Codepolice

This Monday (April 11 2010) we noticed a sudden drop in traffic from Google.com on AlternativeTo.net. Me and my collegaue have tried to figure out why all week and finally we found the answer. In the Google Webmaster Blog there is a post about how Google is deploying it’s new spam filter (named “Panda”) to all English speaking markets. And that should have been a good thing for AlternativeTo because when the filter was introduced on the US market we noticed a 10% growth in traffic from Google.com. But there is ups and downs with this blog post.

In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

And yes, we noticed this and we are now back on almost the same traffic as before the introduction of “Panda”. And I guess this is a good thing. We gained a positive effect when the filter was introduced the first time. Now they have trimmed the filter and it’s probably filtering out some really bad sites and we have maybe gained 1-2% more traffic from Google (it’s hard to measure such low percentage compared to natural changes from day to day and so on).

Here is a little graph from Analytics that is Google.com traffic from US visitors.