Top SEO Ireland

Google’s farmer update has been so-named by SEO professionals because it was designed to target content farms – sites that churn out low quality content according to search volume lists that they run.

However, they are not the only sites that will be affected. Being as the changes target pages with little unique or valuable content, other sorts of sites will also be affected.

Many that demand user contributions are likely to suffer. At some point or other, you will probably have landed on a page that promised a lot according to its title but actually offered nothing whatsoever. Many review sites automatically generate pages and then wait for users to add the content. These pages are extremely frustrating for search engine users and after Google’s update, you should see far fewer of them appearing in results.

Ecommerce and price comparison sites are also likely to be affected for similar reasons. Sites such as Amazon, which generally has reams of unique text about a product in the form of reviews, will not see a drop in rankings and might even benefit.

If you write a reasonably successful website, chances are there are a bunch of sites scraping excerpts and presenting them to their own readers to ‘expose your work to a wider audience’.

This is theft and it’s easy to do on the web where RSS feeds allow someone to take your words automatically without even having to Ctrl-C Ctrl-V it. Many sites will draw content from a number of sources and ‘aggregate’ it for their own users (if they have any).

People running these sites use all manner of phrases to describe the worth of what they do, but in reality they are offering nothing of value to users because they add nothing new.

This is all well and good until you start noticing that these sites are ranking better than yours for your own articles. Clearly something is very, very wrong.

Well, the good news is that these are exactly the kinds of sites which will be hit by Google’s Panda/Farmer update. If there is nothing on a page that can’t be found elsewhere on the web then the whole domain will be affected. If the whole site is built in this way then that problem compounds itself.

The moral? Write your own content. That’s an SEO strategy that will stand the test of time.

This is news that should be of interest to Irish SEO practitioners .What Google is calling its Panda update has significantly affected many high profile sites in the US. Here in Europe, we get the benefit of more warning because Google, a US company, rolls out its updates over there first. This means we can act quickly if we think our rankings might be in danger.

The evidence indicates that there are several signs that your site might see a drop in search traffic following the implementation of the Panda update.

If you have a lot of low quality content, you are likely to see a hit overall, not just on those particular pages. Improve or remove them.

Poor design seems to be a factor, so make your site more user friendly. Pay particular attention to the ratio of adverts to content. Lots of ads and little content is a sign of a poor website.

The most significant of those is doubtless the first. Google speaks of ‘shallow or poorly written content’ as well as that which is copied from other sites as being indicative of low quality. It is also interesting to note that they recommend removing it to see an improvement in rankings. Suddenly, less is more.

As a web publisher, I’m hugely enamoured of Google’s latest update which has targeted sites producing high volumes of poor quality information.

It was dispiriting to see these sites have £1 an article crap rank above far better content on more professionally written sites purely because of their host site’s size, but now it seems that not only is the high volume and low quality business model not being rewarded, it is actively being punished.

Google say that poor quality content on a site will mean pages across the whole domain will rank worse. So what if you’ve based your entire philosophy on producing low quality content? You can’t delete it all because there’s nothing left to rank.

This is the problem with putting all of your eggs in one basket based on a short-term opportunity brought by the search engines – it’s not a plan that can last. One change from Google and everything’s up in smoke. Tough luck.

It surprises me that anyone would think it wasn’t. The reason is that a clearly undesirable search situation had come about where junk articles that were written for a quid had the potential to rank higher than articles on the same topic written by experts. This could never last. No-one would want it to.

The significant nouns were the same in the junk articles and those published on the BBC and the Guardian, but the value was clearly very different. Sooner or later, this had to be addressed. People who built their businesses around churning out crap must surely have stopped and thought that they weren’t working on a long-term project. Taking a step away, they could surely have seen that they were in what could only have been a very short-term scenario in the grand scheme of things. Why would we create the greatest source of information of all time and then promote articles created by barely literate people dashing off articles almost thoughtlessly when there was a perfectly good alternative?

If you know something and you can help others, your web content deserves to be at the top of the search results. That might not always happen, but that is the goal.