Categories: News

Phantom Update Rolls Out Targeting “How To Style Content”

According to the reports of NBC News, Google has recently launched its latest Algorithm Update, “Phantom”. Revealed just after Google’s Mobilegeddon update that has favored the mobile friendly website in search results, Google’ Phantom update is primarily focused towards impacting publishers and modifying their “how to style content” part. Hubpages, a compilation of more than 870,000 mini blogs covering all important information about the “History of Advertising” has faced a major drop of about 22% in its traffic on May 3 as the company lost 68 visitors at a stretch from its top 100 pages.

Moreover, websites such as WikiHow, eHow, Answers.com, are other major informational sites that have faced major drop in their traffic in the past couple of weeks. Previously, when Hubpages’ traffic was affected by this update, Google refused to give any detail related with this update, but now Glen Gabe, an expert search engine analyst and digital marketing professional has coined the term “Phantom” for this update as it is the second major algorithm update of Google in the past two years.

With his proper understanding and effective data analyzing techniques, Gabe becomes determined that this update has no relation with Penguin or Panda update as this update was a ruthless approach by Google affecting the complete domains for a few occurrences of content. Although Google has not commented on this update officially, but recently at SMX Sydney last week, a spokesperson from Google Webmaster Trends team, Gary IIynes confessed about the latest change in the core algorithm update.

With the notorious combination of Google’s Knowledge Graph that lessens traffic from websites for “how to” searched and Google’s Phantom update impacting the websites, it will definitely become more challenging for the content publishers to write and publish their content. Do you have an information website and you have also noticed some changes in your website’s traffic from this month? If so, you can analyze the types of content that are affected by this latest update and review the content to minimize the impact on the overall traffic of your website.

Joydeep Bhattacharya

Joydeep Bhattacharya is a senior digital marketing specialist in TIS India, one of the pioneers in web design, web development and internet marketing . He helps businesses increase ROI by improving the website's presence on various digital marketing channels through proven techniques, logic and creative abilities.

Share
Published by
Joydeep Bhattacharya

Recent Posts

Cumulative Layout Shift: Google’s Next Ranking Factor for 2021

With 2021 round the corner, you get to see many metrics that have come to the fore with the assurance…

2 months ago

Google Page Experience Ranking Factor: What it Means for SEO Rankings in 2021

As 2021 is drawing near, you need to prepare for your website's new search engine ranking strategy. Google, the search…

2 months ago

SEO in 2021: Trends that are Most Likely to be a Key to Successful SEO

In business, the only constant is the change, and SEO trends are no exception. With the grueling competition among enterprises…

3 months ago

How To Improve Web Page Speed

Web page speed is the time taken to load the content of a web page. It determines the frequency of…

6 months ago

What is Structured Data and Why is it Important?

With the emergence of schema.org in 2011, the world of SEO and SERPs underwent a monumental facelift. However, the rate…

6 months ago

Powerful SEO Techniques that Generate Real Traffic

Google dominates the flow of traffic on the internet. In fact, the tech giant’s three flagship products namely Google Search,…

7 months ago