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Yesterday, Google launched the “farmer update,” an update to clean up spammy content farms from the SERPs.
Content farms such as eHow, eZine, Mahalo are effected drastically in their rankings.
Now let’s connect some dots!
What do you think? Conspiracy? Thoughts?
Tip of the hat to TJ
About David MalmborgDavid has always been involved with consumer electronics and shiny geeky toys. After finishing his degree at the University of Utah in communication and business, he decided that the new age of online marketing was a great fit for him. David has 5 years of computer electronic sales experience which include retail and B2B. He also worked with a premier design agency focusing his efforts on sales and marketing of the agency, where he became familiar with SEO and other forms of online marketing strategies. In April of 2009, David joined SEO.com as an SEO Specialist.
Check out David Malmborg on Google+
Google will never punish those who spend lots of ad dollars with them no matter what they say.
Untrue to some extent. eHow.com is part of the Demand Media empire. DM creates thousands of video on YouTube (Google). These videos create tons of ad revenue for Google. By punishing eHow they are also punishing one of their major YouTube video suppliers.
I don’t think that its a conspiracy. The Google algorithm has so many variables and About.com fulfill so many other requirements of the algorithm.
Wow that is so crazy that I ran across this post b/c yesterday I saw numerous sites that I own drop in rankings. The drop was not drastic to where I fell off the radar but I noticed on about half of my site dropped a good 7-10 spots. Now one of my main money making sites went from ranking #1 to #11 and it is just a squidoo lens so I guess they are looking at squidoo as a content farm.
I don’t think any of these sites were effected. They aren’t really link farms in the traditional sense. They have some good, informative content on those sites and all are reviewed before published I believe. There are far more spammy article sites and such than these.
I think it will really depend on how far Google is going to push the definition of link farm. There are several article directories out there that most certainly will be classified as link farms. Where will they draw the line? Ezine, Squidoo, Hub Pages? If you’ve used article marketing directories for a portion of your link building, I think you’ll see the importance of those links devalued…not that they carried a ton of value in the first place. In that scenario you’ll probably see a drop in rank.
First, the value they were not tons. In this case, you may see a decline in ranking. They are not really linked in the traditional sense of the farm.
Google is simply out of control. They have tremendous market power over online commerce and make decisions that arbitrarily impact businesses in adverse ways. To say some content is better than others without a substantive review of the actual content is inherently irresponsible and reckless. It is quite clear that “shake-ups” further their business interests by inducing those that have enjoyed high organic ranking to choose to invest in Ad Words in order to compensate for the loss of favorable position. That is the primary mechanism by which they can expand their advertiser base and prevent stagnation. It is also why the default search returns are 10 entries instead of 100. The less people on the first page, the more ad buyers there are. When coupled with a lack of any real mechanism for a fair review and absent any objective standards, one is hard pressed not argue that they violate virtually every unfair rade pratice law in America. Unfortunately, Google has gine from the White Knight to the dark side, and is doing plenty of evil to a lot of legitimate businesses in my opinion.
Google’s results are becoming more and more irrelevant. Sometimes I need to scroll pages and pages of results to find something remotely related. Google more often than not spits either results of sites I don’t need to shown because I already know them (like wikipedia) or a bunch of links to seudo-search engines with links to ads (Very Google style mind you) I guess people are still used to “googling”, but everything that goes up, like Google did, goes down too.
Let’s see, About.com is staffed by vetted experts and their qualifications are listed on each site. Each topic is written about by only one or two people with control over what they write and when they write it. Of course not every article can be everything to every person but About is nothing like Huffington Post or Demand Media.
At least most of their Guides have more experience in their topics than “worked with a premier design agency focusing his efforts on sales and marketing of the agency, where he became familiar with SEO and other forms of online marketing strategies”
HA HA HA – This is good. Thanks for the comment (6 months late and when panda has rolled a number of additional updates that have affected the rankings of about.com.), but still thank you!
I think it has more to do with PR. There are plenty of pundits out there trashing content mills, and in particular trashing Demand Media as the biggest and worst offender (no matter how ridiculous the last part of that is). These self-same pundits ignore About.com completely, even though About’s content isn’t noticeably better or worse than Demand Media’s, precisely because it’s owned by the New York Times.
What ambitious wannabe journalist does a hatchet job on the only part of the NYT family that is making money?
Looks like Panda is here to stay