Google’s recent algorithm change more popularly known as the Farmer/Panda update is all set to impact nearly 12% of Google’s search queries.
The Google alogorithm change has given rise to a lot of speculation, as marketers worry about how it will affect their marketing efforts and their business at large.
At LeadFormix, we wanted to see how this change in Google search algorithm will affect our B2B clients in the US.
To find out we decided to measure and track any significant change in the search ranking and overall traffic to the website of some of our clients who are also active on the SEO front, the findings have been put together in a basic report, which highlights the changes in traffic and search results these clients witnessed post the Farmer update.
Our detailed report on the Impact of Google Algorithm change on B2B Companies can be viewed on our site.
Just to set the expectations straight, this is not a SEO report and does not present any in depth SEO analysis, but just an effort to understand the immediate implications of this algorithm change by Google on traffic to our client websites.
While you can find the detailed report on our site, in this post I would like to highlight something really interesting that popped up during our research.
We investigated the sites and keyword search ranking of 9 of our B2B clients and found that almost all of them, saw a significant jump in their keyword rankings.
For the purpose of our study we picked up 5 random keywords for each of these clients and checked their positions on Google before (15th Feb) and after (1st March) the algorithm change.
We cannot share the names of clients and hence we tried to stick to the business space they belong to.
Company 1 – Legal Data Archiving
Company 2 – Data Archiving
Company 3 – Engineering
Company 4 – Product Development
Company 4 was the only company in our list, which was unaffected by the Farmer update. It could be because at the time this data was collected the company website had not been crawled by Google.
Company 5 – Online Communication
Company 6 – Test Management
Company 7 – Data Management
Company 8 – Knowledge Management
Company 9 – Application Service Management
For all these companies the algorithm change seems to have come as a boon with most of their keywords ranking higher than they were before the change. If you check the original report, you will notice, companies which saw their keywords move to the first two pages of Google search, there was an increase in web traffic as well.
Skeptics can always say that it could be because of the search engine optimization efforts of these companies, but then all in the SEO business know that such significant jumps in keyword rankings don’t happen in a matter of days. The efforts of these companies towards search engine optimization might have been a contributing factor but definitely not the driving one.
I have come across lot of reports by various sites on how they have experienced severe drop in traffic since the Farmer update (in case your website experienced such a drop you can post your concerns on this forum by Google Webmaster Central – http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en), this does not seem to be the case for B2B companies, at least for the companies we investigated.
From where I see, based on our findings it seems B2B websites which offer rich data and content in the form of whitepapers, case studies, research reports etc. will have an added advantage. Companies which are into SEO can expect better results and increased traffic. At least for now, it looks like, B2B sites will benefit from this change.
