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.