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Comment by kalvin | Hacker News Reader

I googled "sharpen a knife" yesterday early afternoon and I'm pretty sure I got ehow high on the front page. Now it's halfway down the second page.

Appropriately, the summary for eHow is: "on 3/31/2009 This article provides a high level overview of sharpening, but doesn't provide enough detail to enable a beginner to sharpen a knife ..."

Is there some tool SEO people use to compare results before/after Google algorithm changes? Would be interesting to see.

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kalvin, there would be no way to do that unless you were prepared and happened to store the queries beforehand. However, if you take a look at the Alexa page for one of the sites in question you can see what some of the top queries were that used to bring those sites traffic, and then manually go see where they rank now. For instance, Mahalo used to be in the #1 spot for many of the queries listed on it's page:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mahalo.com

If you look now though you can see they are at #5 for [mcdonalds coupons] (which is still higher than they deserve), #6 for [how to play guitar], more than 5 pages deep for [bed bath and beyond], etc. Check ehow.com and you can see similar results no longer ranking:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ehow.com

I don't know of any resource of ranking information, so you would need to have collected the data beforehand. That being said, I've been collecting data on some queries that showed a lot of eHow results, and I suspect something related to knife sharpening may have been on my list (but I'll have to double check.) Data is stored locally at my office; I'll post a quick update here tomorrow if I have something interesting.

I don't see any major dip on WiseGeek, which is directly-measured traffic:

http://www.quantcast.com/wisegeek.com

The results may be directly measured but they are not real time. Click on the 7 Day view and you can see that the latest numbers are from Feb 22, before the change was rolled out. You would have to wait until Sunday or Monday, I would think, before seeing the difference.

see my comment above about the 164 eHow keywords I started tracking last week in anticipation of something like this.

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