Google Product Forums

Re: Think you're affected by the recent algorithm change? Post here.

jwcost Mar 15, 2011 5:30 AM
Posted in group: Webmaster Central

Categories: Crawling, indexing & ranking :

Hello Google Team,

Thank you for listening.

Google's intention to improve quality search results is very good and commendable. It seems the logic/methods applied to distinguish between the good and bad affected small business like ours adversely.  

Ours is an E-commerce site with heavy competition operating since 2005. There are 100s of websites selling same products, therefore we strive to provide extensive details of the product to visitors and making the content unique. The duplication of content takes place in following ways:

1. Scraping the content without our knowledge.
2. We sell the products at market place as well, who in turn distribute the content freely to its affiliates.
3. We submit the product feed to Google Products, and anyone can sign up with Google to get access to product feed.

Supposedly the content would have been in 3 or 4 places, however it gets freely distributed/copied among 1000s of sites. The challenge for Google is to identify the real ownership of the content.

After the change we got pushed down 5-30 positions and years of dedication and hard work just got wiped off at the same time many of our competition sites with bare minimum content scored well and rank much better than earlier. In short the 'Content' turned to out be the number one enemy in the new change as Less content mean lesser duplication.

We request Google to review the recent changes, while maintaining the search quality.

Thank you for your time.