The reports of a huge decline in traffic to Demand Media sites that allegedly resulted after Google recently tweaked its search algorithm have been exaggerated, Demand Media claims.
"Recent third-party reports attempting to estimate the impact to our search driven traffic, including one projecting a two-thirds decline in eHow.com traffic, are so significantly overstated that we decided to comment," Demand Media's executive vice president of media and operations Larry Fitzgibbon wrote in a blog post. "We currently expect that in Q2 2011 our owned and operated Content & Media properties will generate year-over-year page growth comparable to or greater than the year-over-year page view growth reported for Q2 2010."
Demand Media also issued a press release emphasizing positive financial projections for the company's 2011 fiscal year. It concedes that some sites, specifically eHow.com, have seen traffic decrease, but not as significantly as some sources have reported.
Google began rolling out an international update to its search algorithm in February that reduces rankings for low-quality sites. Dubbed a "farmer" algorithm change, it was intended to weed out so-called content farms from search results. Google has said it alters its search algorithm 500 times a year, but rarely makes an announcement. However, that particular time the company warned that roughly 12 percent of search results could change as a result of the update. In fact some sites reported a 50 percent decline in traffic.
While it appears Demand Media hasn't been affected as significantly as was previously thought, the results of the changes will be seen over time. Demand Media will go into greater details about traffic metrics in a quarterly earnings call on May 5.