Google’s February Farmer/Panda update has every internet marketing company taking a hard look at which article marketing strategies are still going to be affective. This new algorithm change was in direct response to the increased rankings of low quality content farms that provide very little if any benefit to site visitors. To gain positions within specific searches, these content farms would generate cheap, keyword heavy copies once they figured out what the most popular search terms were. Google’s business model is based on providing the most relevant, high quality sites in their search engine results pages.
These low quality “content farms” seem to have been on Google’s radar for some time now. These changes, though they may not admit it, seem to be focused on these type of sites. Google changes its search engine algorithm on a regular basis. Many times, internet marketing companies are the only ones that notice these changes because they are usually so small. With about 12% of the US search results affected, this recent update is different.
The good thing about this update is that Google has penalized sites with low-quality content, sites with copied or “scraped” content and sites that have a low content to ad ratio. Google recently has been criticized for the increased number of low sites in search results and it looks like this tweak is designed to fix the problem. Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said in a recent blog, “Our goal is simple: to give users the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible”. In the long run this should benefit internet marketing companies that focus on helping their clients build trust and authority by providing visitors with high quality, original content. In situations like these, regrettably, there will be collateral damage. Google’s Farmer/Panda update is no different.
Links will be worth less than before, and the article could have been de-indexed all together by posting useless content with hyperlinks that have been labeled as a Content Farm by Google, especially if you are an internet marketing company that, as part of the link building campaign, uses article marketing. Since these articles have probably seen a substantial drop in search ranking, you have most likely noticed the drop if traffic is your goal. So what should you do? Here are some suggestions.
1. Write better content. High quality content gets read. High quality content also gets linked to. Google sees content that gets read and linked to as relevant and authoritative.
2. Promote your content better. Great articles don’t get read if people don’t know they exist. Getting the content noticed is your job. You will need to use an assortment of social media outlets and guest blogging and implement a good link building strategy.
If the Google Farmer Update has taught internet marketing companies and search engine optimization specialists anything, it’s that SEO is ultimately about people. Don’t get me wrong, you have to take into consideration what Google wants to get good search rankings. People will like you if you write what they want to read with quality content, find quality inbound links and utilize the language used by them when searching. And so will Google.
April 29, 2011
Web Development