Sure is. Specially if you're AOL and you forked over 40% of your available cash for something who's worth GOOGLE can wipe out at its whim.
I lost most of my traffic because of this. Made a lot of changes and focused more on unique content and am slowly getting my old traffic back after 2 weeks of hard work. I think the google change will end up being a good thing, but it's going to really punish older large blogs that have been featuring other people's works for years and never gave them a reason to produce unique content of their own - now they lost a huge % of traffic and have no unique content to lean on.
So..they are devaluing sites just because people write about popular things on them? That's rather scary. That can't be right...I'm missing something here.
I can see most of webmaster in niche lost their traffic by 27% to 70% and I check most of them update site daiy with 8-9 original articles! I thinks it's worst algo change done by Google!
I think if they see that their changes worsened the quality of their results they will soon correct it with another change. These days especially they know they got to stay competitive.
Unique content definitely helps. Good thing, high authority and original text is cheaper nowadays. Regardless, if you look at who got hit hard, it's mostly "content farms". They "snipe" Google trends and write on them. Google's still quite vague. I mean, scraping is one thing but what about trend-based original materials (quote with commentary)? Apparently, they've been hitting these as well.
I am still baffled as to how Google wants to crack down on scraping (good move on their part) to this recent crackdown (beating down legit publishers)....
It's a knee-jerk reaction against Blekko's move to ban so-called content farms. Because Blekko is so hot and sexy these days, G felt they had to do something about content farms as well. BTW, somewhat off-topic, but I don't think the 32x valuation of huffingtonpost is that crazy. As part of the AOL network the site stands to earn a lot more. And it still gets boatloads of traffic, even after this algo. It's not like the whole site was banned.