On 24 February 2011, Google.com rolled out a new update targeting spammy sites that generate SEO-heavy content that is not necessarily rich for users. These sites are generally known as content farms. Common characteristics of content farms include:
- SEO optimized content (that may or may not make sense) for relatively competitive keyword phrases
- Free content or low-paid writers who have to crank out dozens of articles to make a pittance
- High advertising ratios – often with ads that bisect articles, and other tactics to encourage pay-per-click click revenue
- And little to know relevance among the topics covered across the site, little depth of coverage and a “scraping of the surface” of the topic at hand
Because content farms were the target of this update, SEOMoz dubbed it the “Farmer” update, which, frankly, makes a heck of a lot more sense than the internal codeword used at Google: the Panda update. So you’ll hear about Panda, Farmer and Panda who farm, but it’s all talking about the same algo change.
Yesterday, the Panda update went live in English-speaking international markets – google.co.uk, google.co.au and others saw the shifts in their SERPs. It’s pretty soon to tell how this is going to impact search referrals for the site I shepherd, but as far as I can tell it looks like the same URLs that were targeted on the google.com update also took a hit in the UK rankings.
Please share your observations and thoughts here about where this is rolling out on global Google platforms. Are you seeing the same results? We’ve had a month to get ready for it, were you surprised by the result?
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems
as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You definitely know what youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your weblog when you could be giving
us something enlightening to read?