Difference between revisions of "Learn/Google's-Farmer-Update:-What-You-Need-To-Know"
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Google said "Note that as this is an algorithmic change we are unable to make manual exceptions, but in cases of high quality content we can pass the examples along to the engineers who will look at them as they work on future iterations and improvements to the algorithm." | Google said "Note that as this is an algorithmic change we are unable to make manual exceptions, but in cases of high quality content we can pass the examples along to the engineers who will look at them as they work on future iterations and improvements to the algorithm." | ||
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| + | {{PullQuote|right|We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content... As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.|Google|[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html January 21, 2011]}} | ||
The Farmer Update, according to Google, was intended to target: | The Farmer Update, according to Google, was intended to target: | ||
Revision as of 21:53, 10 March 2011
What do small business owners need to know about Google's recent search algorithm change referred to as the Farmer Update (or Panda Update)?
This is an algorithmic change that doesn’t target specific sites. Specific websites were not targeted, blacklisted, etc.
Affected about 12% of U.S. Google searches.
This algorithm change is dubbed the "Farmer Update" by the SEO community because it is believed that Google was largely trying to improve search results, by de-emphasizing "content farms". What's a content farm?
Google said "Note that as this is an algorithmic change we are unable to make manual exceptions, but in cases of high quality content we can pass the examples along to the engineers who will look at them as they work on future iterations and improvements to the algorithm."
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| —Google, | ||
The Farmer Update, according to Google, was intended to target:
- "Shallow content (not enough content to be useful)
- Poorly written content
- Content copied from other sites
- Content that’s not useful"
"Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful." -- Google quoted here at SMX West
What types of sites have been affected?
- E-commerce sites with little content, or little unique content. Add unique description to products and product category pages.
- Content farms
- Scraper sites
- Shopping comparison sites, coupon sites
- Any sites that don't have much quality, unique content
How does Google's algorithm determine this?
Bounce rate and time on site have been suspected as informants, and that would be logical, but this isn't data that Google uses. What they can look at is if someone clicks to a website from a search result, and then goes back to the search result -- because this would indicate that they didn't find what they were looking for or didn't find the content valuable on that site. Because of Google Analytics, Google could look at some of these metrics, but they have said they never would and it would be a big ethical leap for them.
Has Your Website Been Affected by Google's Farmer Update?
Did your traffic from Google (organic, not paid) decrease or change on February 24, 2011?
The Farmer Update is currently only affecting search results in the U.S., so if you're not based in the United States or you don't get much traffic from the colonies, you don't need to worry yet, and there's still time to shape up before the Farmer Update rolls out to you.
http://andybeard.eu/3543/google-farmer-update-self-diagnostic-kit.html
What Can You Do if the Farmer Update Hurt Your Site?
- Unique content
- Authoritative content -- more links, social sharing
- Better looking site
- Increase engagement on your site -- shoot for increased time on site, decreased bounce rate
- Remove/redirect/noindex low quality pages
- Build out brand signals -- what's that?
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/discovery-pushing-back-content-farm/149313/
"...it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain." -- Google quoted here
Matthew Brown of AudienceWise (previously with the NY Times) made some interesting points at SMX West. "Brown noted that content farm-like sites that seemed not to lose rankings had common factors such as brand awareness and credibility (like my Huffington Post example), inclusion in Google News, lots of links to internal pages, and substantial social media sharing. He felt design and user experience play a part as well, showing an example from ehow.com (some say content farm-like, yet not impacted by this Google change) with a clean user interface and few ads above the fold." from here