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On 23 February 2011 Google updated their algorithm to weed out ‘content farms’. These are usually low quality sites where people can submit their content, and even content scraper sites, which literally ‘scrape’ content (via software) from other sites to use on their site. These sites have often performed well in search rankings, but visitors to these sites can end up landing on low quality, useless content and surf away.
It was only a few weeks ago that Google hit ‘link farms’ which can artificially inflate links to a site, again with links back to sites on very low quality pages. (you can read my post about this here – Do You Care Where Your Links are From). This latest update is a continuation of Google’s latest clamp down on spam to increase the quality of their search results and the user’s experience.
As you can imagine, this latest clamp down hasn’t been good news for some sites, in particular some of the popular article submission sites such as Ezine Articles, Hubpages and Squidoo. Even we’ve suggested to clients and through our blog posts that these sites are useful for recycling content and gaining more traffic to your site. Until now these tactics have worked well. However, it’s the quality of the article that is key. Although we’ve recommended using these sites, submitting low quality articles won’t have the desired impact as it’s unlikely anyone reading a poor quality article will be likely to bother visiting your site. Just submitting a low quality article for the sake of a link is never a good idea anyway.
Ezine Articles responded very quickly to Google’s latest update as they lost 35% of their traffic literally overnight! To prove to Google that they’re worthy of regaining rankings, they’ve revised submission guidelines to improve article quality and increased the length of articles, which you can read here, Quality Matters.
I personally think this is good news, not only for Ezine Articles themselves, but will help to improve the quality of content on the internet. Unfortunately as more and more people get their own sites, and let’s face it, you can be up and running with a free site in a matter of minutes, the more dross is out there, with some people still believing that putting up a sub-standard site with sub-standard content will somehow still lead to overnight success and lots of £££s!
I’ve been fed up with coming across an awful lot of rubbish out there for quite a while, with people jumping on the latest trendy ‘bandwagon’, offering misleading information, and it’s no wonder anyone starting out online to promote their site ends up getting totally confused and frustrated! I hope that this is the start of a big clean up of online content that is well needed. I realise it’s not as black and white as this and there are some genuinely good sites which have been hit, however, these changes will hopefully help to convince people that writing sub-standard ‘lazy’ content will no longer work.
To read more about these latest changes, there are a number of articles well worth reading:
Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update – from SearchEngineLand.com
Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change? – from SearchEngineLand.com
Where, Why, When & How To Benefit From Google’s Farmer Update – from SearchEngineLand.com
Finding more high-quality sites in search – from The Official Google Blog
Some Farm Aid for the Afflicted: Google Farmer Update – from HighRankings.com
What do you think about these latest changes in search? Do you think that it’ll help to improve the quality of content on the internet? Please share your views!
Image: Beef Portrait by Alex E. Proimos, on Flickr
About Samantha McArthur
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
Thanks for the article Sam! I agree with you about the rubbish we see all the time in the searches.
But I do hope that Google sorts out the quality sites issue for HubPages, EzineArticles, and Squidoo. To compensate, I’ve actually changed my search criteria now. I will first look to HubPages and EzineArticles for what I’m looking for instead of doing a Google search. Only if I cannot find what I’m looking for, will I use Google.
Maybe if their search numbers start to decline, they’ll figure out a way to add something to algorithms to make quality sites appear again. They do need to work on refining this further.
Hi Debbie, thanks for your comment! I’d be interested in your experience of using Hubpages & Ezine Articles before using Google search, so please let us know what you think of the quality compared with Google. I agree that there’s a lot of work left in refining the algorithm, I expect it’s going to take several months before it settles down. I’ll be watching the UK results when the new changes are rolled out over here – interesting times ahead!
Great info! I am concerned about the fallout from these content farms. I have recently discovered some of my articles posted on other sites, under some other “author’s” name. I have written to them to remove the articles, told them who it was, and have yet to hear from them or see any action being taken.
What concerns me is that I cannot do anything to stop this, and I might be penalized from having too much “duplicate” content.
I’m hoping something will also be done to address this situation.
Hi Cindy, thanks for taking the time to comment and glad you find the post useful! Having content stolen is a real problem and you’re not the first person who’s found their articles appearing on other sites. The search engines’ are quite good at working out the source of the content, so hopefully your original article will be credited rather than the ‘stolen’ version. I wrote an article about this a little while ago which may help: http://www.savvymarketers.co.uk/2010/03/duplicate-content-dilemmas.html
I doubt you’ll be penalised, but keep an eye on your rankings anyway. It’s going to be a bit of a bumpy ride over the next few months while the new algorithm settles down, but hopefully it will help to clean up the internet in the long term!
Hi Sam,
Panda update is cool in my opinion. Once I wrote to ezine asking about so many google ads posted on their roof, floor, sidewalls etc. I asked them to share some revenue with me because I submitted my articles to them in full. The reply was ” YOu get traffic blah blah”. Till now the traffic is extremely and I never could outrank them on my article. But today I found that I am starting to get some Panda Kungfu chops. One of my article ranked over my own article on ezine for same keyword and that made me happy. I already stopped sending my own hard work to these article sites.
And the traffic from Google is getting better.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge
Ashvini
[...] have been turning over the last few years with quality being far more important. Even more so since Google started rolling out their ‘Panda’ updates. But to gain those all important links, many paid link networks cropped up where you could pay to [...]
[...] have been turning over the last few years with quality being far more important. Even more so since Google started rolling out their ‘Panda’ updates. But to gain those all important links, many paid link networks cropped up where you could pay to [...]