On February 24th Google made a significant SEO change for their search listings. Official information can be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
Someone was calling this the Google “Farmers” SEO update because it targets content farms. Cute, and it works for me.
Based on an evaluation of my own sites, plus what others are reporting, Google’s attack on content farms on scraper sites means the following:
- This is not a backlink change. It does not matter what your backlinks or backlink keywords are.
- This is a change based on a sitewide evaluation of your website. Not a per page evaluation. There have been two trust factors for content ranking. One based on your domain as a whole and the other for the specific page content is on. This affects the domain evaluation.
- As usual, although Google calls this a computer algorithm change, this is what is really happening. Humans eyeballing the results are not happy. This includes Google’s users. It includes Google employees such as Matt Cutts. They have a better desired outcome in mind, so the algorithm is tweaked to achieve that outcome. So while specific sites are not manually penalized, the result is as if they were.
This reminds of how legislators can favor certain companies on the sly. Instead of passing a bill saying Acme Corp gets a 10 percent tax decrease – which of course is politically impossible to pass, a bill is passed saying any company that meets certain criteria gets a 10 percent tax decrease. Of course the only company meeting those criteria is Acme.
- Unfocused websites with thousands of unrelated pages have been hit. The flipside is that smaller, or at least more focused websites should now rank better.
This means article directories, for instance, will not rank as high.
Although this factor includes a site like Wikipedia, that is a “trusted” site and is not subject to penalty. Just put Wikipedia in a separate classification not affected by the latest change. Very few sites will meet that gold standard.
- Websites consisting mainly of copied content from other sites are hit.
- Websites with quick bounce rates and low click thrus from the search rankings will be hit. These have always been included in the SEO algorithm, a couple of hundreds of factors. They probably have a higher importance now because they indicate a low quality website.
It is difficult for a computer to evaluate whether content is low quality or high quality. That is a judgment call of the person reading the page. However, the judgment call of that person has ramifications, such as quickly exiting the website. This not only gives it a bounce rate, but perhaps more importantly the person is only spending a small amount of time on the page.
The page has not engaged them so they are looking for something else.
This means pages with good titles and meta tag descriptions will be rewarded with higher click thru rates from the search listings. If the pages then confirm their value through factors suggesting quality, then they will be rewarded in the search listings. If not, then they are dropped.
- Pages with more text, compared with a website consisting of cheap, copied articles all about 300 words in length, may suggest more value.
- It is possible a heavier penalty is applied for linking to bad websites. My suspicion is this could be applied to article directories because they have control over what content and links they allow. But this is not applied to forums and places with ‘profile’ links because they do not have that control. Identifying the software running each type of site will often not be hard for Google to determine based on footprints.
- Combining all of the above is a method for penalizing the rankings of low quality content farms and scraper sites. Based on my evaluations and review I believe these factors should be considered when creating a website and its content, if one does not want a poor domain quality rating to reduce their rankings.
One of the important factors in this change is that this “on page” or domain ranking has increased in importance. It may now outweigh backlink ranking factors which until now, had been a key component of increasing a website’s ranking in Google.
Before, bad “on page” sites with many “off page” backlinks would rank well. Now, not so because the “on page” ranking factors have increased in importance.
Remember the change is still new and the overall ranking algorithm is continually being tweaked. What you need to do consider what is a content farm and what could be evaluated to give it a rankings drop – and then making sure your website does not meet those criteria.
Here is a fascinating statistical analysis showing sites hit hardest by the Farmer update:
http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html
Looks like article directories have been hit the hardest. Ironically, they are following the “best” article directories. The crap directories accepting any slop that comes their way might as well be off the web – except that it still remains to be seen what value those backlinks still have. Two separate issues: traffic from links and PageRank value from backlinks.
Link to this page
Entries (RSS)