Monday, December 27, 2010

Who Broke Google?



This is the last 12 months of our website bandwidth. It had been steadily growing for 5 years, then google changed something, such that in August, we now cyclically drop out of the first few top search results.

Makes a huge difference. It isn't just me either, but many illustrators. The Google webmaster forum is full of cases, and after posting about it several times with our findings, haven't had any positive results yet.

Basically Google broke the search for many things, especially image searches. I assume it was trying to stop the sites that just contain links to other sites and contribute nothing, but it is more than that. When searching for any of our illustrations around August, you would find our images on a few such sites, and not the original source. They seem to have fixed that, but broke it in a different way.

A two word search can significantly reduce the significance of one of the search terms. Can only assume this has significantly reduced the usefulness of Google for searching for everyone, but unless you actually test this, you wouldn't notice.

It would seem "All good things...."