Matt Cutts: The Greenspan of Google

March 17, 2011 at 9:00 PM UTC

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This article is part of the March 21, 2011 issue of businessweek.

Fraser Cain realized on Mar. 2 that his 12-year-old astronomy website had lost 20 percent of its traffic in five days. The quality of the writing on Universe Today hadn't deteriorated, nor was there a redesign that irked readers. The problem was Google (GOOG).

Like every Web business, Universe Today gets a sizable portion of its traffic via Google, which accounts for 65 percent of U.S. Web searches, according to Nielsen. Occasionally, Google tinkers with the way it ranks search results—and it did just that on Feb. 25. The goal: reduce the prominence in query results of so-called content farms, sites that churn out content low in quality and high in likelihood of getting noticed by Google's search algorithms. The Online Publishers Assn. estimates that this most recent change will shift $1 billion of advertising revenue from sites identified as farms by Google's technology to other sites it deems more worthy.