Did Farmer put your Website out to pasture?
Google’s most recent update, officially named the Panda Update but nicknamed the Farmer Update because it targets content farms, has been shaking things up over the past few days and has many content marketers grasping to save their SERPs while others are reaping the benefits.
Who was hit the hardest? The Farmer update wasn’t intentionally launched to target content sites like Ezinearticles but there was certain criteria set in place, and if a Website met the criteria of a significant amount of generalized or regurgitated content, the Website was most likely negatively affected.
Google really was on a search and destroy mission to remove low quality content and I’m glad of it because there has been a growing trend with the SERPs showing nothing but SEO intended articles with the same non-original, non-fresh or non-unusual content with links pointing to affiliate Websites. My only regret in this update is that other content Websites like eHow weren’t hit harder.
This Farmer Update came as no surprise to me, and I’m sure many other marketers saw it coming also, and for that obvious reason I rarely ever participated in article marketing. It really is just a spammy, unclever method of optimization for SEOs with little creativity, and now Google is finally forcing marketers to clean up their act and do things the right way instead of providing us with that overly spun garbage. And it forces those who do things the right way to stay on top of their game, or slip and fall as I did with one of my new Website properties being penalized by Google.
So what are the affected casualties of Farmer going to do now? I say try going back to the basics of SEO by building your Website around decent content instead of building a few web pages around affiliate programs. And with all the resources available to online marketers it’s not too costly to develop acceptable original content. It’s a slightly longer process but it has much longer staying power, and the general public won’t be offended by reading all that junk content.
If you can’t build legitimate inbounds to your Website then that might be writing on the wall you should pay attention to. Maybe in the next blog post I’ll review some ideas of how to build those links.
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This is going to be good for the end user experience, and for niche affiliates who produce their own unique content and are trying to connect with their audience. Crappy spun articles have been clogging the network for too long, I’m really glad Google did this.
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