Google’s Farmer Algorithm Update
On February 25 Google rolled out a very significant and long overdue change to their search algorithm that impacts the results of 12% of searches in the US. The Farmer Update is the most significant change to the Google index this year and is designed to help combat the growing volume of low value / low quality content on the web. The dust is beginning to settle and the winners and losers are now emerging.
Google’s Matt Cutts pointed out during the official release that there was an 84% overlap between the sites reported using the new Chrome Blacklist extension and the 12% of results impacted by the Farmer Update. Google used this metric as evidence of the utility of this change to end users.
Key Findings:
- The ratio of low quality content on your website matters. Your entire domain will be penalised if your ratio of low quality content is too high.
- Your link profile matters more now than ever. If the majority of your links come from websites with a high ratio of low quality content the value of these links have been greatly reduced
- Duplicate content (including articles and press releases) have been devalued.
- Google is going to rely heavily on crowd sourcing in its war against spam
Key Recommendations:
- Focus on quality. Remove all poorly written, shallow, non-unique, or generally not useful pages from your website
- Do not create content for SEO purposes only – all content should have utility to the end user
- Focus on SEO and promotional efforts that create utility and delight fans… Google is placing more and more value on these signals
- Do not do undertake any link building initiatives that involve link schemes, content farms, low quality directories or low quality article sites
ManagedSEO, along with all other white-hat SEO companies, are very supportive of the Farmer Update. We strongly believe that Google will win this war against spam and companies that the companies that do the best job of aligning their content and services to what customers want will be the ultimate winners.
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