The Google “phantom” algorithm has been on the roll for over a month now and has impacted many websites in causing up to even 60% drops in organic website traffic overnight. HubPages, a collection of more than 870,000 miniblogs covering everything from the “History of advertising” to “How to identify venomous house spiders,” saw its Google search traffic plunge 22 percent on May 3 from the prior week. Of the company’s 100 top pages, 68 lost visitors over that stretch.

According to Searchmetrics, the clear decline in visibility has been of the certain how-to sites, mostly pertaining to those with content without much substance. So the iteration that “Content is theKing” holds true. Google practically controls almost two-thirds of the U.S Search market, its updates like Panda and Penguin have already seen much criticism in the past. This one is quite similar to Panda in the logic that it is also content focused but it has affected more websites than ever with poor quality, thin and affiliate content by listing entire domains and not just pages.

It is important that you review your website and make sure that there is quality content today. Google has said that the update doesn’t go after any particular class of sites, it is just an overall ranking algorithm but what is true of this fact is yet open to debate.

Websites with unnatural links are being affected, i.e. not the ones that are spam or with fake links but many such that link to other websites not respecting Google’s guidelines about external linking.

Cross links: Websites cross linking to each other using exact anchor text links have also been affected. You should be worried here if you have more than one website and you are cross linking them with same anchor texts on links on both.

Content Management: Scraping old content in order to make your website look better furnished can help solve this purpose. It can be done by removing any spam directories, comments and any other such content that can affect your website.