On February 24th, 2011 in the U.S. only, Google rolled out an algorithm update. Google says about 12% of search queries were affected. Danny Sullivan dubbed it the 'Farmer Update' because it was supposed to hit content farms. Google named it the 'Panda Update' after an employee who was invloved in this update. So let's call it the Panda/Farmer Update.
Google's Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote:
In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking - a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries - and we wanted to let people know what's going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sitessites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.
There's been a lot of speculation in SEO forums, blogs, websites and the mainstream media about what this update actually targeted, and what to do to get your rankings back if your site was hit by this update. Below is a compilation of some good ideas.
One thing seems clear. Google wants website owners to make their sites better. They want to reward sites (with higher rankings) that offer well-written, original, quality and authoritative content. And they want to punish sites that don't offer this, often times considered spam or 'spammy'.
Keep in mind that Google may actually purposefully offer misinformation, mixed signals, doublespeak and obfuscation when talking about this update, so always take anything said by a Google employee with a grain of salt.
The content issue that this update seems to have tried to address does appear to make sense as far as what Google has been saying it is trying to do. In other words, they want to reward sites that offer content that's good, original, authoritative, etc.
So if this update forces sites owners to purge their bad content (404-ing or noindex-ing), then they are getting closer to their goal. Of course they could want this, do an unrelated update, and simply tell all their voice-pieces like Matt Cutts to toe the line and say it was a "content-related" update just to get site owners to clean up their sites.
Whether cleaning up our sites helps 'get back rankings' or not, it's a good idea and I know I am going to do it.
Here are some sites/posts on this update that may (or may not) help you get some of your website rankings and traffic back if you've been hit by the Farming Panda Bear!
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There is a chance that if you can improve the number of people reading to the end of an article significantly (across a large percentage of your pages) then you could lessen the effects of this algorithm.
Read more about Analysing the Google Panda / Content Farmer update by Blogstorm SEO Blog
From: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/analysing...farmer-update/
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- Aggresive ads could be a factor
- Trust is a big deal too
A Singhal comment that hints that they have actually built an algorithm that is designed to fit a bunch of human signals
from http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/...o-do-about-it/ about http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/...es-farms/all/1
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- Substantial low quality on a site can cause the rankings for the entire site to decline (even for the high quality pages)
- Evaluate your web site for poor quality pages (not useful, poorly written, non-unique, or thin) and remove them
- Overall user experience is likely important: design and usability, ad-to-content ratio, brand perception
- Look at both content and page templates (do the templates overwhelm the pages with ads? Provide a poor user interface?)
- After ensuring all content on the site is high quality, focus on engagement and awareness (through social media and other channels)
- Diversify into other channels and even within search, look beyond web search at Google News and “one box” style results such as blogs, images, and videos
- We can potentially learn from content farms, particularly in how they pinpoint what audiences are interested in and what problems they are trying to solve as well as how they harness crowdsourcing.
- This algorithm specifically targets sites (not necessarily content farms) that are low quality in a number of ways, such as:
- Shallow content (not enough content to be useful)
- Poorly written content
- Content copied from other sites
- Content that’s not useful
- Low quality content on part of the site can impact the rankings of the entire site
- Remove the low quality pages of the site to increase rankings of the high quality pages
Matthew Brown of AudienceWise (previously with the NY Times) recommended:
- Getting rid of poor quality pages entirely (redirect them if it makes sense, otherwise 404 them)
- Building out brand signals
- Working on promotion and engagement
All From SMX West 3/9/11 http://searchengineland.com/the-farm...smx-west-67574
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You could also have pages and/or sections of your website that are dragging down the overall rankings for other pages. Identify them.
- Address the most significantly impacted pages first, get rid of them
- Use Meta Robots noindex, follow tag on individual pages
- Delete the pages permantantly
- Don't delete, improve the content of the page immediately.
- Reduce the number of internal links
- Improve the content X ad density ratio. More unique content on ad heavy pages.
- Remove redundant pagination
- Use the rel="canonical" attribute on duplicate pages
- Do nothing quite yet, watch and see what happens
- Revisit those dark and forgotten parts of your website, eliminate any junk
- Address boilerplate content. Reduce it, or consider making it unique for each page
From http://www.seroundtable.com/how-to-r...ate-13074.html
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Usage of the 7 deadly keyword phrases could penalize your site
Too many nofollowed outbound links could indicate to Google that you don't trust anyone you link out to, so why should you be trusted
You may have gotten hurt mainly because your links are from article directories which have been penalised.
From http://www.potpiegirl.com/2011/03/my...e-algo-change/
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It's also suggested that you take a look at site sections, directories and specific pages to see which ones were the most positively or negatively affected by the update, possibly by using your Webmaster Tools account. Then, with that data, you can:
- Determine which sections of the site are unscathed.
- Review these pages to determine if they need any adjustments to protect them from additional algorithm changes. For instance, Mahalo should take a look at pages such as the one shown above about becoming a travel agent in vermont to determine if it includes elements that could cause it to be a casualty in the next set of algorithm changes.
- Otherwise, you can spend your resources on the pages that are having trouble.
- *Determine which sections of the site are heavily hit.
- Compare the qualities of these pages to the ones that are unaffected to see if you can determine patterns about what caused the declines (as described more below).
- Evaluate if some sections require too substantial an investment to improve and consider removing them.
- Determine which sections of the site suffered minor losses as those may be easiest to improve so you can start gaining traffic back.
From http://searchengineland.com/your-sit...now-what-66769
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I believe that it's probably a good idea to clean up your sites so that they have a larger percenatge of quality pages and content. I also believe that it will take some time to really figure out what to do to get your rankings back.
Furthermore, Google's algorithm was built with links as the currency. Links have always been very important to ranking well in Google, both internal links, and of course links coming from other websites. The mouth pieces for Google have not mentioned links very much at all regarding this update and that makes me a little suspicious. I am not only going to clean up my sites, but I'm also going to look at incoming links. Incoming links to homepages and incoming links to my deeper pages could also be a big factor in this update as well.
Finally, this may not be over. Google has alluded to the fact that they may be updating this update again in the near future, so keep an eye out.
No one except some Google employees know what this update really changed. But over time, when you read and re-read your analytics, read what others say (with a grain of salt), test, adjust, and test again, you can get a much clearer picture.
