Latest posts by Rhys Wynne (see all)
- Build A Brand – The Futureproof Process for SEO Success - September 8, 2011
- Google Panda Update & It’s Implication For Bloggers - March 29, 2011
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The Google Panda update, which has also been referred to as the Farmer update, has negatively impacted a great deal of sites on the internet and positively influenced some of them as well.
How Did It Occur?
The update was perceived to be released in response to a large number of complaints that had been surfacing about the quality of the search results in Google. For example, recently there have been high profile cases from companies being called out on their SEO strategy – for example JCPenney was outed for it’s large number of irrelevant links. However in my opinion Google have been wanting to devalue content farms for a long time, and in my thinking the outing of companies such as JCPenney sped things along.
What Are Content Farms?
A “Content Farm” is a loosely defined term that refers to sites with content that might be friendly to the search engine algorithms, but not to actual human beings.
Michael Wyszomierski, of Google, spoke on the subject, saying that the changes were primarily focused around bad content. Perhaps the most important piece of information that he released was that “low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.” He went on to say that removing this low quality content, or improving it, could also improve rankings.
Manual Reviewing
While algorithms likely played an important part in the update, there is also a strong possibility that manual review did as well. Companies such as Leapforce have been contracted to work with Google in order to review articles for quality. They have also increased the number of avenues for people to give feedback about the relevance of search engine listings, a process that is likely to become more common in the future if it turns out to be helpful.
Some of the hardest hit sites were mahalo.com and ezinearticles.com, both sites that have enormous amounts of content without a great deal of accountability on behalf of the writers. Most of the sites that have been hit do have plenty of high quality
Another aspect of many of the sites that have been hit is the ad to content ratio. If a site seems to exist primarily to advertise, even if the ads are “by Google,” the site appears more likely to lose ranking. If everything else is on the fence, this may be the deciding factor.
It is unlikely that Google has an algorithm capable of detecting “bad content,” something that is hard to define even in human terms – in my eyes some of the biggest blogs on the internet aren’t always the best. It is more likely that the search engine is using manual reviews to locate bad content, and to reduce the trustworthiness of affiliated sites. The bottom line is that bloggers are advised to make sure they are comfortable with the quality of their site, as well as the sites that link to it.
How You Can Protect Yourself as a Blogger
Due to the relative size and nature of most blogs, unless you were actively creating a blog filled with poor quality content or had a site with no editorial nature, then you should be alright. However, to avoid false positives and protect yourself as a blogger, here’s a few things that I recommend:-
- Avoid Using Poor Content – Write for your readers, and avoid using poor or duplicated content, especially from article directories. Poor quality content from these directories in large quanities can cripple your website in the rankings.
- Be Careful of Ad Placement – A lot of these websites that use large amounts of poor quality content often have overly agressive ad placements. Whilst not a huge factor in itself, it does seem to be a ranking factor. If you’re a blogger, having ad placements littered throughout the content can now not only lead to less readers, but also lead to a Google penalty.
- Build Up a Community – Ultimately though, the best way to protect yourself from negative Google equity is to not rely on Google at all. Build up a community surrounding your blog and then traffic from Google will not be needed. This will in turn lead to an increase in traffic in Google, because you have what they are looking for – useful content with plenty of links from a variety of sources.
