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Google algorithm change cracks down on content farms

D

djbaxter

Guest
Finding more high-quality sites in search
by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer
February 24, 2011


...in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking?a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries?and we wanted to let people know what?s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites?sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites?sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

...
To start with, we?re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time.
Click to expand...

Read more...
 
Google's Old Motto: "Don't be evil."

Google's New Motto: "Do as we say, not as we do."
 
Hehehe that's funny! Yes if you see all the google sites, they consist of articles, documents, reports, pdf from all sources, so is it duplicate content? eh?
I don't know, I'm just a small potato. My question is... what happened to the article writing software that scrapes contents from the web? will the publisher be penalize if she keeps on scraping contents?
 
Peoney said:
My question is... what happened to the article writing software that scrapes contents from the web? will the publisher be penalize if she keeps on scraping contents?
Click to expand...

Yes. That's the intent of the algorithm change.
 
Who Lost In Google?s "Farmer" Algorithm Change?

Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google?s "Farmer" Algorithm Change?
by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
Feb 26, 2011

On Thursday, Google announced a major change to its search algorithm, designed to weed out shallow and low-quality content from its top search results. Content farms were seen by many as the target. Were they hit? Who was hit? Some figures are coming out.

If you were expecting these figures to show Demand Media?s eHow site to have been harmed ? surprise! Two studies show eHow actually gained. I?m still crunching through some of the figures, but the biggest ?content farm? type brand that seems to have suffered are Associated Content.
Click to expand...

Among the big losers:

  • wisegeek.com
  • ezinearticles.com
  • suite101.com
  • hubpages.com
  • yourdictionary.com
  • brothersoft.com
  • buzzle.com
  • associatedcontent.com
  • freedownloadscenter.com
  • essortment.com
  • fixya.com
  • americantowns.com
  • lovetoknow.com
  • articlesbase.com
  • howtodothings.com
  • mahalo.com
  • automotive.com
  • business.com
  • doityourself.com
  • merchantcircle.com
  • thefind.com
  • wrongdiagnosis.com
  • findarticles.com
  • faqs.org
  • tradekey.com
Read more...

If your sites depend on backlinks from any of these sites or the other sites listed in the article, expect your ranking to also drop. And the more your site depended on those sites for backlinks, the more it will drop.

So far, the algorithm only affects US sites (or sites with backlinks from US sites) but it will in due course roll out across the rest of the globe.
 
And more:

Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Rankings Up
by Aaron Wall, SEO Book.com
February 26, 2011

ArticlesBase (an article farm which built up its popularity by linking to contributior sites) now slaps nofollow on all outbound links & is pulling in a cool $500k per month!

How did ArticlesBase grow to that size? It and Ezinearticles were a couple of the "selected few" which lasted through the last major burn down of article directories about 3 or 4 years ago. But it seems their model has peaked after this last Google update.
Click to expand...
 
More fallout from the algo change.

<a href="http://mashable.com/2011/03/02/mahalo-lays-off-10-of-staff/">Following Google?s Algorithm Change, Mahalo Lays Off 10% of Staff</a>

?The Google changes have led to a significant dip in our traffic and revenue. It?s hard not to be disappointed since we?ve been spending millions of dollars on producing highly professional content,? explains Calacanis. Due to the dip in traffic, Mahalo will lay off 10% of its staff and temporarily halt its freelance content production.
Click to expand...
 
It’s hard not to be disappointed since we’ve been spending millions of dollars on producing highly professional content
Click to expand...

My understanding is that Mahalo was one of the prime targets of the new algorithm. I don't know what they were spending millions of dollars on but evidently Google saw them as scraping it from somewhere else. If they had spent those millions of dollars on creating origional content, they likely wouldn't be feeling the need to lay off all those employees.
 
Interestingly, looking from a totally different viewpoint, many of the sites that got hit were literally Google's competitors too.

Search - Mahalo

Many local directories, business directories and review sites were hit like InsiderPages, Merchant Circle, Business.com, americantowns.com and more.
(Google Places, Hotpot)

Many shopping aggregation and coupon sites were hit
(Google Shopping, Google Offers)

Docstoc was hit
(Google docs)

Think I saw a list of others somewhere.
 
minstrel said:
Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google?s "Farmer" Algorithm Change?
by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
Feb 26, 2011



Among the big losers:

  • wisegeek.com
  • ezinearticles.com
  • suite101.com
  • hubpages.com
  • yourdictionary.com
  • brothersoft.com
  • buzzle.com
  • associatedcontent.com
  • freedownloadscenter.com
  • essortment.com
  • fixya.com
  • americantowns.com
  • lovetoknow.com
  • articlesbase.com
  • howtodothings.com
  • mahalo.com
  • automotive.com
  • business.com
  • doityourself.com
  • merchantcircle.com
  • thefind.com
  • wrongdiagnosis.com
  • findarticles.com
  • faqs.org
  • tradekey.com
Read more...

If your sites depend on backlinks from any of these sites or the other sites listed in the article, expect your ranking to also drop. And the more your site depended on those sites for backlinks, the more it will drop.

So far, the algorithm only affects US sites (or sites with backlinks from US sites) but it will in due course roll out across the rest of the globe.
Click to expand...

Add the Cult of Mac to that list! For some reason G decided that CoM is a site that needs to be punished. Personally, I reckon it's a conspiracy - Goog only wants us to talk about Android, not Mac!! ;)
 
Content Farms and Google Algorithm

what do you guys thinks of the new Google algorithm rollout? Content farms (except for ehow) are taking a hit. I've noticed it myself where I had articles on hubpages, EZA, articlehub etc. - they all dropped in the SERPs.

Just wondering if you guys have been effected...possibly your traffic and conversions as well?
 
SO what was Panda/Farmer really all about?

The ?Panda? That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google?s Top Search Engineers
By Steven Levy, Wired[/COLOR]
March 3, 2011

Amit Singhal: So we did Caffeine [a major update that improved Google?s indexing process] in late 2009. Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.

Matt Cutts: It was like, ?What?s the bare minimum that I can do that?s not spam?? It sort of fell between our respective groups. And then we decided, okay, we?ve got to come together and figure out how to address this.

Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site? Do you have to wind up defining low quality content?

Singhal: That?s a very, very hard problem that we haven?t solved, and it?s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem. We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we?ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: ?Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids??

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. ?Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?? Questions along those lines.

Singhal: And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality. In addition, we launched the Chrome Site Blocker [allowing users to specify sites they wanted blocked from their search results] earlier , and we didn?t use that data in this change. However, we compared and it was 84 percent overlap [between sites downloaded by the Chrome blocker and downgraded by the update]. So that said that we were in the right direction.
Click to expand...

Read more...
 
Your Site?s Traffic Has Plummeted Since Google?s Farmer/Panda Update. Now What?

Your Site?s Traffic Has Plummeted Since Google?s Farmer/Panda Update. Now What?
by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land
Mar 5, 2011

Google?s latest algorithm change has impacted nearly 12% of queries. That means that a lot of sites, big and small, are looking at their web analytics reports this week and seeing devastating traffic graphs down and to the right. It can be difficult to think strategically and objectively in such a a situation and your first reactions may be panic and anger.

Understandable, but if you want to restore your site?s traffic, you need actionable steps for evaluation and change. Even if it is truly the case that you were unfairly hit as a result of collateral damage, you want to spend your limited time and resources on tactics that are likely to bring your traffic back. Read on for more tactical things you can do now, and methods you might want to avoid.
Click to expand...

Read more...?
 

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