Google has recently made a huge update to the algorithm, known in SEO circles as the Farmer update, Google Panda update, making it a hot topic. Find out what this means to you. Author - Sean Butcher, Account Executive, I Spy

1. Google’s ‘Farmer/Panda’ Algorithm Change

2. What Is A Content Farm? “Articles in content farms have been found to contain identical passages across several media sources, leading to questions about the sites placing search engines optimization goals over factual relevance”. “(They are) low quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm & http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

3. An Important Point However, like most algorithm changes that happen in the USA, its very likely that we will see them here in the future...

4. What’s Changed? On the 24th February 2011, Google rolled out a new algorithm change to combat content farms Change was in two parts – first aimed at scraper sites and second targeting content farms Earlier update happened at start of February 11.8% of websites were affected by the changes Should help sites with quality, original content Will harm those with content that offers no benefit for users

5. Who’s Lost Out? There have been a number of high-profile casualties following the update including: Ezine Articles (-90%) Hub Pages (-87%) Buzzle (-85%) Articles base (-94%) Mahalo (-84%) All are sites which allow users to add content, including a link back to their own site Stats published by Sistrix, reported by SEO Moz

6. Controversy... Ezine Articles, one of the most well-known article submission sites was hit hard by the changes, despite very tight editorial checks compared to a number of its competitors In addition to the 70+ full-time people on our team who impact every single article published (quality control, link quality checking, landing page quality scoring, spam abuse detection, etc), every article is double-human reviewed by hand. We’ve been both quietly and publicly at war with a small percentage of our membership who aim to use our site to game the search engines with what we refer to as “article vomit” or thinly-crafted software-spun articles. Chris Knight, CEO of Ezine Articles: http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html#more-11693

7. Ezine Articles The day of the change traffic was down 11.5%, and 35% the day after... Chris Knight vowed to make changes to the site, including 10% fewer articles accepted, a word count increase, tighter keyword density limit, and stopping submissions through Wordpress blogs He also made the suggestion to add the ‘nofollow’ attribute to all links; this was quickly retracted when users reacted furiously to the idea, threatening to boycott the site Does this show that Google are right, and that Ezine Article’s users are purely using this and similar services as a mean of gaining a backlink to their own site/blog?

8. Even Google Make Mistakes Google did make slight tweaks to the algorithm change following multiple complaints from sites wrongly affected Website owners could submit any complaints to Google Webmaster help forums "We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem. Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent." AmitSinghal, head of company search quality ,ranking and algorithm, source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-content-farm-tweak-13031.html

9. What Does It Mean For Websites? Google, more than ever before wants to see good quality content on a website Websites will benefit if they are authoritative and informative to their industry/niche Content may need to stand out/offer something different from the norm and be noticed This could mean being shared via social bookmarking, Facebook likes or Tweets, as well as attracting blogger attention or natural linkage.

10. What About Link Building? Article submissions in particular may: Not be indexed as easily Not hold as much value – less link equity passing to your site Less visibility of articles/ability to reach a wider audience with content Less visitors coming to site through links within your articles

11. What Can Be Done Differently? Write more content on your own site/blog and promote it through social media Offer unique, interesting content that can be discussed and debated in your website’s community Guest blogging – work together to share ideas for content Attract natural linkage/come up with link bait ideas

12. Summary Change only in USA at the moment No date agreed yet for release UK/Worldwide Targeting content farms/scraper sites with low quality content Number of positives as a result of change – less competition, quality sites will benefit Website content/link building strategies may need to be altered in future

13. Questions?