Learn/Google's-Farmer-Update:-What-You-Need-To-Know
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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 -- unlike the new search engine Blekko, which has blocked 1.1 million sites from its search results entirely.
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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 to confirm 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? A content farm is a website that has lots of content, but that usually isn't very informative or useful. Many content farms have aggressive business models that are based on creating cheap content for the search terms that people are searching for right now and that they think they can make profitable with advertising. This often includes things like how-to articles and articles that (are supposed to) answer a question. Content farms are an SEO play and a business model that relies on search engine ranking... until the Farmer Update, this has worked fine for many content farms.
Google frequently changes and tinkers with its search algorithm, but it's usually in minor ways that don't affect many searches, aren't given a name, and largely go unnoticed. Google says the Farmer/Panda Update affects about 12% of U.S. searches, making it a substantial algorithm change. The Farmer algorithm change has not been rolled out to searches in other countries, but it presumably will be sometime soon. (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)?
Contents
What types of sites have been affected by the Farmer/Panda Update?
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- Shallow or thin content
- Poorly-written content
- Content copied from other sites
- Content that isn't very useful
To give you an idea of the real results, some Farmer Update losers that you may know include: ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com, associatedcontent.com, answerbag.com, FindArticles.com, merchantcircle.com
Interestingly, some sites that could be considered content farms because they have how-to or Q & A content actually saw increases in traffic and rankings after the Farmer Update. Some winners include HowStuffWorks.com, eHow.com, instructables.com and our friends at wikiHow.com. These websites generally have better content, a more professional design, and less intrusive ads than the sites that took a nosedive after the Farmer Update.
[Comparison image of some kind]
How can Google's algorithm determine quality content?
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.
"Success" of the search visit is what SEOmoz calls it.
SEOmoz:
- "User/usage data - signals like click-through-rate, time-on-site, "success" of the search visit (based on other usage data)
- "Quality raters - a machine-learning type algorithm could be applied to sites quality raters liked vs. didn't to build features/factors that would boost the "liked" sites and lower the "disliked" sites. This can be a dangerous way to build algorithms, though, because no human can really say why a site is ranking higher vs. lower or what the factors are - they might be derivatives of very weird datapoints rather than explainable mechanisms.
- "Content analysis - topic modeling algorithms, those that calculate/score readability, uniqueness/robustness analysis and perhaps even visual "attractiveness" of content presentation could be used (or other signals that conform well to these).
Has Your Website Been Affected by Google's Farmer Update?
While the Farmer Update was likely intended to affect larger spam-y content farms, because it was an algorithm change, it could and has affected some sites not in its main target. In general, any site with little unique content could have been impacted by the Farmer Update. Examples include:
- E-commerce sites with sparse content, or little unique content (like just taking the manufacturer's product description).
- Shopping comparison sites or coupon sites
- Any sites that don't have much quality, unique content
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
If your website's search engine traffic has suffered since the Farmer Update, read on for tips on walking the straight and narrow to get back in Google's good graces.
If you're not confident that your website provides quality, unique content on the majority of its pages -- regardless of whether the Farmer Update has hurt you -- read on for tips to become a quality website that should never fall victim to a search engine algorithm change.
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?
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/
"...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