Google’s farmer update (panda update) first arrived late February 2011 and then part 2 rolled out about 2-3 weeks ago.
This major algorithm shift to the biggest search engine has affected about 12% of the search results according to Google’s estimates with many of the affected websites now receiving about half the number of visitors than before the “big” update by Google.
According to the official Google Blog:
“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.”
The above means that content farms that produces duplicate and low quality content were strongly affected. This includes many article syndication websites where spun articles were posted and content were not unique. Scraper websites that harvest content from around the internet are affected. Websites with excessive advertisements were also affected.
Websites with links in their content with no relevance seems to be affected the strongest. Major websites such as eHow and Hubpages were bombed as well.
How to ensure you don’t get affected
- Always plan how you can provide a good user experience on your website.
- Always create useful and original content on your website / blog.
- Never, never, never use duplicate content.
- Add fresh new content to your website and blog and remove the old low quality content.
- Make regular updates and improvements to your website and pages with the lowest visit time and the highest bounce rate.
- Make your content easily sharable on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels.
- Keep your website in good repair. Fix broken RSS feeds, broken links, etc. Broken features is an indication to Google for low quality content.
- Avoid excessive advertisements that exceeds the amount of useful content to users.
- Delete spam comments on your blog and always moderate your comments.
Well said anton. Websites who has always focussed on adding good valuable content was not affected much by this update. If you want your website to always keep performing well, stay clear from anything that does not add value or is a short term quick fix strategy, it will hurt you in the long run.
I must be doing something right, Google Analytics has my site with an 11.70 increase! Not so happy with the 9% bounce rate, though. This might have something to do with the broken link checker I installed two weeks ago and which has cleared out a lot of junk.
That is good to hear Kevin. If you are not doing anything “black hat – https://www.antonkoekemoer.com/seo/the-nasty-way-of-seo-black-hat/” and only using unique content on your site, you have nothing to worry about. This goes for publishing articles on other directories/sites as well.
9% wow, mine’s more like 90%. Haha 🙂
Thanks, Anton. A really informative article.
thanks for the article. I will delete all spam content and comments on my blog
Thanks Anton. Great advice 🙂
excellent article !
I whas looking at this article really informative, since last week we have the Google’s Penguin