Google Algorithmic Update – "Farmer"
We don't mean to gloat, but it appears one of our predictions on Google's algorithm changes were correct.
Google made the update (codenamed "Farmer") last Wednesday or Thursday and is designed to crawl and remove low-quality content from the SERPs — namely those which are ranking well and shouldn't be. The sites most affected by this are so-called "content farms".
Will you be affected?
At the moment, the change has only been made to the US version of Google and has yet to be rolled out across localized versions of the engine; so in short: only if you've any traffic coming from America. However (and this is a big however), it's highly likely that the change will be rolled out to the UK and most other countries very soon, so you should be prepared.
For those who are worried, Andy Beard has kindly written a tutorial & provided a link to apply a diagnostic to your analytics. This will examine individual pages and the entire site to see what has been affected.
Affected websites
The sites speculated to be most negatively affected by Google's Farmer Update are:
- ezinearticles
- associatedcontent
- suite101
- hubpages
- buzzle
Those speculated to have been most positively affected by the latest Google Farmer Update are:
- youtube
- ebay
- instructables
Source: SEO Book
How to help your chances of not being affected
Obviously at the moment there is no tried & tested way of not being affected by this change. What we do know, however, is why these sites have lost traffic… Because of the low value content which offer very little to the user. This can lead to only one suggestion from us:
Make sure you have a website that users want!
We're moving away from websites made purely for search engine optimization purposes, and moving into a search index where only relevant sites are appearing. So always try and make sure your content is relevant, interest and – at the same time – search engine friendly and keyword rich, without cannibalising.
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