Google changed its algorithms way back in October, and it's still just hitting some people. It's meant to penalize people who use link farms and who buy links, as well as those who use subdomains for multiple sites with the same content. It all started last summer, when they started getting complaints from the retailers, wholesalers and those with big sites that their sites were being knocked down to the second and third page by the spammers using links farms (like PayPerPost) and such. Google took awhile to work the algorithms out, and now we're seeing the end of the purge. Now they're purging people with only one page with a lot of links to and from other one page sites, and giving better rankings to people with niche sites with real content, which is as it should be.
You can read more about it at the links on this page:
http://www.mattheerema.com/archive/goog … rks-suffer
Personally, I'm glad they're doing that. These places like Clickbank, where everybody is selling the same e-books, and using "black hat" methods to get traffic is dishonest, and I, for one, am very happy that it's coming to an end. I got so tired of every page I clicked on page one of Google being one of those screaming one page ads for some e-book or something, with all the attendant popups. Now when I Google, I get better results. For instance, if I Googled SEO, I wouldn't get all that crap from The Rich Jerk and stuff.
I believe that people who take the time to build a blog or a site with real content on one main subject deserve to have their content get better ratings. I see some people who have one Hub and they say they get 5000 hits a day, and make hundreds a month on it. Then they whine when Google takes that away from them. Squidoo is full of them too, and worse, because they allow adult content. My thought is "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Some of these "sites" with one or two pages that are nothing but an advertisement to sell something have them posted under hundreds of subdomains and crosslinked back to each other, giving them hundreds of crosslinks. That's one reason Google started punishing duplicate content, but then they just started changing each one just enough to get around it, so action had to be taken.
I remember not long ago searching for an herbal treatment for something, and EVERY SINGLE AD I clicked on page one was a one page ad touting some miracle program for some amazing amount of money. Used to be, I got the actual sites with information, and even medical sites on the condition.
I have nothing against affiliate ads, and I use them on my site as well, if they are related to the content, but you know what I mean. I've seen them here on Hubpages, and flagged a few. They are the people who come on here, and every Hub is an advertisement for another product or e-book. There is no cohesiveness to what they write, it's just spam. A bunch of "Product Reviews" for products you've never used, but only picked up on an affiliate catalog, and made up some fake review for it does not constitute "content", IMHO.
Well, hooray for Google, for doing their part in cleaning up the internet for us.
