Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?

[Millygirl]

On Thursday, Google announced a major change to its search algorithm, designed to weed out shallow and low-quality content from its top search results. Content farms were seen by many as the target. Were they hit? Who was hit? Some figures are coming out. If you were expecting these figures to show Demand Media?s eHow site to have been harmed ? surprise! Two studies show eHow actually gained. I?m still crunching through some of the figures, but the biggest ?content farm? type brand that seems to have suffered are Associated Content.


More information and stats @:

http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173

 

[Shownuff]

Here's another link to go along with yours.

http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html

 

[m0n3y_]

Lol, the owners of Associated Content must be banging their heads against their desks while screaming "Google go to hell!!!" seeing their $$$ drop.

 

[dragonlube]

Lol, the owners of Associated Content must be banging their heads against their desks while screaming "Google go to hell!!!" seeing their $$$ drop.

Yea Google pretty much completely screwed this mega $230 million / year revenue company, pretty amazing big G can do that with the click of a botton.

 

[Total Noob]

AC is owned by Yahoo, lol

 

[mytony]

i can count myself very lucky this time, my auto blog has dropped from number 1 to number 3 and i can eaisily get it back to the number 1 spot, only problem im having is with a new review site big G just aint indexing it ?

 

[zebrahat]

In other words, Google took a lead pipe to its competitor Yahoo, while high-handedly describing it as "a quest for quality." LOL, how do you declare a vast website with hundreds of thousands of pages uniformly 'low quality' or spam? AC, like all other directories, is a mixed bag of poor and excellent articles. A given article on it may be more relevant and useful to the reader than anything published on a big institutional site. G just doesn't want Yahoo getting a whopping share of its Adsense money.

 

[charlie3]

I was just about to start an article marketing campaign with Ezinearticles and I just found out about all of this

It seems most of the sites that went down were sites where users could submit their own content and fill it with spam (ie. squidoo, article directories, etc).

The sites that seemed to move up were sites less prone to spam (ie. ebay, amazon, youtube, wikipedia).

Now it's time to figure out how to offer good content through the sites that dropped and get them good rankings. Anybody have any ideas??

 

[Millygirl]

G just doesn't want Yahoo getting a whopping share of its Adsense money.

See I would have believe that if Google only went after Associated Content. Many content sites took a whooping which includes Ezine, a few of Demand media sites, etc.

Furthermore, I personally believe Google is being forced to clean up their search engine by other media (such as official news sites). After all, a whole lot of content site writers tend to rewrite mainstream news, thus taking away traffic (and money) from news sites such as CNN, ABC, BBC, etc.

Content mills tend to flood the first couple of pages of Google, making it harder to actually find sites that actually have authority and relevant information. I would never take ANY medical advice from Associated Content or any other content mill, yet AC and several other content mills used ranked higher for certain medical keywords than medical journal sites and other type of medical information sites.

And finally, Associated Content screwed themselves. If they would have started off making people apply to their site like Demand Media, Examiner, and textbroker, etc. not to mention getting the Content editors to actually EDIT articles (not simply running the articles through copyscape) before going live, Google wouldn't have penalize AC as bad as it is now. Crappy articles does bring down a site.

Sorta like having a wedding and 5 out 6 of bridesmaids are in dirty, torn clothes while everyone else is looking good....Chances are people will say the wedding was ghetto despite the fact that the bride was absolutely prefect.

 

[dpatel1357]

Does this algorithm change the value of spammy backlinks? xrumer?

 

[ascura]

Yea Google pretty much completely screwed this mega $230 million / year revenue company, pretty amazing big G can do that with the click of a botton.

If big sites with that huge revenue can be swapped away in 'a button click' then is it true that IM is so insecure way to do business? Especially if the traffic source is mainly from Google?
And it means bad news for SEO business as well?
What if it is your site?
Millions $ per month down the drain in a single update?

D*mn... that's scary

 

[dpatel1357]

thats why its a game. to come up with new strategies to beat a algorithm

 

[StreetFighter]

If big sites with that huge revenue can be swapped away in 'a button click' then is it true that IM is so insecure way to do business? Especially if the traffic source is mainly from Google?
And it means bad news for SEO business as well?
What if it is your site?
Millions $ per month down the drain in a single update?

D*mn... that's scary

Do NOT put all eggs in one basket

 

[ascura]

yes, I know that, but $200+ million/year?
I better hold that single basket tight.
and it's still down the drain with just single update..
something is not right with this business, lol

PS: I'm not saying those companies only have one basket or something
just a scary thought from a lonesome single fighter cowboy in this wild wild web

 

[zebrahat]

The point, again, is that although the changes applied to all content farms, it preponderantly impacted AC, indicating AC or Yahoo was the prime target. Oh, and while we're talking uneven content, let me say I've read some pretty crappy content on Wikipedia, WebMd, et al "authority" sites. If Google was concerned about "quality" it would equally impact poor content on the big boy sites. The plain fact that it does not shows the real agenda is to push back alternative content, not "poor' content.

The fact they can smash the bottom line of their main competitors is icing on the cake. The substantive impact of every major G change has been to push big corporate sites up, and the little guys down in the rankings. The suppression has been based on the nature of the content as much as the "quality" of the content. If you are specifically looking for cutting edge research on a medical subject that just happens to only be on an alternative medicine pages, those are the sites that are supposed to top the list of the results, not WebMD.

The decision as to what is good or low quality content is supposed to come from web visitors, not from a search engine acting as a gate-keeper. The engine should allow the actual organic traffic of the market to establish the authority sites, not for the authority to be pre-decided by a algoriithm. The Google changes are trying to eliminate the level playing field through which success in promoting an IM site is possible, using high-handed rhetoric about quality content as a cover.