Seems like a good plan if it is executed well enough. Who doesn't want more legit quality results? Hopefully they get it fine tuned a bit, and do away with as much of the copy paste or scraped crap as they can. Would also be nice if they could demote some of the made for adsense sites that have little or no value. I get so tired of 2 sentences of content and all kinds of ads all around it. Bump those sites down to page 3-5+
My crappy autoblog increased in traffic 40% while my hand written, high quality blog decreased 50% yesterday. Hopefully this is just a Google dance.
I am trying to stay optimistic. Losing 50% of traffic on my high quality blog is heartbreaking. I worked so hard on it for the past 3.5 years. I publish unique high quality content to it one time a day 6 days a week for the last 3.5 yrs... I refuse to believe that Google is classifying my blog as a low quality website.
They will have to make a ton of tweaks before these rankings settle. All niches are seeing crazy movement. I have 30 niches (general) that I monitor, all 30 niches have 6-7 new players on page one now. That's a lot more than 12.4% of searches affected. I honestly reviewed three totally unrelated niches between Canada and US results. Of those, many competitors that had quality stuff are gone from the top 3 pages. I would say the new algo. adds 3 new players on page 1 that don't deserve to be in the top 50 quality-wise. They really botched this algo. change.
I've written some articles for ezine (and other article directories) to help establish my website. I don't care if those articles take a hit in Google, but I can't figure out why my website has taken a hit. My website is an authority blog with 100% high quality unique content. The only duplicate content I have is from manufacture official press releases... I might publish a new press release once per month, other than that, the content is 100% unique. My backlinks come from other blogs, natural forums posts, some youtube, article directories, some old link directories from like 4 years ago, blog comments, profile links... so pretty diverse. I did some research on a couple of my blog posts that were getting high traffic, and found some crappy amazon/ebay scrape wordpress blogs stealing my content without giving any link backs. Maybe that's how Google is updating, by punishing the original author of stolen content?
Having the exact same issue... our low quality doorway sites with low quality contents/links are rising in the SERPS, one of our main sites with unique content (constantly featured and linked to from other big sites) has disappeared! GOOGLE FAILS ONCE AGAIN! I guess it is time to start buying bulk domains, hire low quality content writers and buy massive forums links... lol... Black hatters apparently always win! All the "one page sites" with forum and comments links are getting better results than high quality sites in the niche we are currently working on. The only positive change I've seen is the removal of some OBVIOUS parasite hosting websites... but that should have been fixed 4 years ago!
I don't think webmasters who update their site with original and unique contents need to worry. It is a step in the right direction and google has taken the initiative to implement it, although a little bit late. A well deserved punishment to content farms and the likes...