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- RT @FisheyeStuart: We are proud to announce that 2 of our devs are now officially certified. Well done guys..
Internet Marketing News
- Webinar Next Thursday 5/30: Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World
Bidding Best Practices (Part 3) - Calculating mobile bid adjustments
The new Display Benchmarks Tool: put context around your display campaigns - Using schema.org markup for organization logos
Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages
5 common mistakes with rel=canonical
Google farmer algorithm update
How will the Google ‘Farmer’ update effect my site?
It’s Google algorithm update time again already. For anyone working in the Search Engine Optimisation industry, this can be a nerve wracking time. Not for me though, and here’s why -
On Thursday 24th of February, Google announced a big change in its search algorithm. The so called ‘Farmer’ update is designed to weed out low-quality content on the net; in particular content farms. As is always the case with these announcements, panic spreads throughout the SEO community and the rumor mill is in overdrive. This is what happened with Google Instant and the ‘MayDay’ update. Early reports have come in that even quality content sites like EzineArticles and Buzzle might find themselves in the firing line. I mention these two sites because they have strict editorial guidelines which put them at quality end of article sites.
My answer to this is always the same. If you are engaged in ‘proper’ ethical white-hat SEO then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. If on the other hand, you are using low-quality spammy articles specifically to acquire back-links, or article spinning techniques that aren’t of any real use to the user, then you will suffer and rightly so.
Copy that is written purely for SEO purposes always makes me cringe to be honest and I’m constantly surprised at how often I see it – even on SEO industry sites.
If you are writing quality, and genuinely useful material then I can’t see how you can be penalized by any Search Engine. Good quality article sites don’t tolerate spun or scraped content anyway. In a response to the ‘Farmer’ update, some article sites including EzineArticles, have tightened up their editorial even more and increased the minimum word-count for submitted articles.
As with any Search Engine algorithmic updates, the answer is to keep an eye on the SERPS ranking of your articles. If they suddenly fall off the bottom then you are doing something wrong and may need to re-think your strategy. If you are engaged in quality SEO with a long-term perspective, then you needn’t worry too much.
