spam-fighting efforts. "No algorithm can be 100 percent accurate."

Google engineers are constantly tweaking the search engine, making hundreds of changes a year to the algorithm, most of them less noticeable. They keep the algorithm under wraps to prevent Web developers from getting around each revision Google makes.

As part of its effort to zero in on troublemakers, Google created a software extension to its Chrome browser that lets users block sites. More than 100,000 users have installed the extension, giving Google the ability to study the top several dozen sites that users disliked so much they gave them the boot. About 84 percent of those sites were affected when Google tweaked its algorithm, Cutts said.

"The work of search is never done. No matter what we improve, there will be people trying to 'game' search," he said.

Some search-engine marketing consultants, even those whose clients lost as much as 50 percent of their traffic, applaud Google for encouraging websites to produce more useful, relevant content that can win over users, advertisers and Google.

But Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at University of California-Berkeley, says he's disappointed in Google's effort, which he says falls short. Google wiped out some of the content farms and spammers, but it left many unscathed while inadvertently hitting a number of legitimate websites that were "innocent bystanders," he said.