A few weeks ago, Google promised that they were gunning for content farms and today it looks that they fired the first shot.
According to a post on Google’s blog:
“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 sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”
“At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
“We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem.”
“Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”
“It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. ”
“However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.”
Already some major publications are calling this change an attack on content farms naming Demand Media in the article.
The San Fransisco Chronicle, ran a story about the Google blog post calling it; “Google Declares War On Content Farms, Including Demand Media”
someday, Google will be able to decide also our countries daily weather 🙁
I’ll be interested to see the price for Demand stock tomorrow. I wonder how much this influences it.
I personally don’t know why everyone hates Demand so much. Sure, their articles can be brief and stupid, but it is not uncommon for them to have an article written about exactly what I am wanting info on.
Oh well.
Troy (Contact Group) (Linoleum Elephant)
jk
Troy
Demand Stock fell 5% after hours today, we will see.
For the record I have nothing against Demand and Still think its better for a major company in this space to do well so I’m rooting for them.
However Google does seem to have an issue with this “content farm” concept without mentioning Demand by name.
Its not that all of Demands Content sucks a few of the articles are weak and in their conference call they mentioned some new layer of editorial review which I think was to address this issue.
Overall like I said on my post I think that the update will benefit many domainers who develop sites with unique quality content and might get rid of some of the sites above ours that get hurt by the update.
Brian
“For the record I have nothing against Demand and Still think its better for a major company in this space to do well so I’m rooting for them.”
Wasn’t referring to you at all Mike=)
Good.
LS Morgan
(Deep Sea Diving Group) (Rubber Chicken)
… and how many sites belonging to LS Morgan (and the Deep Sea Diving Group) were negatively effected in SERP by this change? Zero.
Positively effected? Multiple.
One particular site just went from P1P6 to the one-hole.
Will this affect Epik and WhyFark?
Oh well….
BullS (BullShitWebsites Group) (Creative CEO)
BullS,
My Epik sites are either non producing by now or totally banned from the Google results. But they have been that was months now.
I forgot,
(Contact Group) (Constipated Flamingos)
Content is King!
Fatefully Dean (Heavy Metal Rock Group) (Bang Your Head Media)
i can confirm ehow is not effected, when google goes after content farms its not ehow they’re going after.
There goes all the stupid .com sites that tried to con people into clicking so they can make illegitimate money.
It is a pyramid scheme if you ask me.
Google is doing the right thing.
All these .com garbage sites can go away.
Whypark and all these b.s. sites can disappear.
Remember to buy your .CO web site.
@Dean
FRO …
======
YOU CRACK ME UP! 🙂
QUICK! RUN OUT AND GET ONE!!!
I believe this algorithmic change will negatively impact Octane 360, as well.
Yeah, Google consistently seems to be able to build a better mouse trap. They control a lot of talent. And, a lot of their technology clearly benefits the world.
However, it is concerning to see one single entity wield soooo much power and so much control in relation to the Internet.
Everyone from the mom and pop operations to the behemoth fortune 500’s must continually run their businesses “according to Google”.
It doesn’t matter what sites you like or don’t like …Google will decide for you.
Maybe it’s paranoid, but it seems like we are headed for a time when anything Internet must go through Google first.
Re: Whypark (and others).
To be fair, the option to add unique content has always been there. The question is whether G will de-rank across the board just because it’s a Whypark (and others) site. That remains to be seen and I suspect will be very difficult to know for sure.
Stunningly, Carrottop (Rouge Cheveux Group)(Copper Aardvark)
In a couple of years or so it will be SO hard to rank a site on the first page, that is if Google does not start charging for every position like their Beta page suggests, that the whole SEO business will collapse and businesses will throw their hands up in frustration and just say “screw Google”.
They will form alliances, that is if another platform does not evolve to level the playing field in terms of an advertising source. Groupon and Facebook might be able to do this. Only time will tell.
A friend of mine has a 3-year old domain attached to his wordpress site that has been getting a consistent flow of around 2,000 uniques per day and he ranked on the first-page of googul for four different terms. His wordpress blog has over 600 pages of content and he updates it at least three times per week – bottom line, it’s a real site, not a link farm.
Anyway, two days ago he dropped from the first page on googul and his traffic is down 30% – thankfully, he still has many loyal readers.
There’s too much power in the hands of one company, IMHO.
“His wordpress blog has over 600 pages of content and he updates it at least three times per week”
Not to question the legitimacy of your friends site or it’s content, but numbers don’t matter. I think what Google is getting at is it’s evaluating sites based on the quality of the content, not the quantity of articles. I have a wordpress site that until recently only had two original articles written by me, it’s a fairly popular term, yet with only those two articles I ranked consistently #1 for that search term.
If your just churning out the same bs everyday, it’s going to lower your rankings.
@MHB
Kindly Ping!
Above LandEn, is not me…
is BIG CHEESE (Nevada) impersonating again!
Elliot confirmed him barred from his blog, again, the other day.
He and Robert Cline are of the same team.
This is (above) is Not my Post!
correction: Big Cheese (Nebraska)
How does this affect the purpose of back links to sites which has been so important?
Hello Mike,
The coming backlash from Internet Business owners, I spoke of on my Blog, is long overdue. Google keeps adjusting their Alogs only to cloud the current search markets results even further.
The smart business owners realize that all search needs to favor building their business BRANDS not tearing them down as the current search business models are doing.
Underlying Market Forces are driving forward competing Business models and we will be a major player in this Underserved Market Niche.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
I feel the Google update was long overdue, now if they can do something about some of the ‘spun’ content, most of that stuff is just unreadable.
The spun stuff will effect the person blog/site with Google having to lift a finger. The people who visit the sites just wont come back if they cant read what the content is.
Just my thought.
Cheers