Google made a significant change to their algorithm on Thursday 24th February.  This was intended to target sites with thin content, but at the same time impacted quality sites such as Article Alley.  Whilst we understand that Google intended to hit “content farms” they have caused collateral damage along the way.

As a result of this change our traffic is down by more than 30% and the changes that Google have made have yet to be rolled out to the rest of the World.

We will be making some major changes to Article Alley as a result of this, as we recognise that we need to be stricter than ever with the quality of content that goes live on our network.  As a first step from today we will reject all articles with a word count of less than 400 words.  We are also working on a new algorithm of our own to cut down significantly spinning of articles, shortly only articles that are significantly different from existing content will be approved.

I’ll keep you all updated on developments, but rest assured we are committed as ever to making Article Alley the best website for news and articles

We are trialling a new template at the moments, depending on performance we may roll it out over the coming weeks.  Google inpressions have continued to grow – but CTR has dropped slightly, so we plan to try a single larger advert.

Its just a trial at this stage, but as usual we will keep you all posted

Google announced its quarterly results earlier today.

Google reported a rise in profits in the first quarter as it saw the benefits of a shift to online advertising from traditional media. Google reported that its online advertising rose 17 per cent in the first quarter from a year earlier.

Shows just how strong Google is as a company and the potential of the internet to grow and sustain quality advertising sites. Its amazing that Google is still able to grow albeit at a slower rate, in the UK we have seen a big decline in advertising activities across the board.

We have had a good experience with both Google’s adwords and adsense programs and strongly recommend them both to authors who are not yet signed up.

We just added Google Friend Connect to this blog, its a new feature that Google has just launched, it offers the ability to attract more visitors as account users of Google, Yahoo and MSN can easily add themselves as friends.

The coding is very simply, so we implemented and will report back on the progress.

We are pleased to see that we continue to top the search results for many popular phrases in the UK search, US results are consistently page #1 but not always the top slot. 1 out of 13,600,000 results is pretty good going and we happy about it.

A major promotional campaign is planned for 2009 and we are determined to build further on our already good results.