'Daily Mail' Fail -- Did Google Just Switch On A Quality Filter?

When the country's most globally popular newspaper says its organic traffic from Google has dropped 50% overnight, it's the digital equivalent of what we used to call in the newspapers "a marmalade dropper."

It's that moment when a story is so captivating and surprising, the reader can be forgiven for not quite fully aligning their mouth and the morning toast.

In fact, it's such a big story that it even got news "legs" to take it through the weekend with a Press Gazette story confirming that head honcho for SEO at The Daily Mail had indeed posted a remark that drew attention to the title's plight.

A staggering 50% loss in traffic overnight and an even more amazing 90% drop in Google Discover traffic. It is, without question, the stuff of which SEO executives' nightmare are made.

But why? What's going on? Well, Google took the unusual step of flagging up that this latest addition to the "Core" algorithm was happening. It explained this as not meaning the change would be substantial, but that it had been asked to be more up front about warning when changes are being made.

The official word from Google is that it wasn't necessarily a huge change. One has to wonder, however, whether it was a little more than a minor tweak for it to have been flagged up.

There are a couple of very interesting points to pick up on here, once you accept that the "Mail Online" website has not done anything -- it is Google that has tweaked its algorithm, so any change comes from its side.

The first comes in a Search Engine Land article, which displays a a cut-and-pasted Tweet that summed up advice from Google in a blog.

To paraphrase, the helpful hint was that for any publisher hit by the new tweak, the main way to rank well with Google is to produce great-quality content. 

You can't really get a more clear steer that if the algorithm thinks your content is not as good as someone else's, they will be rated above you.

The second comes not just from the 50% decline in search engine traffic but in Google virtually turning off traffic from Google Discover. A 90% drop in the flow or readers from Google's news gathering and recommendation app is severe and would show that the search giant has a major issue with "Mail Online."

There is a suggestion that this could be about load speed -- the rate at which people can get the content on their smartphones -- which Google loves to prioritise pages by. However, "Mail Online" is saying that this drop off the cliff is happening on its accelerated AMP pages as well as content not consumed over AMP -- ie on a desktop.

Could this all be about quality, then? It is hardly a secret that most liberals do not have the greatest respect for the The Daily Mail. It's not worth getting into here, but suffice it to say that older people who want to be made to feel angry about stuff will generally buy the paper and check it out online.

There's some fantastic journalism in there, but it's fair to point out that it has a poor reputation with younger, more liberal news readers. 

Online, it sports what has widely been referred to as "the sidebar of shame" in which there are a bunch of salacious stories dominated by pictures of scantily clad female celebrities in bikinis trying to have a holiday with a new partner or to show off their new body.

Media watchers will remember the American news rating company, Newsguard, flagged up warnings about Mail Online a few months ago before a few issues were ironed out and the site got a clean bill of health.

I'm just wondering, here whether it's not about speed of download and the big advice from Google that producing the best possible content is the best way to survive the latest tweak. Is this simply attributable to quality?

It could be a technical issue that has only been flagged up by the latest tweak and it could be about the speed of download or the design of the site. However, when the dropoff is so severe, it would suggest that something in the tweaked algorithm has taken a dislike to the site. 

Without any proof to point to, it does rather leave one wondering whether Google has just incorporated a quality or good-taste filter of some sort, doesn't it?

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