Learn/Google's-Farmer-Update:-What-You-Need-To-Know

The "Farmer Update" was a change in Google's search engine ranking algorithm that took place on February 23, 2011. As an algorithmic change, this means that Google didn't target, blacklist or manually do anything to the rankings of specific websites.

“	As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.	”
—Google, January 21, 2011 (before the Farmer Update)

This change in Google's search engine algorithm is unofficially called the Farmer Update by the SEO community because it is believed that Google was largely trying to improve its search results by de-emphasizing web pages from "content farms" that don't provide much valuable content to searchers. Google alluded to a crackdown of content farms in January (see quote to the right), but they have declined confirmed that content farms were the target of their search algorithm change. Google internally refers to this algorithm change as the Panda Update.

What's a content farm?

Google says the Farmer/Panda Update affects about 12% of U.S. searches. The Farmer algorithm change has not yet been rolled out to searches in other countries. (Does anyone know when this will happen?)

What do small business owners need to know about Google's recent search algorithm change referred to as the Farmer Update (or Panda Update)?

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... 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, March 9, 2011 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?

http://searchengineland.com/your-sites-traffic-has-plummeted-since-googles-farmerpanda-update-now-what-66769

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?

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." (Where was this said?)

http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/discovery-pushing-back-content-farm/149313/

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2631-Google-s-Farmer-Algorithm-and-What-It-Means-for-Ecommerce-SEO

"...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

http://searchengineland.com/the-farmerpanda-update-new-information-from-google-and-the-latest-from-smx-west-67574

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