This past week, Google reported that they had rolled out some algorithmic changes aimed at decreasing the visibility of low quality sites and increasing the visibility of high quality sites:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites-sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.  At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites-sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

We have had numerous customers asking us how this will impact Google referral traffic to their news releases.  We believe that the algorithmic changes will actually benefit PRWeb.com.  Think about it this way: every day, hundreds of users collectively spend hundreds of hours crafting compelling, original stories to be shared.  These stories are then reviewed by our professionally trained editorial team for adherence to our editorial guidelines and are only published when they receive an editors stamp of approval.  In many ways, this is precisely the type of content that Google wants to showcase in search results.

We have been carefully monitoring search referral traffic from Google and are pleased that on the day that Google announced the launch of their initiative, we had our best Thursday in 2011.

Google referral traffic over the past month (click to expand)

We are confident that as long as you continue to write great stories and we continue to review, edit and publish them, we will see this positive trend continue.  We would like to further acknowledge that we will continue to work dilligently with our syndication partners to adopt standards to clearly define PRWeb as the “canonical” source for all news releases distributed via PRWeb and continue to manage our distribution network to ensure that only high quality publishers carry PRWeb news stories.

Filed under: Content, SEO, Web site by Jiyan