Answers.com CEO Bob Rosenschein revealed this week that his site lost 28% of its traffic in a week, thanks to a change in Google's indexing algorithms. That news should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who depends on the search engine for traffic and revenue.
And, as it turns out, Answers.com isn't the only site suffering from a traffic drop: Technorati's reach of internet users, as measured by Alexa, is also down by 25% in the last two weeks. There's good reason to cast a skeptical eye on Alexa's skewed and often downright inaccurate measurements, but Compete's analysis also shows significant drops in the traffic to both sites: Visitors to Answers.com were down by 10% in June, and at Technorati, visitors were down by almost 14% in June, according to Compete. Ouch.
Will Answers.com's purchase of Dictionary.com help, as Rosenschein suggests? Maybe not: While Dictionary.com has far more traffic than Answers.com, Compete shows Dictionary.com shedding a whopping 41% of its traffic in June.
Are these sites getting hit by the same Google indexing changes? Or are they losing users for other reasons? If you've got information, let me know in the comments or by email.
