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A Look into Google’s Farmer Algorithm Change and its Thundering Impact + A Checklist of 10 Items to Bulletproof Your Website for This Change and Each Change Thereafter
by Jim Morris
Did your traffic and site rankings get hit by the most recent Google algorithm shift?
And if so, do you know why? I’m sure you’ve got your finger on what may have happened, but in the aftermath, it’s even more complex than you might think.
More importantly, do you know (1) what you need to do in order to readjust so it never happens again or, (2) if you didn’t get affected, what you should do to plan for the next shift so this never happens to you?
That’s what we’ll be covering in the checklist of 10 items below, but let’s first cover a little background before we jump ahead of ourselves. 
As it inevitably occurs once or twice a year, Google rolls out an update in the way they rank web pages. Each major update that seems to shake things up a little bit seems to acquire a name of some sort, and this one’s name is …. the Farmer Update.
It is important to note that there are always slight changes happening on a daily/weekly/monthly basis which is why your site will fluctuate in the rankings and may, seemingly, disappear from the results altogether — only to bounce back up to the top a week or so later. I’ve held my breath many of times when rankings disappeared, but I’m just simply immune to it now.
While most SEOs and major news chains have hopped on the topic a couple of days into the rollout of this update, I like to stand back and watch things evolve before actually predicting the future after just a mere 48 hours.
The most recent Google Search Engine changes seems to be going after lower quality sites, content farms, and even article directories (and speculation arising about certain topical flags that may be a target). The article directory category may leave even intermediate and expert website promoters wondering what the state of article marketing is right now.
Usually, the Google changes have been relatively small in impact, while all the usual whiners and complainers that focus on one tactic get thrown off the caboose. But let’s see how large this recent meteor was and the depth of its impact.
Was this a minor tweak Google made or was it somewhat major?
Let’s observe the impact.
CNN Money characterizes this in their article “Websites to Google: ‘You’re Killing My Business!’” as one of the biggest changes ever and declares that websites such as Demand Media, AOL, Mahalo and the Huffington Post are screaming bloody murder.
Now, if you’ve ever keep an eye on the Huffington Post, you’ll notice that they tend to slap up a press release, a quick snippet about some news, without much editorial, and then link to the original news item. This could be a hint why HuffPo is no longer top dog at the top of Google for recent news events.
Mashable reports that the human powered search engine, Mahalo, has laid off 10% of its staff due to the recent dip in traffic as a result of Google’s change. Looks like over-optimized SEO crud has taken a dumper. Ouch!
Two days after the change, the very popular article submission directory, Ezine Articles claims to have lost 35% of its 57 million monthly unique visitors just 48 hours after the change took place. That’s a huge hit.
Ezine Articles was among the Top Losers of visibility by Sistrix’s own quest for quality. You can see it wasn’t just article directories that took major hits.
All this mad loss in traffic has got some site owners up in a roar and asking “How can Google do this to my business and can they truly get away with this?”
Just the other day, I received an email article from Lawyer Michael E. Young of the Internet Attorneys Association addressing whether Google has the right to slap your website. We personally use Mr. Young’s Legal Forms Generator for our FTC legal compliance disclosures on the footer of all our sites and he personally said that:
Google is a publicly-traded company (not owned by the government) that crawls the web and ranks content as it sees fit. Those who use Google Search are wanting relevant results, not low-value content. And Google gets to decide the value it places on the content of each website. You don’t…and neither do I.
In the war of the search engines, Google can and will do what it deems necessary to keep the visitor value high and had this to say in its announcement of the change last week:
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.
So I guess if you’ve been using auto-posting scripts or automated blog posting plug-ins for WordPress that pull in other author’s articles as the primary content for your website, you’ve probably been hit and hit hard. Woops!
Auto-posting was a big hit in 2005 and 2006, but this is now 5-6 years later. Google has caught onto this stuff and it was only a matter of time before that entire game would come to an end. Seems like that day has arrived. Sorry guys and gals, but the total laziness can only carry you so far!
Now does this mean if you have 70-90% unique content on your site and a little bit of auto-posted content throughout your site — will you get smacked? Probably not. Where the threshold of percentages and mixture of copied content to unique content is unknown and I would merely be guessing, as would anyone else.
Article Directories (with Low Quality Content) Also Hit Hard
But what’s truly interesting is how one of the most popular article submission directories on the planet (EzineArticles.com) was hit big time.
The owner of the site, Chris Knight, was about to go to the lengths of adding “no follow” tags to the outbound links in the author’s bio box. This would, in effect, cancel out any backlink credit the article author’s site would receive for the keyword phrase hypertext pointing to the author’s site from their article content posted on EzineArticles.com.
Apparently, Mr. Knight re-thought his Google ass-kissing position by Sunday night and crossed out that potential change EzineArticles.com was going to institute. I think he realized that EA would have faced more backlash and lost a sizable portion of publishers submitting their articles to the site, resulting in a deeper impact of their future traffic.
It seems quite clear that worthless content posted to content farms, very highly optimized SEO text on sites like Mahalo, short, low quality snippets of articles or regurgitated press releases on places like Huffington Post are now a big “no-no.” But what do these recent events say for the state of article directories getting hit and the website promotion technique known as article marketing?
Is article marketing still relevant today as a promotional technique?
My answer is undoubtedly a resounding YES!
In fact, it is my guess that article marketing will continue to thrive well into the next decade.
I can literally guarantee you that after EzineArticle’s analysis of their traffic catastrophe is done, they will find that the traffic was impacted by only poor quality articles that did not muster up enough energy to bypass the new quality standards in the eyes of Google.
And given the most recent tests on Google’s Algorithm Change conducted by Jenny over at Pot Pie Girl, much of hit that Ezine Articles is taking could be a result of the topical considerations that are quite frankly ridiculously over-saturated. I think she’s onto something given the hours of labor she put into her tests. I think Jenny has a valid point that Ezine Articles may not want to evaluate what to do with the over-saturated niche decisions, but rather, just completely eliminate the 7 Deadly Topics (as I am calling it).
What exactly will this translate into?
More than likely, Ezine Articles will increase the minimum word count for articles submitted to their directory. I mean, let’s face it — how much real quality can you stuff into an article 250 words long? And it is my hunch that they will probably only accept articles that are not only exclusive to you as an author, but exclusive to the Ezine Articles site itself. (I’ve been saying to do this for over 3 years now — post exclusive content on EA and then a different version elsewhere). And that’s just two out of the nine changes that Ezine Articles is considering yet.
I personally have a hard time shutting my mouth before pounding out a 5,000 word article. Most of the time I don’t even focus on SEO within each article because it’s the quality I want to control for my visitors and my valued subscribers like you.
SUPER HOT SEO TIP: Now, if I do focus on SEO or search engine optimization, I will more than likely mass submit a shorter version of a long article to hundreds of directories and look to get credit for the backlinks to the piece of content I want to get ranked in Google. And by the way, there’s no reason you can’t mass submit an article that has a link pointing to your Ezine Articles content that will boost a ranking even further.
And if Chris Knight actually puts on his thinking cap, he’ll come across Pot Pie Girl’s non-scientific, but highly probable, tests she conducted and surmise that it may be well worth while to nix (eliminate) content on the 7 Deadly Topics that seem to be part of the topics Squidoo eliminate back in 2009. That would also mean they would stop taking submissions on said topics as well.
There are some other interesting findings that Jenny at Pot Pie Girl came up with as to why HubPages.com is suffering a loss in traffic given a very low rate of content on the 7 Deadly Topics — which makes the complexity of this Google update even more complex than the news outlets lead us to believe. I will even agree with her assessment that Adsense ad presentation could have deeply impacted EzineArticles.com. If over-glaring ads make visitors duck for cover back to Google, then that’s a telling sign and will affect your rankings. But how much of that can be attributed to this algo change, whether any of it, will remain a mystery but for the internal folks at Google.
So how did NicheBOT and my company’s other properties fair with this recent Google change?
Unscathed! Not much of a change.
In fact, some of our rankings INCREASED as a result of the quality content we produce.
I would venture to say — after this Google change is rolled out, we’ll be doing better than we did before in our rankings.
For example, if you go to Google and type in “consumer market research,” you’ll find the same article that has remained on Page 1 since 2008 (currently in slot #4). Not bad for a top Google ranking, with very little promotion since it was posted, to stick as long as it has. That goes to show that quality sticks in Google.
Now, am I saying that you need to create 5,000 – 10,000 word articles or web pages like I do? Absolutely not! But I certainly wouldn’t stop at 250 or even 500 words.
Once you get to around 800 to 1000 words for a piece of content on a web page or an article you wish to submit, we’re now talking about a piece of content that will contain a wider array of keywords. It’s the type of content that Google might say covers a broad spectrum of related keywords such as a well ranked quality article or web page would contain (aka LSI driven content).
The Really Wonderful Juice Created by This Google Algo Change
I think this most recent change has knocked a lot of people off their pedestals. And most will fall by the wayside, clearing a lot more of the competition out of the way.
For those still reading, that’s means good news for you and I.
Those who fell victim to straight laziness in using other people’s content which is readily available on the web will most likely go away because they are gonna have to buck up and start thinking creatively or hire quality writers to create their content.
This clears out a bunch of the hi-tech folks that run multiple servers and hosting accounts and setup their auto-posting software producing useless crap all over the net.
Thanks for pushing that button Google!
It was almost like an instant Nuclear Blast that leveled and changed 11.8% of Google’s rankings (as Google said themselves).
But this most recent Google change also calls attention to sites like Huffington Post that will take a Press Release, pretty it up and post it to their site just to get more page views. Apparently, that’s not gonna cut it any more with the Big G either.
It doesn’t matter what kind of authority or PageRank your site carries or how large the content base is on your site, low quality content won’t be stood for any longer. This a clear sign to literally clean house on ANY low quality content on your site.
And by the way, if you are still one who tends to place importance on Google’s PageRank system, let’s remember what Google’s own employee said after they removed PageRank from inside Google Webmaster Tools. Susan Moskwa (Google Employee) said :
We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-
10 Ways to Prevent a Future Blood Bath on Your Site’s Traffic Meter in the Future
So rather than go into much more analysis of a Google change that occurred just over a week ago, let’s get into what you can do right now to prevent a future blood bath or rectify what may have happened now:
- Quality, Quality, Quality with Your Own Voice: In case I didn’t say it enough there, the quality of your content is absolutely imperative. Always inject your own personality and voice into your article and make it your own. In fact, your visitors will love it and those who take to your personality will become your biggest fans. Your personality is much like your DNA. It’s unique unto itself — so use it! If you are going to take a Private Label Rights article, then re-write it and inject your thoughtfulness and personality into the re-write. You have NO excuses now.
- Quantity: A short synopsis of an article is not going to work much either as we can tell. Google wants quality and that necessarily means quantity that (and I’ll quote Google here) equates to “thoughtful” content. A good starting point is 800 words and up for an article or web page. I would even try to go above and beyond by producing 1000 to 15000 word articles or web pages.
- Schedule Out Your Content Routine: Create a schedule or routine upon which to produce content on a regular basis. Just because high content sites got penalized by Google doesn’t mean you should keep your site static and not growing. Setup a reminder on your Outlook calendar to produce ongoing quality content that will rivet your visitors. Google will take heed of quality content as they track visitors that stay on your page or bounce back to Google to continue searching. If your have a regular HTML site, then install WordPress — it’s free for God’s sake!
- Link Out Naturally: Much like this article has done, link out to other sites naturally within your content using “do follow.” It’s a naturally tendency to reference other sources. This has been a guideline for as long as I can remember being in this game — dating back to 2003 (I really started learning back in 2000).
- Mix Up Your Backlinks: Rather than just submitting your article to Ezine Articles to get a backlink to your site and then quit, take a different version of your article, intelligently spinning it to create multiple READABLE articles that can be submitted to many article directories. You can also vary the keywords used in the hyperlinks (backlinks) pointing back to your site in the author’s bio box. Use the sites that allow multiple distribution points (auto-syndication) to distribute your content to multiple social media outposts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, etc.). Use other methods to distribute the content through social bookmarking and other places that allow you to post content in the form of PDFs. I will cover these places more in detail next week.
- No Auto-Posting Content:If you didn’t hear the message at the top of this article, then you may not hear it this time. Do not auto-post content to any of your sites. And if you do intend to continue, go in and REVISE the content, making it unique, quality content that will give a value-driven perspective to a Google visitor. I think the Google message is clear: “post quality content or don’t post any whatsoever because we won’t give you any rankings for the crap.” Yes, that was my own interpretation of the Google message.
- Fix Up High Bounce Back Pages: Go through your individual web pages in Google Analytics or whatever stats package you use, and determine which of your pages get the highest bounce back rates (where the visitors hit the web page and immediately go back to Google to continue searching for relevant information). Ask yourself why the visitors may be leaving that page within a moment’s notice. Then, alter the web page that will deliver an answer to the most pressing question a visitor may have on that topic. Take a look at other websites’ pages that show up in the Top 10 for the given keyword your web page is ranking for to see what they might be doing differently. Analyze others and integrate what is applicable to integrate into your web page.
- Remove the Stuffing: Are you guilty of overdoing the keyword density on your articles and web page? You wouldn’t need to do that if implement item 5 above. You know if you’re guilt of doing this and over-optimizing pages. Get out of this bad SEO habit and write for your visitor — they’ll appreciate it more. This is the rationale you should use: “If it’ll please the visitor, it’s going to please Google due to lower bounce back rates — plain and simple.”
- Stop Posting to Content Farms: If you are posting to content farms that are primarily made up of really poor quality content or regurgitated machine language, you can’t expect Google to pick out your quality content and decide to rank it high amongst all the existing pages of crap on a given site. So find places that have higher quality standards/sites to post your content like Mike Liebner’s Article Underground Traffic Announcement System. I think it begs here to say that quality begets quality and poor quality, well, you know where that goes.
- Re-Write All Your Poor Quality Web Pages Now: Perhaps this should be at item #1, but I think this goes without saying that you need to completely audit your current web pages on your site(s). Re-write the stuff that is lackluster. I think you’ll be able to tell which pages by doing item #7 because you’ll find those pages with high bounce back rates will be the lower quality pages that are missing the visitor’s hot spot. Those are the pages that may have been affected by this most recent Google change.
- BONUS – Adjust Your Visitor Experience by Checking Your Ad Presentation: If you run Google Adsense Ads or anything similar, check your ad presentation. Are the ads or affiliate offers glaring in your visitor’s eyes that might want to make them run cover by hitting the back button? This requires stepping out of your own perspective and walking a mile in your visitor’s shoes. Or, are your ads more stealthily disguised? If not, then you may want to find a way to be more elusive by getting rid of banners and using a text call to action. Perhaps trade out the flashing banners with a static text version of the banner. Anything that may disturb a visitor from focusing in on the content, which is what brings a visitor to your site in the first place, should be eliminated and toned down.
There is plenty more I can continue adding to the list, but that’s enough to get you started and pretty much covered. So perhaps you want to pipe in and continue the discussion down below in the comments section.
Besides, the Google change hasn’t even rolled out to the remainder of the globe. Boy, aren’t the Americans a lucky test bunch?
Next week, I’ll be discussing a case study and free traffic blueprint that includes various elements touched on in this article, but with greater detail.
Until then, you’ve got your work cut out for you unless you’ve been producing A+ quality content. 
Google proof your content now — don’t put it off.
All the best quality content,
Jim Morris, Founder
NicheBOT.com Online SEO Keyword Research Tool
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Really appreciate the work you put into this report.
I read Pot Pie Girl’s analysis earlier, seems to me you are both spot on and that those of us who have been positng quality original content have nothing to be concerned about.
I am surprised to see EzineArticles take such a hit though…maybe now they’ll tone down the adsense on the article pages
Lynne,
What’s funny is that, it’s those hidden shining stars like Pot Pie Girl who seem to be doing the real leg work that unveils true insight and usable data that any lay person can use.
My pleasure on the work, you’re welcome.
It’s actually quite pleasurable to bring forth stuff that is more eye opening than regurgitating the usual non-sense in what seems to be a unique manner. In fact, there’s a little bit of a juice you can squeeze out of what I just said.
Even if you’re not passionate about your particular topic or industry you’re monetizing on the internet, doesn’t mean you can’t have pleasure in bringing forth enlightenment to the visitor. It’s that kind of energy I put into my content that usually tends to be transmitted to the visitor, allowing someone to WANT to read through a 1,500 word post, or even a 15,000 word article.
I mean, it’s equally true if you make an article boring or just dry, even I couldn’t make it through an 800 word article.
The common misconception most people have that say to “keep it short,” even in the comments below, are missing the true essence of folks on the hunt for truly valuable information. Once a visitor gets a squeeze of your unique perspective and insightful information on a topic, they ARE going to want more and more and more. This is especially true about newbies just beginning their research.
And the more depth and insight you provide your visitors, the more they will continue to consume. And respectively, you bolster the sense of trust and even begin to build loyalty in the reader — building what Seth Godin calls a tribe of followers.
Consider your content as a tribe or community building device and you’ll place a lot more importance on the quality of what you publish.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not devaluing the Seth Godin’s of the world, but he is micro-chunking an entire topic into bite-sized components with genuine insights. I tend to cover an array of topics in one article and go off on a number of tangents, most likely because that follows my ADHD type personality.
I think the saying goes, play to your strengths.
As far as Ezine Articles — I think Chris Knight really has to not just tone down the Adsense blocks on his page (and stop trying to squeeze every bit of profit from his 57 million unique visitors minus 35%), but he also needs to consider getting rid of the over-saturated articles on those 7 Deadly Topics. And those topics are a TRUE hint to those niche marketers that want to enter those markets (hint: it’s a lost cause and you’ll get buried in the sea of content).
The other article directory that got hit — “ArticleBase.com” — has already instituted an increase in their 250 word limit on articles up to 350 — and I can predict that EA will do the same.
What’ll be interesting to see is how, if at all, EA and AB enter back into the graces of Google and whether they will reveal what exactly they did to do it. But it’s my guess they won’t even know what did it if they institute a number of different changes all at once (i.e., there’s no way to measure the % of each change). Moreover, I think EA was hit by Google applying a number of different ranking factors, not just one particular thing, like low-quality content.
Long live article marketing!
@Lynne – I’m surprised you’re surprised about the hit to EzineArticles. Let’s be honest – most of their content is garbage that has been either rushed, mass-produced and/or churned out of an article spinner.
I recently re-engaged my article writing on EA (and elsewhere) and was searching the site to see what the competition was like for content I was writing, and I was really questioning why I was even bothering to produce quality content. Then the Google Farmer update hit, and of course immediately felt vindicated.
Nice article Jim. Thanks.
No matter what — Ezine Articles will still continue to be an authority site. And Khalid, the BEST reason you’d want to produce quality content is quite simply for the fact that your well written, LSI driven content that is sprinkled with a broad spectrum of related keywords will stand out amongst the crud and you’ll be crowned above and beyond anyone else the top spot by Google on page 1 for that particular keyword phrase. My friend, Andre Chaperon has a particular saying that goes, when everyone else zigs, you zag.
And besides if you want to solidify your #1 ranking to that EA article — just build some backlinks to it and it won’t get anywhere for years. I’d put my entire savings and retirement money on that.
I’m with you on this. The adsense on the articles pages at EzineArticles has become terribly annoying! With human editors and guidelines intended to elicit better quality content without keyword stuffing, Ezine shouldn’t drive us away with so many ads. We can all benefit if they bounce back in Google strength, but Chris must do it intelligently. I hate censorship and silencing voices that can contribute quality information to a topic, but eliminating the now-taboo topics might be a start – or at least requiring high quality, longer length, truly original articles to pass human editor muster on any of those topics.
Margaret, as a heavy Adsense marketer back in 2005 – 2007, I believe that the EA ad placements are not optimized for high CTR. If he wanted to improve things, I would use a block that I used on my old sites that worked well with blending in when you use the same color anchor text. Here’s the block I used to use either blended in with text or just underneath the headline. http://www.explainstuff.com/2009/07/16/best-adsense-layout-adsense-placement-tips-and-layouts/ But who knows, maybe that block was tested, but the way it looks now just cheapens the whole site as far as I’m concerned. I would not have ANY ads above the fold until the user scrolls down into the content.
Chris has an incredibly balancing act he is faced with between profitability to site, appeasing Google algorithm wise while still maintaining the happiness of his author base. He’s got quite a balancing act, but I think in the long run if he considers potentially taking a bite in the profit center for now, he’ll make it up in the long run by doing the right things all the way around. I do NOT envy his position once bit whatsoever.
Hi all and thanks to you Jim very important insider info – so anyone who views this page should immediately share this page link with any and all known online outlets that they know – I have as a thank you to you good buddy
Wow thats the nail hit square on the head then! wonderful write up thank you and a real eye opener for soooo many IM er’s. SIMPLE MESSAGE: dont spam or auto anything anymore -you are wasting time money and effort!
YAY!!…..level playing field for a newbie(ish) like me and thousands of others so we can step up and choose our slice of the pie at last and not compete against auto- affili-machine-spammers.
Bring it!!
Richard, that’s absolutely right. This levels the field for everyone — newbies alike. And I think I saw someone in the comments here say something about this post giving away the formula the spammers need to continue creating content that fools Google. Just do not think that’s possible at this time. The problem is — no matter how much artificial intelligence you build into a script, you cannot create machined content that is highly readable, high visitor friendly and that engrosses the visitor. It just aint possible (bad English purposely used).
So the whole point here is to build your writing skill and ultimately learn how to speak to your visitor as if you were in their living room having a spot of tea or a beer or some coffee (metaphorically speaking) and speak to them like a person, not as a corporate billboard.
I wrote an incredibly valuable article on this topic that’s still at the top of Google called Write Like You Speak – Not As You Think. It’s all about breaking the old habits that we were taught in the educational system and communicating as if we would in person.
That’s how I’ve been writing since I broke the habit in 2004, I believe it was and I haven’t gone back to proper English since.
If you put original commentary on your site about famous quotations, and other people copy it, would that help you under the new algorithm? If other auto posting blogs link to you, do you suffer?
As long as your unique content outweighs the famous quotations you are creating commentary about, you should be just fine. More than appeasing the search engines though, I would make certain your content carries a message to the visitor because if you get high bounce back rates, you’re going to suffer in your rankings as a result of that. Hope I was clear and not too baffling in my answer.
John, the only bad linking neighborhoods you can control are the people you link out to and those links you acquire yourself. You are bound to get trackbacks from spammers to a WordPress site of yours and you are bound to get links (as NicheBOT has) for certain scraper sites. If they link to you (which is beyond your control), you are not going to suffer because there will most likely be a 10:1 ratio of other legitimate links you have to every one scraper that grabs your content and actually links to you. What happens more often is that the scraper just steal your content and fail to even link back to you.
As long as YOU are in control of creating unique, highly visitor friendly, engaging unique content and not the one in control of putting up scraper sites with your own content and linking back to yourself (even if you registered the domain in someone else’s name), then you will do just fine.
It’s the whole thing about where your integrity lies. If you’re doing things clean, you really have NO reason to ever look back.
Besides if you’re produce A+ quality content, you’re gonna get way more people linking to your content then you do actual scraper sites.
IT is about time that google did something about all the crap out there.
I am sure that it will not take much for them to start buying memberships to these link building websites and track them back to the source and start to de-index them.
Not that I have not been guilty myself for using these membership sites. Luckily I also use a number of other methods so hopefully I will be ok
Lloyd,
I honestly thought this was going to happen quite some time ago — but I guess it took this long to get the formula right.
However, it looks like a LOT of other sites have suffered as a result of this aggressive algorithm. It will be immensely interesting to see what feedback Google takes into account and how they end up applying tweaks that either bring back certain sites or not — and how much of this change will actually stick.
I am actually quite inspired by this change myself and it will add a whole new dimension to those wanting to create highly stable website rankings into the future. Those who forge forward with high quality content will prosper even more than they have previously as all the soot gets cleared out.
As far as those memberships that are premised on link building. The real issue here is there is “buying links” on actual sites that give you anchor text back to your site and then there are these membership sites that give you access to blogs that allow you to POST content to the sites and get relevant contextual backlinks to your site. I’m not sure how aggressively Google can go after them as folks aren’t necessarily BUYING LINKS as much as they are posting content thank links back to their sites. If it’s crap content that is being posted, I think the results will speak for itself. However, if the end poster uses awesome content (even if it’s intelligently spun), then that will rise above and stand out for Google and other engines.
And as you so keenly put it, you can’t put ALL your eggs in one basket and it’s all about spreading links ALL over the place with various methods. So good on ya! All those that follow in those foot steps won’t get caught in another change that takes out link building memberships.
Spread the link profile of your site across various places and it’s really hard to get penalized because you don’t look repetitive, but rather, simply human.
The quality of this assessment shows why it is better to wait with comments on changes by Google – or others – before speaking your mind. Ezinearticles is not the only one caught up with the Content Farms problem, although the bulk of the articles published there are of a far higher standard than, say, Helium. Quality does show through eventually.
Perhaps the next change Google ought to consider is a ranking according to how many adverts appear per page compared to the value of the article itself. This is unlikely, however, since it would change the manner in which many sites use GoogleAds and cost Google money too. But, for me, a site with good articles and less advertising will always hold my attention better than a purely commercial one, where the ads are the prime interest for the publishers and the articles merely a method of gaining more income.
Viki.
Viki, you’re right — this Google change is far deeper than content farms. I think part of the thing that eliminates Google having to rank according to how many adverts appear on the page will come down to their measure on bounce back rates. If an article doesn’t hold anyone’s attention due to advertisements and Adsense blocks, then the visitor just won’t stay and will return back to Google to continue their search.
I have always believed in quality content and hope that i can take my sites to the top of the SERPs by producing quality content. Those who contnue to seek to exploit Adsense at the epense of good quality shall continue to suffer and rightly so. My recent reluctance to submit to directories like Ezine has been due to the blantant ripoff of content without the courtesy of an acknowledgement and the fear of the penaties assocviated with duplicate content. Much of my effort has een centered around building quality backlinks. It is tedious and alas the results are not automatic which adds to the frustration. I will continue to plug along in the vain that no good deed goes unrewarded.
As long as you keep plugging away, your determination will shine through. However, I would never rule out using EA to submit your content just because someone rips off your content. Someone can easily do that by finding your content in the search engines and take it right off your site without giving you link credit — so I don’t see what the difference is. BTW — I will actually be out in St. Lucia somewhere between March 13 – 20.
Hi, Jim. Impressive article! I can see I have a lot of reviewing to do…Nah, not really, because I’ve only recently started writing regularly.
Question: You wrote,”Use the sites that allow multiple distribution points (auto-syndication) to distribute your content to multiple social media outposts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, etc.).”
Rats! I’m so new that I’m not even sure what those social media outposts are. I’m very confused about duplicate content and such places as StumbleUpon and so on, and I am at my wits’ end trying to figure it out. I don’t want to break any rules. But I don’t want to neglect great resources either.
What’s a newbie to do?? Thanks!
Paula, first off, don’t free duplicate content when it comes to auto-syndication — it’s a term that Dr. Neil Shearing coined when it comes to submitting to social media sites. And there’s really no duplicate content necessarily counted on those sites because you mainly just give a snippet of information, subject line or the name of the article and a short redirect link to the actual piece of content. With Google taking social media into consideration, those redirect links are being taken into consideration as a SLIVER of the ranking factor.
For instance, say this particular article has 29 people retweeting it on Twitter and 27 mentions on Facebook while another article has just 10 retweets and 15 Facebook mentions, it is most likely that Google will this article higher than the other article in this example.
So when it comes to auto-syndicating, there are a number of ways to do that so that you don’t waste too much time posting your content on places like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed. One of those places that helps with auto-syndication is OnlyWire and the other one I will be bringing up this coming week. Keep your eyes peeled and we’ll be covering it as well as a case study of a free web traffic layout.
Wow, if anyone ever thought Jim Morris was just another Internet Marketer, this superb article will spin their head around and get it on straight.
Jim’s article here like most of the content of his Blog together with Pot Pie Girl’s analysis, are two of the best you’ll read regarding the bottom line purpose of Google, of Google users and of what the bottom line should be for Internet Marketers. Indeed, I too think many IMers will be falling by the wayside because their basic purpose is a quick buck. That’s good news for the rest of us!!
If one is not going to at least try to do things to professional standards, then why bother? You may make a quick buck, but it will always come back to bite you. Then, you have to start over.
I say hooray! for this development. Let’s all get busy following Jim’s advice and get busy making sure we are in the business for real. Good riddance to the rest of them (probably a lot of them) who don’t want to work for it and aren’t in it for the right reasons – like value for value.
If we follow Jim’s advice we will remain on the right side of the issue. Whether EzineArticles or the others can make a valuable comeback or not doesn’t matter.
The Internet, Google and the other Search Engines are still just in their baby stages. Who knows where we all will be in a couple of years from now. If one destination like EzineArticles or Mahalo or HubPages falls by the wayside or loses influence, it makes room for innovation and somebody else to launch a great idea that benefits us all.
If we just make it our fundamental purpose to give value for value, we all will win – period.
Well Done, Jim.
Thanks!
Ay-men Michael! This truly IS a real blessing in disguise while some folks will surely be on their knees wishing they had chose a different path some time ago. And those newbies that are just getting in the game have a real easy choice to make toward success — or they can quit altogether. There really is no free meal ticket on the web and this most recent Google change is clear evidence that it’s going to weed out the weak and reward those that add true value to the internet. May the rubbish on the internet burn baby burn!
The cream will rise to the top
Great piece Jim. I couldn’t agree with you more and that is exactly what my web developers told me. I work my butt off to give my readers a full piece not some 200 word junk. If you write good stuff the searches will come.
Sean K
The thing is — no matter how clear the formula is for the spammers out there, there is really NO WAY to fool a reader in giving them that wonderful feeling when you impart true solutions that help in giving clarity. No machine program or programming script can come from a place of writing with contribution in mind. Don’t care how good the artificial intelligence is — the reader just won’t feel it.
Thanks for that Jim.
I must say that I have been guilty of keyword stuffing, and need to go back and (Sigh) do some editing.
Can I ask an SEO related question though…
I have business (marketing) that offers a number of services (eg Graphic design, Web design, Print copywriting, Web copywriting etc) , and each service has a page/section within the site. The site also has a blog, covering all services)
So far, so good. (I hope!)
Now, let’s say I want to give some attention to one particular service (Say… graphic design). As well as improving the page in your steps above, am I right in thinking I should:
INTERNALLY
1. Write high quality Graphic Design related articles on the blog.
2. Put links (with appropriate anchor text) from those articles back to the Graphic Design page.
EXTERNALLY
1. Write high quality Graphic Design related articles and submit them (I use Unique Article Spinner for this).
2. Put links (with appropriate anchor text) from those articles back to WHERE?
Do I send then to the Graphic Design page?
Or to the articles on the blog?
Or to the site’s home page?
Any thoughts on this would be GREATLY appreciated!!
Thanks!
Jerry
Hey Jerry,
I really appreciate calling yourself out like that admitting that straight up. That’s the first step in recovering as a keyword stuffer.
See — you may fool search engines with that intent, but you don’t fool real human beings that read it — cuz I am sure that professional folks that require your services can probably tell what you’re doing if you keep bringing up certain keyword phrases up at various points in the content.
Now — getting beyond that — all your site setup seems to be fine without having actually looked at the site itself to examine how the sections and pages are set up.
INTERNALLY:
You are absolutely right with your INTERNAL intentions to:
1. Write incredibly high quality graphic design articles on the blog as those posts will get pinged from within your blog engine and get the immediate attention of the engines to index it.
2. When you say put links with appropriate anchor text from those articles, I would only put ONE anchor text link that links only once to that specific page. You can have three links in the article, but make sure they point to three distinctly different pages on your website with three distinctly different keyword phrases in the anchor text. As soon as have two links pointing to the same page, you dilute the effectiveness of both links, whether or not you have different keyword phrases. And of course, you need to make sure you audit yourself and ask whether or not you’ve got too much internal linking going on as well — cuz that’ll put up a Google flag as well. Now, if you don’t have multiple pages on the site to link to, you can plan out some blog posts and internally link between your blog posts. Or you can develop your content out, and then plan to go back and hyperlink pages together with probably no more than 3-5 internal links at the most per article without looking overtly obvious. Lastly, I would also make sure that you LINK OUT to some authoritative reference sites in your quality article blog posts so you detract attention from your internal linking efforts as that is natural as was mentioned in the 10 items in your Google Proof checklist. Also remember that these high quality blog posts are search engine bait for particular keyword phrases as well, so watch WHERE you use your anchor text hyperlinks as you want to make sure to end your article with a quality CALL TO ACTION that directs the visitors attention to the actual place you do your selling after you’ve gained the trust with your impressive high quality article. So you may want to save that link to the actual services page until the end. Something to think about.
EXTERNALLY
1. Agreed on this point
2. Put links pointing back to actual high quality content and also pointing to the page that does the actual selling. Remember, if you are going to publish high quality, highly intelligent spun articles that are longer than the average bear’s content out there, then you’re gonna want to make an attempt to direct that visitor to your services page for whatever is the relevant service you’re discussing. Now, remember that you get at least and sometimes a maximum of two hyperlinks in your bio box of your article, so you can send one link to the actual services page if you see fit that the high quality spun content carried value through to the reader, or you can continue on a Part 2 of the conversation on another high quality article on your blog that will continue building trust and develop instant loyalty. You’ve got to ask yourself once you submit that article out there to a directory, what BEST SERVES the reader where you wish to direct them. If you think of the buck first, then you’ve instantly lost the best interest of the reader and you’re killing the chance at building long term profits and what may potentially be a lifetime customer for you. Always, and I mean always, think of the reader and visitor first and you will amplify your profits as you continue down that path. Once you think for a minute of how fast you can begin to make the sale by scooting a prospective visitor along the sales line, the quick you are diminishing your returns. Now that you’ve come clean about stuffing keywords, you can go and do the opposite and you’re conversions will swing the other direction and improve 10 fold by placing the focus in the proper place. When you come completely from wholehearted integrity, it’s hard for the visitor not to feel that, let alone being hard not to want to do business with a person like that.
As for where you would send them for item number 2, I answered that above, but RARELY if ever do you send them to your home page. Again, here you need to ask yourself whether that article and the continuum for the reader is a good user experience to send them to the home page only for them to then navigate and figure out where to go next. You truly want to guide the visitor along a path that deeper entrenches them in the topic, or a relational topic, from which page they landed on to begin with.
So if someone lands on a page about graphic design and considerations of a logo, then perhaps a relational article would be how to create a header graphic that incorporates that logo design (as an example). So you’d better serve the visitor to send them to an article that deeper entrenches them into the process they are already involved in from that particular article.
You constantly want to guide the visitor to the next best user experience versus having the visitor trying to figure out what that user experience should be. They shouldn’t have to hunt for it — YOU should plan that out. You can call this control, but I call it thinking ahead and thoughtful consideration for the person and making the slippery slope to making the sale as easy as possible for them by taking out all the guesswork.
Hope I explained that properly for you because that just came shooting out of my fingers in a first draft with no edits. So please forgive on any typos.
Wow! What a terrific and helpful answer Jim.
I SINCERELY appreciate that effort, and the good insights. The only thing I’m struggling with is where on EARTH you find the energy, passion and time to give such quality feedback to people on your blog.
You can be assured that I am going to act on your advice.
Thanks heaps. Seriously.
Warm regards from Australia,
Jerry
Great analysis Jim,
Always a pleasure to read your assesment in the realm of internet marketing.
Dan Shannon
Thank you Dan. If you have any questions that may bubble up, please make sure to post them above and I will make certain to answer them with the utmost thoroughness possible.
Thanks Jim
My pleasure Rachel. And the same thing I said to Dan goes for you too.
You’re right Jim. But really, Google “slaps” are nothing new. if a person doesn’t like what Google is doing, they can use Altavista.com, etc. My opinion is that Google has the right to censor the search results any way they want, after all, it is their website. Maybe a filter built into Nichebot that can automatically “remove” or at least flag keywords related to the “7 Deadly Topics” might be helpful as a new feature. Anyway, quality content is only good sense, since unreadable spun articles maybe sometimes great comedy, but useless for pre-selling and conversion if your object is to make money anyway.
Tom — you’re right — these slaps are nothing new, but this is one of the more severe ones that affected what folks may think are legitimate sites. And while people can use Altavista.com — there’s no way to ignore that when you get ranked in Google, it easily accounts for 80-90% of the factors. Hmmmmm, I like that — a 7 Deadly Sins Topic filter in NicheBOT … I have to put that on the list. Awesome suggestion.
Great job Jim,
Excellent tips for your readers to consider (sooner than later.)
We’ve always preferred to encourage people to create high
value, useful, and engaging content for their readers. This
is still the year of the writer and Google is only wanting the
best quality content for their readers.
With the use of NLP or “Natural Language Processing” in
the background now, we know that Google and other engines
can now grasp meaningful content that someone has put
a part of their heart into (as opposed to all of the old lazy
methods.)
I like what you said in the statement short and sweet,
“If it’ll please the visitor, it’s going to please Google.
True enough and very well said.
GREAT job!
Highest regards,
John Alexander
I only recently started a blog (Blogger) and started submitting my content online to Suite101–which I guess is what some call a content farm, which I don’t think does it justice–but anyway, my content is original, but some of my blog content, though original is “lackluster.” Your piece is very helpful in encouraging me to do better. Thanks..
SWB — I am glad that I encouraged you to bring your content game up a notch.
And it really depends on how the service is organized for Suite101 and how it may appear to be a content farm. As long as that’s not your ONLY place for dispersing content outside your blogger blog And btw, I would highly advise you consider getting your own hosted blog because you could easily lose that blog should you even closely violate terms of service or have some idiot report your blog. You are at the mercy of a service owning your content and really don’t control that content, which is why I could probably back it up after time you make a post or have a copy somewhere on your computer to re-create should the blog ever get shut down (not that it will — it’s a just in case). 
Hi Jim,
Excellent work my man. Did I read that right ……… 1000 to 15000 word posts. That’s 50 times what I’m doing now. With the amount of Blog Hopping I’m doing, I seldom have time to invest for 15000 word post worth of reading.
I can’t help but think of Seth Godin. His posts are 30 words in length and he practically rules the Blogosphere. I’ll say that the focus should be on quality instead of quantity.
Jeffrey,
Yes, you read that right — 1000 to 15000. And while you may not have the time or inclination invest in a 15000 word post, I am certain there is an avid newbie just learning about a topic that will gladly consume that in the beginning stages. And I’m unsure how long this article was, but I venture to say it was anywhere from 2500 to 3500 words long — and if something is THAT critical to you, and vital to your industry knowledge or business, you’ll know 2-3 paragraphs into that article whether it’s worth the time to invest.
And Seth Godin is an exception to the rule as he actually has authority by having so many people in the social media sites retweeting and linking in to him. As I said up above, Seth does a great job of micro-chunking a broad topic into bite-sized pieces that have great insight.
But I’ll refer back to the Google post that announce this algorithm change:
“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.”
I can hardly say that a Seth Godin post is an in-depth report or thoughtful analysis, but rather highly condensed and compressed opinion that truly cuts to the heart. But I also don’t know how many other similar Seth Godin’s there are out there.
Thanks Jim. I too appreciate reading your analysis of Google’s latest change.
What I find interesting is that if people had read Googles Webmaster Guidelines and followed them, they wouldn’t have had a thing to worry about. Those guidelines haven’t been changed in years as far as I can tell:))
I was wondering why you said “If your have a regular HTML site, then install WordPress”. Is it because WP out of the box looks better than most HTML sites or is it for SEO or what? Just curious.
Regards,
Zeek
Zeek,
Thanks for the compliments.
I’m certain not too many people ever bother looking at those Webmaster Guidelines. Besides…
Many people (the lazy bunch) as well as intellects love to try and trick, outwit, outsmart, outplay, swerve around and find the rules and regulations. I’ll have to admit I am one of those people, but I realize you can always find a vulnerability in the rules, but you can’t fool people. Well, maybe you can pull the wool over people’s eyes once or twice, but not much longer. And with that approach, you won’t last long on the internet.
I’ve heard far too many people tell stories of how they wish now (in hindsight) that they took the path that was shown them at first rather than the devising their own grandmaster plan. Now, those folks that failed to read those guidelines will have a new chance to redeem themselves or disappear into the ether.
As far as my comment about folks with HTML sites recommended to install a WordPress site or whatever type of CMS (Content Management System). The reason I say that is because WordPress keeps your content well organized and allows folks to create content fast without having to depend on a designer or having a resident program on your computer to manage the content. Besides that, WordPress offers interactivity like all these comments and, of course, the SEO benefits not to mention the auto-pinging engine as well.
The
Crikey! I found someone who is actually talking sense about this subject!
Very good quality, informative article Jim (and I suppose that is the point really).
regards
Roy Carter
Roy — that would be actually right — in fact, now that I’m thinking about it — I might as well get this article to rank for as many keyword phrases connected to the main phrase “Google Algorithm Change”
Looks like I’ll have to go create a shorter condensed version of this article and submit it to the directories with multiple variations of keyword phrases in the author bio box and this article will stick in Google for years to come. Talk about creating a wide sweeping visitor traffic net for years to come. That’s another great reason to create high quality content as well because you reep the rewards of never-ending residual traffic.
Wow, Jim… thank you SO much for all the in-depth information. It’s things we can all do right away to help improve our websites. It might just be the motivation that many people need to start adding regular, original, quality content to their sites and stop using the old methods that don’t work well.
I can understand why Google did what they did – from a consumer, researcher point of view, it’s very frustrating to search for something you really want to learn more about and when you arrive at the site, you cannot find what you searched for anywhere… even with a little more digging. Those keyword-stuffer webmasters need to be removed from the net because they are not helping anyone.
Most of us would never consider buying a product from someone who misled us, so what’s their point?
Again, thank you for the time & energy involved in this very helpful post! Have a super weekend, Donna
Appreciate the comments Donna and you’ve hit so many great points.
I’m glad we had one keyword stuff come clean up above and I think he’s well on his way to recovery.
And yes, I, too, have been frustrated many times conducting research and coming across straight crap that didn’t have anything to do with the topic. These are people that think they are going to outsmart the average human being with their nonsense. It just doesn’t work like you say and it certain doesn’t build trust. It’s like I’ve said resoundingly through the comments back to others, whatever your original intent is will eventually get discovered by the visitor and they will either scram or become your fan.
Wow! I always thought you were pretty sharp Jim but this is way cool! Excellent analysis!
I too am doing just fine and not hit by this update. My sites are all doing great!
I have now decided to call the media frenzy on this Google update a victim of the “Charlie Sheen Effect” where people who don’t know anything at all about search engines and getting free traffic are talking about this stuff and blowing things out of proportion!
I’m glad to see you’re helping steer people towards doing the right things! Like I pointed out in my blog post – when something goes DOWN it means something else is going up! Hopefully that wll be US!
Keep up the great work Jim! Love reading your stuff – even if it goes on for miles :’>
Michael,
Hey — you think my stuff goes on for miles? I think the comments in this post are like 10 times longer than the actual content is…
Anywho…
I really liked your blog post on this topic too and it offered some valuable advice and insight.
Yup — you’re right about the media frenzy — just tonight I noticed a top news article about this topic from the Los Angeles Times about 5 days ago restating the whole Mahalo workforce cut. Always nice of the LA Times to point out the doom, gloom and the obvious. Interestingly, since you mentioned this as the Charlie Sheen effect, I think you’ll find it quite interesting that the Mahalo founder tweeted at Charlie and said:
“Hey @charliesheen, I’m having a rough week… any chance I can swing by for breakfast at your place?”
Too funny!
Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/03/mahalo-cuts-workforce-by-10-after-traffic-dip-from-google-algorithm-changes-report-says.html
Don’t you suppose Google’s going to crack down eventually on the article spinning/spamming technique you mentioned? To me, that seems to be asking for the axe. Although the few sites I’ve been working on haven’t been impacted by this latest Google Internet “adjustment,” I’m appalled at how successfully Google has been able to control the content available to Internet surfers. All we as site creators or admins seem to be willing to do is keep on adjusting our information businesses NOT to our potential customers, but rather to the whims of Google.
Incidentally, when I go online to search for info, I’d much rather find ONE site that has a collection of information, articles or viewpoints, then link to the one which is of particular interest to me, than jump back and forth between twenty different ones. For crying out loud, isn’t Google doing that exact same thing when you enter info into it’s Search Box? Of course, but you’re not allowed to do anything like that on your own website? That right is reserved only for Google? Yep, it sure is and it will do it’s best to retain control of that, as evidenced in this latest algorithm change.
There’s no way Google is really interested in a searcher’s “good experience” but rather on Google’s “good bottom line,” which is dangerous for us all. While those two goals aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, Google’s egregious efforts to control the the content of information on the Internet will, I suppose, someday need to be legislated, as the financial aspirations a key individual or two cannot be allowed the kind of power they yield.
Ed, I believe CERTAIN article spinners that are not careful and are truly spam driven will be weeded out. However, intelligent spinning is nearly undetectable if an article is seeded properly by HAND. Quality control — the more that goes into a spun article, the more highly undetectable it is to the human eye. An intelligently spun article is as readable as a rewritten article — so there’s really no way to weed that out. Of course, a spammer is not going to take 3-5 hours to seed an article with enough synonyms that make it completely readable no matter how many times it’s spun. However, for that 3-5 hours of investment, there is 30-50 return on investment for the amount of distinct and unique backlinks that will stick in the search engines — and yes, even Google. I think it goes without saying that whatever personal (non-machine oriented) time someone puts into a piece of content is how much ROI they will get from their publishing efforts.
As far as the other stuff that gets into the motives and perspective of Google — anything I would say is merely speculation as to what their thoughts are behind their actions. But one thing is for sure, no matter how pure a corporation’s genuine intent is, they are always (I repeat always) concerned and considering their bottom line, no matter what.
Jim,
Thank you for the great info.
It was hard to read with that “FOLLOW ME BOX” on the left side of the page (how do I get rid of it?).
Thanks, Dick
Dick,
We will see what we can do about the follow me box that just sticks there — however, we felt it was a lot more distracting than those buttons that just HOVER and lag behind as you scroll through the page.
I’ve got notes in about this.
Appreciate your feedback.
Jim
Of course, that last sentence should end, “…cannot be allowed the kind of power they wield.”
And they do tend to wield a lot of power — beyond all the water their server warehouse cooling systems use up — don’t they?
A truly amazing and helpful article. Now I can get back to work. I recently started religiously updating my website almost every night and got into a pretty good groove moving up the charts until the Google changes hit. I woke up one morning and moved back pretty good after about 20 or so days of moving up. It was great and motivational to read this so I can get back on track.
Thank you!
Anthony,
Whatever you do, do not allow the outside environment and Google circumstances stop you from doing what you’re doing. As long as you have great and valuable intent behind what you’re doing, allow Google to bounce you up and down.
I have literally woken up and found my search engine results disappeared off the chart. Not even one on page 10 or page 20. I went “gulp.”
A week later the results returned stronger than ever.
This stuff just happens — so take it from my experience and never allow anything to stop what you’re doing and diminish the passion inside you. The fire should burn no matter what is happening on the outside. Just keep stoking your own fire.
Jim
We moved up 16 places to number 7 on Discount Coupons!!!! We have always been number 1 on Bing and Yahoo, can’t wait till we are number 1 on Google.
Good stuff Pat — you’re definitely doing something right then.
Hell Jim,
was it really necessary for you to advise all the crap-generators how to overcome and reinstate their high rank positions?
I was really happy to see Google do what they should have done years ago…clean out all the garbage spun articles, crap copy-content and odious sales cliches.
As a link builder I used to post legitimate one-off replies to specific blogs etc, but had to stop a few months back due to the amount of ‘asian generated crud’ that was being permeated into every nook and cranny by every lazy bugger that wanted 5000 backlinks per week. I got fed up adding my quality works to garbage threads.
I think probably the worst part of being active on the internet is the number of ‘money opportunists’ at work there, not interested in providing any value-input at all but deliberately targetting easy cash extraction methods and tools. Basically just total fraudsters.
I’m just so pleased Google (despite their actual motivation being even more money for themselves) took this step just so the garbage-makers can be pushed off the system.
Well done Jim. Nice article.
Brian
Brian,
Me believes that the crap generators won’t TAKE THE TIME to do what is involved with reinstating their position and I am certain that their sites will stay in the Google penalty box for a while (leaving them guessing whether what they’ve done to remedy is actually working).
My advice is literally bulletproof toward the crap generators attempting to overcome the odds now. They’ve got to do a LOT of manual work to overcome the obstacles now — and there’s only 1 WAY to improve quality. That is through human intervention, which is against all their crap-generating values.
But I do believe you are correct that all the cheap manual labor in third world countries that is employed to ruin true blog threads that were, at one time, worth commenting upon.
What this activity does do, however, is force us to find other ways to build backlinks and perhaps go out of our comfort zone to build skill in new link-getting techniques that others may not be using. The more complex the link-getting activity, the less likely that non-skilled workers will be employed to handle those tasks.
And at the risk of letting those crap-generators and folks who employ cheap laborers, I will stay silent as to what those other types of techniques may be.
Until then, I remain silent.
Jim
How does video fit in? Is a video with some text better than a long article? Thank you for the information. I have to admit, I don’t really but I will, I didn’t have a clue that any changes were/are taking place. Now, I know more than my friends…
Ken, video has a possibility in the overall scheme. And yes, you’ll have to have SOME description text that actually gives the page actual context of what the video is about, not just for the visitor, but for the search engines.
As with any technique Ken, putting one or three or five videos out there and then complaining that nothing is happening won’t get you anywhere. But remaining on a schedule and being consistent like one should be about posting unique value-driven content on a regular basis is how steady results are obtained.
So if you decide to go with a technique, whatever it may be, be sure to commit to that technique and not just stop after even 10 videos, but continue posting for at least a year and you’ll have quite a stable of content and most likely a nice subscriber base.
Let’s take Mahalo, the former human powered search engine that has now shifted its focus to educating people on generalized topics. While their staff was cut 10% due to their loss of traffic (and thus, revenues), they were encouraged by You Tube to continue posting educational videos. That tells you and all of us that once you etch your presence into an ecosystem such as a video community, you’ll develop a long term footing that will be in demand well into the future.
That’s what is required with ANY technique, not just video.
But I do hope that answers your question to the fullest extent.
Jim
Getting rid of all the duplicate content and crap will be great. I’ll be looking with keen interest to see what happens in Australia.
It’s a bit of a worry if we’re all depending on one source, Google, to determine what is value and what is not. How do they determine that? Is it just that the information is not repeated over and over or is it something to do with social media and how many votes of approval an article gets?
What about the small business man with a one page website who just wants to tell people who he is, what he can do and how he can be contacted. His site has been struggling under the load of crap…..will the changes lighten the load and allow his site to ceeep higher on the search results page?
To answer your question, I don’t think it’s really that hard to determine value. Just go around the internet and search among even the valued and treasured news sources and let me know if you find an article like the one I have written above. That answer will guide you accordingly.
Google says in their own blog post — and I think I quoted this above:
“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.”
So you must ask yourself about your own content that you generate on a given topic as compared to what else is out there.
Is it filled with original content?
Is the content in-depth such as found in a report? Does it give statistical information and refer to other notable sources?
Is the content providing thoughtful analysis that is derived from your (or your writer’s) point of view?
If you can answer yes to all those questions after taking a brief look at what else is out there on the topic, then you should be able to assess the value of your own proposed content.
Small businesses with just one page need to build a WordPress installation and begin writing on their topic. Remaining a one page site will not allow that site to rise to the very top with this change. If one’s website wants to become an authority in that industry, then you must write content based on your breadth of knowledge on said industry and provide value to the community. Simply having a website that tells a visitor what you do and how you can be contacted is not enough.
While this Google change won’t hurt the kind of website you’re discussing, it certainly won’t drastically improve the increased awareness through Google and top search results.
Build pages and get links to your site — that’s the simplistic key to the formula.
And at the very minimum, if your site stays a one page site, get links to that one page using different keyword phrases in the anchor text.
I have 3 websites, all with SBI Site Build It!. What has been written above is what Dr. Ken Evoy, founder of SBI has been saying for years, and that is why all those who follow his blueprint are all sitting in the top 3 % of the world’s websites. Black hat SEO will never win the Google game.
It is all about good, orginal content that people are looking for and over delivering. Provide the content, choose the right keywords and title, and you just wait for the traffic. It comes, I know!
Kathryn,
Ken’s teachings will endure the ages on the net.
However, I do find that Ken’s students, while they do very well applying internal linking structure, I tend to see very very soft selling that needs to be toned up a bit with either calls to action at the concluding portion of the content of a given page and also with giving away a freebie to get someone on a subscriber list. But that could be a very general broad-sweeping opinion about EVERY student — it’s just what I’ve seen and experienced over the past 7 years from my analysis.
Nonetheless, the only thing I would add to your combo would be to obtain inbound links that is incredibly crucial to compete and zoom right to the top of Google’s results.
Jim, I think you just told me why our site has moved up top in our main keyword ranking. I constructed an entirely original, but simple, one page content page about two years ago to drive traffic to our furniture store website. We wanted to be able to ship a high quality, high value Queen Sleigh Bed to anyplace in the country. This small one page website moved steadily up in the rankings for “Queen Sleigh Bed”. The title is “Choosing a Queen Sleigh bed” It has pulled our furniture store website right up there with it and even above it for certain keywords. Now we are at the top of the first page not only for “Queen Sleigh Bed” but also for just the words “Sleigh Bed.”
Joe,
I believe you are right and having found your page, you employ the absolute key foundation to a page getting weight and drawing to the top of Google. Excellent and well done.
In fact, if you could find multiple ways to employ the same technique via multiple hosting companies and other methods which I would share in private, you can corner an entire segment of your in your industry.
And I’m sure there are other things you can do to the existing pages and techniques you are using to amplify your efforts and be top dog on Google for years and years to come.
Some of the stuff is SO EASY, I don’t understand why some people don’t use do it. But it does require getting out of the ONLINE comfort zone and using some personal human touch.
Keep up the good work — you’ve made me proud.
Jim
Very good article. I have to ask why you think writing articles that have 1,000 to 15,000 words is optimal and having shorter (250-400) word articles will not work.
Jon,
First off — no need to go to the extent of doing 15,000 word articles — but 800 – 1000 would be optimal.
Here’s the reason behind that.
You can ONLY stuff (notice the word I used) — you can only stuff so many keywords that are RELATED to the target keyword. Here’s what I mean.
If you are discussing weight loss and say it’s about a particular weight loss plan or method of losing weight.
With the Google demands on thoroughness, your article is not just going to cover going over the means by which to lose the weight, but it would likely cover “exercise” or “fitness” keywords, comparing other weight loss techniques to the one proposed, keywords related to dining out and how to eat, keywords related to tips on choosing the right diet program.
Sure, you may be able to cover all elements mentioned above in one article, but it certainly won’t be thorough, but more generalized.
Again, this is not to pooh-pooh the Seth Godin’s of the world at all. He’s mastered the simple micro-chunking of getting one major thought provoking point across on a specific topic, but it’s certain not a thoughtful analysis on an entire issue or problem that a consumer is trying to solve.
When you are attempting to build trust in a consumer on a given page, thoroughness (800 – 1,000 words) will trump generalized brevity (250 – 400 words).
That’s just my opinion and whether you care to adopt it should really be based on your own testing.
Create two different pages for traffic on a typically similar keyword phrase and get both of them ranked and see how the traffic reacts to each page and especially how Google continues ranking each article, that should equally get the same amount of promotion to keep things fair.
That’s the REAL test that will prove it to you.
I’m just an average guy that spews a bunch of words on web pages.
Jim,
Thanks for this information. I am actually pretty excited about the Google slaps. It is a quick way to to get rid of the spammers and help those of us who are actually building real content and have real businesses. Thanks again. I am now following you on Twitter :-
Gregory Schneider
Gregory,
Glad you’re excited — the web has finally evolved where Google is separating the wheat from the chaff — truly.
I’m excited right there along with ya.
Those who have gotten grounded in the true principles of bringing value to the web will become kinds in their industries in these next few years — guaranteed.
And I appreciate the follow.
Jim
Thanks Jim
Certainly the best cut at what happened with this last change – we considered a lot of those automated methods “gray hat” and knew that sooner or later Google would deal with it. SEO does not have to be difficult, and it does take commitment and effort. Hopefully Google just re-leveled the playing field again.
Thanks for your insights and detail
Derek
My pleasure, Derek, it truly is.
This whole year has been about re-igniting my passion of everything I am about at its very core. I’m sure that shines through in what I just outlined above.
And I do believe that this IS going to stick and, at the heart of hearts, I believe this change is something Google has been working on for quite some time, but I believe they were afraid to allow the change out at its early infancy stages, fearful of the drastic effect it would have. Had they done this earlier, I think it would have been much more severe — and while they may tweak and tune the algo based on the wide-sweeping consequences, I believe most of it will stick.
With the current folks crying and brought to their knees, they should feel lucky that they were allowed to get away with this “gray hat” stuff as long as they did.
The learning curve will be 10x more painful for the lazy folks to re-adjust while those who have built true skill will evolve their game at a much quick rate now.
Man — I wonder what it was like for the Google engineer who pushed the final button releasing this algo and also what it was like in the room when this thing was released.
Were tensions tight or were they like celebrating like 1999?
Inquiring minds want to know…
Thanks for the great tips, It’s a real eye opener.
I’ve never thought of my sites as being something that Google wouldn’t like, but it looks like I need to do some more tweaking as a few of my sites have lost a little rank compared to what they were 3 months ago.
Mike,
Glad I could help in adjusting your perspective so that you could go back and know exactly what to tweak.
Good luck on your journey and feel free to ask any further questions.
A great analysis of the situation. The funny thing is, I have been moving in the direction of all 11 of your points as I’ve been learning over the last year or so.
I could never bring myself to do the ugly auto post thing, but so many people teach building exact match domains and minisites. Eventually it just made more sense to me to work on building a good, user friendly site that covers topics in depth and looks good too. Stop worrying about a specific keyword phrase so much, most of my traffic comes from all sorts of unpredictable phrases anyway.
Of course, I’ve got a long way to go, but at least I’m heading in the right direction – - thanks for confirming what I have been instinctively figuring out, and laying it out so clearly. Next thing to work on, injecting my own voice into the content. It’s so true, the sites I like to return to have personality – - time to put some of that into my dry content.
Appreciate the kind thoughts Ken and glad to hear you’ve been moving in this direction.
Fact is, when you’re in the learning stage — there’s really a bit of complexity to the whole content creation, website promotion, search engine optimization gamut that it can consume and overload one’s mind.
But once you get the whole matter distilled into solid concreteness, things can move forward at light speed whereas before you get things solidified, you’re just kind of wondering in a lost fashion.
And lastly, once you add the final touches of injecting that personality of yours — that’s where things really gain some serious liftoff. The important thing to remember and this is extremely easy to apply — just pretend that you are sitting down with ONE person in your home and speaking the content to them. Then, just translate that spoken word content into written form so it sounds just like hangin out in the living room.
When you can transmute and transfer that easy going feeling of communicating in words just like you are speaking to the visitor in your home, you literally put the visitor’s state of mind in that easy going manner where they can let down their guards and their resistance and, thus, their skepticism.
When you put the visitor in that easy state of mind, they are no longer on guard to the salesman just behind the corner and selling to them becomes more just a natural part of the act once you’ve educated them.
And if you haven’t read my article entitled “Write Like You Speak – Not as You Think” — then type those words into Google and you should get the top result as that article.
Best of luck implementing and integrating everything into your future plans.
I would have to believe their is some self-satisfaction in knowing that what you have been promoting legitimately works for many years, sir. (And I don’t mean Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah! I’m so much smarter than you! kind of gloating.)
I was simply amazed after all of this and the dust had hardly settled, then what did I get in my email box? Another Auto-posting program had hit the market!
All I can say is, ‘Good for your clever little self, and lot’s a luck with that.’
Al,
I certainly don’t want to come across as a purist and all so wholesome because I have done some of the auto-generating stuff and auto-posting stuff in the past, but when it comes down to it — true value and integrity that is in alignment with what the web is about — value and education. There’s no way a script or software can mimic human creation.
It’s just great to know that there is great satisfaction in following the path I know that aligns with positivity in the universe.
Wow! The best analysis I have seen on the Farmer, Jim! Thanks! This is a to-do list to take careful note of.
Seems pretty straight forward that quality content rules the day. I’m so sick of hyped up copy… perhaps this change will get rid of some of that at the top of the search results.
Richard,
And there is a difference between hyped up copy and inspirational copy. But if it’s unique copy, then it may not be tampered with by Google — however, the well versed visitor will learn how to just disregard the hyped up copy. Too bad there isn’t some toolbar or software that can detect hyped up copy.
Well, Jim, I’m an English reader of your stuff, and your article told me one thing that nobody else has: that the Google Farmer algorithm change hasn’t yet affected non-US sites. We know that much of the internet community is American, and that that makes it “Americacentric” (sorry to language purists if they consider that to be a new and unnecessary word) but we often forget the fact, and the latest news sent me scurrying to my site to see whether it had been affected.
So far, of course, it hasn’t but the whole Google Farmer thing made me think about the purpose and rationale of our site. Our site exists to attract vacation rental bookings. Renters say how nice our site is, how clear etc., and we do moderately well in a specialised niche (Brittany Holidays) – that is Brittany, France not the place where Ms Spears takes her vacations. We’ve been in 13th place on UK Google ever since Google indexed us. Those were the days when everybody but me was submitting their sites to the search engines – there even used to be software to do it for you – and I was surprised to see that Google had listed us. How green was my valley.
In the time since then I’ve written some articles and tried a bit of link exchange which has probably maintained a position which otherwise would have declined. I’ve also tweaked our web pages, and am still adding new ones. My particular obsession is maps, and the whole Google mapping thing has nourished my imagination so now our site has hundreds of pages, which leads me onto the second and larger part of our site.
This part is devoted to maps of French Wines, French Airports, French canals, and so on. Much of it was set up from a database of material which I collected from here and there. The text of the pages was generated automatically in very large part and Google didn’t seem to mind. In fact some of the pages rank number 1 on Google. The original intention was to use the maps section of http://www.ruelmain.co.uk to attract visitors to the “real” part. It never did, so I turned it over to Adsense advertising. No great deal, but nice pocket money for me and for Google.
Which brings me to my very own “golden nugget”: while the maps don’t have a very thoughtful content, and while there is quite a high bounce rate, they do fulfill a need for quite a lot of people including Google’s need for revenue, so will my maps get slapped down ? And what will happen to the rest of the site – will it trundle along at 13th as it has for so long ? Time will tell I guess.
As to this article, it was thoughtful, Jim (“thoughful Jim, but not as we know it”) and I did aim for 800 words.
If you have been counting: well done ! If you haven’t let me tell you that my word processor says 520. Only sorry I couldn’t say more.
Charles,
The question remains (and only you know this answer) whether the database you collected data from is available to the public and can be crawled by Google. If so, then you’ve possibly got a problem for those particular pages and may not necessarily affect the main listing that is at spot 13 right now.
I believe this Google Farmer update is more related to be applied on a page by page basis and not necessarily going to de-value every page of the site’s rankings.
Will one page pull down another page? I don’t think so, but it also depends if there is some internal linking that is helping the rankings.
Perhaps you can keep me up to date as to how the change affects your site once it is rolled out to the remainder of the world.
Wow that’s cool at least the LAZY MARKETERS will start to be hard working. Now question is, wil article marketing die?
Bill,
Article marketing will NOT die — only those who continue to submit only SO-SO articles will suffer at the hands of Google.
If you submit MORE OUTSTANDING articles than others, then you can count on article marketing continuing to thrive for you.
You may feel free to roam about the internet and submit more articles
It was about time! At last! There is one conclusion about Google’s update. Laziness and autolazy software count days.
Even if you manage to trick Google for a while it won’t last.
Quality sites and content are rewarded one more time. If you go by the rules you have nothing to fear. It’s as simple as that…
Chris, there is ALSO a second mechanism at play here. You can try to trick Google and possibly get away with it — but you CANNOT fool the visitor and try to fake bounce-back rates. Plain and simple.
Having just decided to learn and focus on this whole SEO business, i have to own up to having stuck my fingers in the cheap and crappy due to sheer lack of funds and success, at the same time as trying to generate quality info. Despite having stopped using nichebot, a while back, I have stayed subscribed to your list for the simple reason that you seem to teach HONEST methods. A beacon of integrity no less!
Sorry to hear about the domestic turmoil and it’s good to see you back on form.
As part of my own little efforts what I have started doing on one site is taking the videos that Google itself produces ie straight from the horses mouth, and then adding my own commentary to the post. In the case of explaining to potential customers, how the search process works, what’s important when you focus on the local. and similar background. Ideally I want to attract customers for some of the work but also give them tools and knowledge for doing some of the work themselves rather than becoming totally dependent on SEO types should they wish. My feeling from your comments is that the strategy would still be valid; do you agree?
All the best,
Ray
Ray,
I have stuck my finger in the cheesy crap as well — but I also stayed true with my white hat sites to the sound integrity you speak of.
As far as your technique goes, I would say it is very much still valid and Google wants to see multi-media on your pages and there’s nothing wrong with incorporating Google’s own videos with your own commentary and should definitely carry a very trustworthy feeling to your visitors. That’s a very good tactic to continue on with.
Carry on as usual.
I guess it’s no coincidence that you wrote precisely the type of article Google will love, right Jim?
Long, original, top quality with links to sources… it’s almost like they want scientific papers… perhaps I should dust off my Ph.D. thesis? :p
Neil.
All I know is that when I took my graduate school seminar papers and translated them from academicese into Jane Q. Public, they got traffic. Who’d have thunk nattering about various ancient civilizations could be profitable for anyone besides nationalgeographic.com.
Of course, this doesn’t help those trying to do affiliate marketing. You all are far more practical than I am.
But I like to think my natterings on Greece and Egypt and random Cool Stuff may have helped my humble home weather the storm, in some small way.
One thing I’m pondering, and it’s a bigger issue than you’d think. Many of Google’s algorithm changes are done on a page-by-page basis. I watch newbies with lack of SEO knowledge flail in frustration that they can’t get Squidoo pages to appear in the SERPs (not that they know what a SERP is), whereas other pages get thousands or tens of thousands of hits a week. So obviously, that’s page-by-page. But this latest algorithm change appears to be passing judgment on sites as a whole, then applying that judgment to all pages on the site.
How much of Google’s algorithm is page-by-page, and how much is site-by-site? It’s a philosophical question with profound real-world consequences.
Neil,
I’m not sure what you’re saying Neil. I was really trying to produce some really fast, purely cheap and crappy content that I could pass off as incredibly great content, that seems to have a lot of interaction and commentary after creating 35 different Twitter accounts that retweeted this content and 40 facebook accounts that reposted this cheesy article and making all all these phony people and contrived comments. I’m really unsure it’ll stick in Google’s index.
Okay fine — you nailed me! I may have slightly been doing what you’re talking about (chuckle).
But really — moreso, if I was reporting on something as a news reporter, which is really what we as web publishers are, it is truly natural to cite to references and other authorities. After all, WE can’t be the only authority on the web and when we align ourselves with others that already have pre-established trust — what does that do for how the visitor views us in alignment with those other trust sources? Of course, like we are trustworthy too! So why wouldn’t Google want to trust content like that? It literally has no choice to and that is the formula we can consistently use to seduce Google each and every time — no fooling them necessary.
Hey — it sounds like what Greekgeeks says — perhaps you should actually re-write your thesis from a layman’s point of view — but given that espousing your internet marketing knowledge has more overall usefulness, perhaps you can shelf that thesis idea for a little bit.
Besides, I think you’ve got some sort of a blueprint on your own free traffic generation that seems to be very much in alignment with my own thoughts, ideas and opinions.
Thank You
Dear Jim
You put into practice what you preach with this article. As with all marketing programs, typcial MBA stuff:
1. Analyse what your objectives are.
2. Develop plans / scenarios
3. Analyse – benefit, cost etc but including the risk
4. Choose the cunning plan and implement it.
5. Review
6. Modify Plan
A good marketing plan with low risk is generally one which has many angles and benfits from synergies of using different marketing channels. So whn things go wrong with one part, the rest continues to deliver and it is easy to modify the plan.
In this case, those with a good plan using different channels, will have gained from those who have used a high percentage of articles.
Great article, that I will log as a reference point.
Have a good day
Steve
Couldn’t have said it better Steve!
It is so true that when you have a multi-prong approach and metaphorically speaking, six legs to a table, even if one or two legs get kicked out from under the table, the other four legs will mostly likely continue to support the table.
I don’t want to try to sound smart or anything like that because I don’t believe I am and I would like thank you for this info but I would also like to say that I build my web site for the uses not for any other, I try to please Google/other search engines but my priority is users. The outcome of this is every time there is a change my site comes out on the better side of it, where as over the last couple of years contrary to popular belief the crap seems to be sinking to the bottom for a change.
Gareth,
Well, I would say that you are definitely smart for building your site around the users — cuz as I said up above, if you please the visitors, you are inherently pleasing Google. And that’s why your site will always continue to do well.
God speed!
As always, great stuff Jim. I had read some other posts… but yours put a new perspective on things I need to do. ’tis appreciated!
As a SEO consultant you have to be on your toes. Thanks for the update.
I can understand the desire to use auto created content on sites. By that, I mean, having to create content for multiples of websites, that time is of the essence. Building out sites takes time unless you outsource. Since many people are both lazy and cheap, quality takes a back seat to auto generated drivel.
I just don’t see the logic of using auto blogs. It would seem to me to be better to build less sites with high quality content than to build more sites with lower quality content. As you point out, your sites bounce rate should indicate that to you.
As for me, I intend to follow your advice and the teachings of Mike Lieberman. If quality is what draws people in and keeps them happy, then by that Google will be happy. But add quality and quantity as you do and people will love you!
Absolutely true Dave.
But here’s the little spin I would like to add to auto-blogging.
Nothing wrong with it — now here’s the qualifier.
Take the auto-blogged stuff and hold it in DRAFT format and go in everyday — taking 20 minutes to apply a human touch of commentary and editorial to it by hand and then publish it.
Make sense?
You’ve now taken auto-blogging to a whole new level where you are automating the process of the blog importing the content into your site, but now, instead you are applying the principles that accord visitors and Google.
And this way, you’ve instantly separated the wheat from the chaff.
This is something the auto-blogging suckahz would NEVER consider.
BEST discussion of this I have seen yet. Even better than the pundits at MediaPost and Tech Crunch!
Wow — I take that in high regard Hugh — thank you very much!
Makes me strive to want to be more to you and all my subscribers.
Thanks for the analysis. I always try to write good content on my blog and then I have been sharing it with Ezine Articles, Squidoo, etc. I guess being a relative newbie, I didn’t realize I had to rewrite the articles for each, I just hit the Share button. Thank you for letting me know I need to do more for my article submissions to be worthwhile. I appreciate the help.
Dawn,
As they say, just the LITTLE extra goes a lot longer and it really doesn’t take that much extra time. But the ROI and ROT (return on time) is worth gold bars rather than just getting silver bars.
When most successful folks in any industry or discipline are analyzed and found out why they excel over and above the rest of the crowd, it’s usually that LITTLE EXTRA they do.
So I’m surely glad I have inspired you to new heights — I think it will result in 10 fold the results you anticipate.
Jim, Excellent article. Quality Content rules no matter where you are in the communications industry. Playing games to attract viewers not interested in the content is a waste of everyone’s time. I congratulate Google on making the move\ because I have noticed it is becoming increasing difficult to locate the information I want through Google searches. More and more I have to scroll to a second or third page to find what is meaningful.
The key will not be numbers but knowing your audience and producing the most meaningful content for your group of readers. How valuable are the new York times readers to advertisers. If you are trying to reach the affluent intellectual elite of the country but if you are selling pick-up truck the readers don’t have much value.
Know your readers, focus on supplying their information needs clearly and succinctly, you will retain the readers you have and attract new readers. This is the way to build a loyal foundation. It may not be fast but your readers will stick iwth you through thick and thin as long as you deliver quality information. Larry Wilhelm
Larry,
You’re absolutely right about identifying the needs and wants of your audience and then just GIVING it to them. This is easier said than done for most.
Which is why I have a great resource for that which my buddy, Andre Chaperon, has written up here:
http://affiliatebully.com/2009-2010/identify-your-audience/
Doing exactly that and delivering will build, as you say, a loyal foundation.
I like the way you take the “fear” out of the recent algorithm update, and provide people with 10 actionable steps to ensure their rankings will remain firm in the future.
Appreciate that Holly — and you’re absolutely right — that’s what my intentions were — on a consistent basis to empower people. Glad that message came through amongst all the text and analysis.
I understand the logic of suggesting 800 word posts BUT what about the time it tales to read it all 1500 please save me.
This is a plea for brevity, If you can’t say it briefly you havn’t thought about it.
The web will destroy itself with long articles, hum and er videos, just too much.
Perhaps we need a new kind of article directory that promises 1or2 minute info!!!
Regards
Geo,
I understand what you’re saying but there are some folks who are not as intermediate at topics and have the same opinion as you do and they LOVE to devour data, but I think there is a happy medium.
I saw a recent article that was not only written for the detail seeker, but also for the person who is in a hurry — so there was a short summary synopsis.
THAT is the true happy medium.
Write the detail article for the person who wants MORE and have a section for the 1 or 2 minute info seekers.
Bammo — there’s your formula!
Thanks for the article. I’ve only been into IM for the past month, but I’m actively learning as much as I can. My primary money making site is ranked 5 for my keyword and it looks like the new algo didn’t hurt me much. I dropped a couple ranks at first, but now I’ve moved up to number 5 from 6. I think me being new to the game probably helped me out the most. I wrote my own quality content, providing natural backlinking, and did my best to answer what searchers are wanting to know. I didn’t have enough knowledge to auto blog, scrape content, or even spin my own articles.
Great article Jim, all things come to an end and the article you have provided is great long term strategies for those that want to run a real business. Having seen so many what I call dummy blogs recently it really does get annoying when the content is from all over the place and is a dumping ground.
I am glad that Google is rewarding good content rather than 1,000 fake posts. This will be a continual battle so the strategy Jim gives here is the best strategy rather than the latest hot tool.
Terry,
And I am so sick of the next latest hot tool (geared toward the lazy folk). Hey, if it’s a genuine method that makes something slightly easier while keeping the human organic element involved, I’m all for it. But the preying on people’s need for ease is just getting a bit over done.
Some quality sites with original content and no hint of the seven deadly topics got hurt by this algo change as well, which leads me to think that over-use of ad units is partly to blame. But tellingly none of the sites that got hurt are talking about reducing their ad blocks…
I still think that if that were the root problem, Squidoo would be getting hit just as much as some of its fellows. Then again, I’m old school web 0.5 (1993); I can’t monetize to save my life because I have a very low tolerance for ads.
@greekgeek — I think you’re absolutely right.
In fact, I think this is a great example of how Google ads are artfully used — and I believe Chris Knight can stand to learn from this as well. Check out this page on an about.com ad:
http://weightloss.about.com/b/2011/03/06/soup-it-up-like-they-do-in-japan.htm
Just as I said up above yesterday — NO Google ads above the fold — leads to LOWER bounce-back rates.
Look at how these ads that ARE above the fold are blended in with the same color of the hyperlinks so the ads literally blend in.
http://weightloss.about.com/od/getstarted/tp/8-Easy-Ways.htm
I believe Chris Knight can learn a huge lesson from About.com Adsense placement and implementation — somebody get him the message!
Teatree, I really thing that overdoing ad blocks and such directly relates to bounce-back rates and that’s why those sites with no 7 deadly topics involved were hurt. More ad blocks = higher bounce back rate and perhaps THAT is the tolerance that is at play and I am becoming more and more convinced of that the more I read.
Excellent article and excellent comments – thank you! What is your take on the effect Farmer will have on press releases? While I submit only unique content to each article directory, I usually submit the same press release across multiple sites.
Thanks Stephanie. While anything can be possible, I would probably say it is somewhat an acceptable standard that the same press release appears around the net. And really, this is more of an off-page factor which I wouldn’t worry too much about. Nonetheless, if I had it my way, if I am submitting press releases to multiple free press release directories, I would certainly try to distribute 3-4 different versions if you have the extra time to use a content re-writer to make the change or even do it by hand. I would personally assert more effort into putting my variety into article marketing and distributing that kind of content.
Hey Jim, what would you recommend for an ecommerce store, where there are short category and product descriptions.
thanks
Chris,
I would say write more commentary at the bottom of the page that relates to the product, perhaps reviews, take a look at what Amazon does for their products.
The other option is to have a blog, write good quality content, and then give a good call to action at the end of the article using a keyword phrase in your anchor text linking to the product page. That internal link will help get that product category page ranked.
I would also recommend getting backlinks to the actual page as well.
Isn’t this just another re-spin of the same old Google formula?
Write good content, no link farms, watch the RSS feeds and auto-post articles.
I think Google does these “updates” just to make everyone “believe” they can catch all the SEO shenanigans in use.
I guess you could call it a re-spin, but I’ve personally never heard of sites that laid off 10% of their staff as a result of this kind of shift.
Furthermore, I think this update is the one that is flushing all the crap.
I’m sure they can’t catch everything, but I think it’s at least considerate they give fair warning that a change has been made rather than folks waking up the next morning only to see that half their traffic is gone.
I mean — if YOU personally are walking the white hat road, you shouldn’t have any concern with this stuff.
If you look at this report here, I think you’re absolutely right — it’s all just a re-spin and sites have usually been hit this hard:
http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html
A link farm is a link farm is a link farm, no matter how hi-end the website may be.
I’m ecstatic about this update after reading that report on Sistrix, and I agree about the flushing.
EzineArticles, HubPages, ArticlesBase and many other sites on that list have been nothing more than link farms for several years… part of the idiot’s guide to SEO.
I’m sorry if anyone got laid off in this economy, but it was past time for some of these giant crappy sites to get their comeuppance… or “down-nance” in this case.
Agreed that a link farm can be disguised as a high-end, authority-like site.
I am sorry that those people got laid off, but not in any way sorry about the dip in traffic that Mahalo got hit with because I know for a fact that when they were a human powered search engine, they were producing strictly SEO optimized content that was nowhere close to visitor driven. And while they had shifted their focus to more educational driven content, they probably had the previous content that probably didn’t keep up with current Google standards.
So — may all those who produce crap thereafter get a taste of their own.
Like I said earlier in another comment, I believe this algo change was in the making for years, but they were too worried letting it out of the can in fear it would be too aggressive, and they finally tweaked it until they got the right mix. And unfortunately, the low quality crap got hit hard — and I don’t think the magnitude of sites ever got hit as hard as what went down here.
I just recently saw a post by Jerry West that he didn’t really see a shift at all and thought the change happened a couple months ago as it related to brands. I guess he hasn’t read the Sistrix report that shows the bottom falling out from underneath them.
Anywho — once the Big G dials this new change in — I think the next update will do the final flush of toxic waste out of the index and onto Google’s Results Page 20 where most people never make it.
Hi Jim
Sir, that was arguably the best information anyone’s yet produced on Google’s latest offensive against garbage content!
I’ve been enjoying your newsletters, and your insightful take on various aspects of website promotion, for many years.
Content Is Still King
I heartily agree with you that the quality of content is the defining factor of overall success, regardlessof the niche! Whether its articles, blog posts or page content – if you duplicate, copy or homogenize other people’s content – at best you are immediately second-best, and SERPs should reflect that…
Sadly, its not gone far enough in my view. I frequently work on small business sites in the hotel, bed & breakfast, provincial and town informational websites sectors, across the general tourism service industry. Its frustrating that the likes of Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, Travelfish, Travelpod etc dominate the top rankings in almost all the tourism-related niches! Inevitably they’ve got a few pages of shallow information.
The a bona fide provincial / town site may have 50 plus pages of genuine local content with original images, but its lucky to make page 2 or 3 on the SERPs due to the plethora of big-budget heavyweights! Those same heavyweights are often scrapers that utilize the genuine sites informational content, making their money off adsense and hotel booking commissions, at the expense of the smaller, locally focused sites! That not fair… it will be fascinating to see if there is any positive global change in that area in the coming weeks.
Impact of Farmer on Link Portfolios.
What’s your view on the impact that the average site’s link portfolio has on overall rankings these days? For example, some of my clients have automated links directories dating back several years. These alleviate the burden of responding manually to endless link exchange requests.
Almost two years ago, some sites were amended so that all links were “no-follow” to stem link juice loss. it seemed that those sites were losing more than they were gaining from providing the directory-based reciprocal links mechanism… Many links are only vaguely related – travel, automotive etc.
Now, I’m wondering if we should prune out all those non-relevant links entirely – leaving only strictly relevant regional informational site links.
Kind regards
Ben Kemp
Ben, without getting into too much detail — and I appreciate your valued insight to the specific industries you’ve seen unfairly rules by conglomerates and scrapers, I do believe it’s in your best interest to prune the directories and remove many of the non-reciprocating links and sites that are giving a no follow link back.
I would give some broad relevancy to some of category of sites still actually linking with a do follow link, not necessarily keeping it strictly relevant to regional information site links. However, if there are MORE than 20 links on a given site’s page where your client’s link still exists, I would no longer link to that site and prune it.
I do believe — and I don’t think it’s linked to the Farmer update — that efficacy of reciprocal links have degraded over the past few years of Google updates as people seemed to wear that method out with overseas workers.
While I used to focus on reciprocal links, I have moved away from that since 2008/2009 and more toward other type of one way inbound links. I have however kept the link directories in tact.
Hope that gives some good feedback to make an enlightened decision.
Hi Jim,
First of all the image on http://www.explainstuff.com/2009/07/16/best-adsense-layout-adsense-placement-tips-and-layouts/ which is hosted at TinyPic is not showing up.
About google algo change:
I would have loved to see eHow.com and Answers.com getting hit. The answers.com site is mostly user generated content with majority of the answers are single answers and is worst than yahoo answers.
Google has not penalized Demand media (eHow). They are after affiliates who generate large amount of garbage sites and articles for article directories. This is a mess google itself created. If google had given high importance for unique, quality content and less importance for backlinks, affiliates will be more interested in developing quality sites than avaerage sites with tons of backlinks. They need backlinks. Hence they fill article directories with crap to get backlinks.
Google needs to forecast the result of their actions.
-Neo
Neo,
Some of those answers sites are a joke — aren’t they?
And it is quite interesting that eHow did not get penalized for what they do, but therein lies the mystery of what they did to avoid the Google nuclear blast that leveled some places.
I think you’re right about the whole backlink thing — and many realize they have to do it — so they just keep drudging out keyword rich NON-THOUGHT PROVOKING content that doesn’t mind the visitor’s time and strictly goes for the backlink. It’s a little out of control and I think upcoming algo changes that Google makes should tweak the value of some of the backlinks in proportion to valuable content.
But if you ask me what it’s going to get to in a year or two — social media and the number of mentions will become more and more dominant as a ranking factor. Mark my word on it — but that’s not something I forecast until late 2012, or early 2013 (that is, if the world doesn’t come to an end before then – ROFL!)
During the past 3 months or so I have been involving myself in local sites more than affiliate market news, even wrote and Ebook I called “Staying on top of the Mobile Game”. Now it was explained to me that the number one initiative of Google was to go mobile and Google Places Listings to be the top spots for SERPS with certain limitations i.e. authority backlinks and aged domains. I always wondered how many articles anyone can write about their trade be it a local store , seo services company or social network business. But in the end unique perspective and individuality builds credibility for the long term..this is good. I can appreciate that intellect and know how is earned from years of study and experience and also having great article writing ability is a big plus. Enjoyed reading all the comments here and just this afternoon was asked if I would exchange links with another web development company. Thanks Google for sending some links my way for a change.
Richard,
What’s really interesting is how you never really know which way the wind is going to change 3 months from now. You just have to put your finger up in the air every month or so to see which way it’s blowing.
You are totally right about the unique perspective being SO important, especially in the eyes of Google. They want fresh stuff — even if it’s a take on someone else’s opinion. And while it is very hard to predict how many different articles one can write on a given topic without overlapping discussions, I think there is NO maximum. As long as you are constantly keeping your ear to the ground on news happenings, you’ll always have something to new perspective (of someone else) to comment on.
And really — it’s not so much the years of involvement in an industry that I think rules because someone with just a year of entrenched knowledge can truly share as much as someone with seven years of experience — esp. given the right amount of passion.
My whole perspective and thrust comes from the passion and really loving this and wanting to help and assist others. That being the main driver, promotion of anything else becomes a natural component. If folks truly grasped that concept, they would be seriously dangerous when it comes to monetizing nearly any type of site.
But I digress…
Good on Google for kicking EzineArticles.com to the curb; for an article directory supposedly focused on quality, most of their articles are blatant self-promotional, unsubstantiated crap. I had an argument with an editor once because she didn’t want me to include citations in my article – you know, references to scientific studies that demonstrated I wasn’t just pulling this stuff out of my “you-know-what.” How can content be of great quality when authors don’t have to substantiate or support a single thing they say?
Paul,
Yeah — good on them! In fact, I would just wonder how much of that EA stuff is actually GHOSTWRITTEN $5 articles…
beyond just being blatant self-promotional crap (i.e., no value to the visitor).
As far as I’m concerned, an article should at the very minimum give some sort of partial solution to a problem that the visitor can take action upon (not just common knowledge crap you can find everywhere). There’s really NO WAY to fool the visitor at all and make them FEEL that you truly care if you leave this element out.
Citations — my wife was a stickler on that being nurse. There’s no way she could say anything in a term paper without using some sort of PEER REVIEWED reference that was actually scientifically tangible and published in a well recognized journal or medical publication.
Honestly, I think references to articles just make it THAT much more real and I believe give the impression to the end user that “Hey, this person actually took the time to review and put in this article a thing or two about where his/her statements came from” — and then immediately, the initial inertia of skepticism is alleviated and now a true relationship or bond can be formed between reader and author.
Now, I don’t particularly care for the formalized manner in which some authors write because I am much more grammatically loose. I would be criticized left and right by my English teachers the way I write — but it took me a LONG time to break these old English habits.
I write like I speak, not the way those English teachers taught me to think about rules and restrictions.
When someone finally is able to transmute the voice that is inside their mind onto paper without much editing, that’s when the true essence of one’s own personality shines through and the visitor actually feels it. That’s when real magic happens when coupled with a bit of actual references from which the article/conversation/discuss was pulled.
Wow that was insane good, look forward to ur next article,post very high value shows u spend time and effort u will come out on (top) in all aspects of life not just this crazy awesome internet love we all have
peace
Arik, thanks for the comments and the next article should be darn good as well as I think there is some clarification on the darkness lurking behind auto-posting and how some folks may have confused it with scheduling posts in the future.
And yes, time investment really ends up working to your advantage. I said it above and I’ll say it again — those who are at the top do that little extra 1-2% more than the clump of everyone else. So what you need to ask yourself — are you putting that extra 1-2% into what you’re doing now and if not, why aren’t you? It’s not that much more to do because it shines through in the passion you speak from and it’s actually quite contagious.
It’s interesting that your article is titled Google Algorithm Change-Shift-Update 2011 – Were you hit by the Farmer?
Using the “farmer” metaphor, it reminds me when I was young and I used to raise show lambs. When the judges chose a champion lamb and that lamb happened to have long horns, a trend for “long horn” selection would begin. The sheep breeders would furiously engage intense breeding selection programs to make sure their future offspring had long horns for the show ring in hopes of making it to the top the following year. What eventually happened is the lambs born under those circumstances eventually grew horns that actually curled and gouged their eyes. Everyone had to step back and stop. They had gone to far. After realizing the danger they created, the following year the judges would switch the other way and select lambs with shorter horns, so the story goes. Long horns out. Shorter horns in. What does this have to do with marketing?
I’m fairly new to writing articles and I’ve noticed right away that so many sites have content lacking in richness or quality. Although I am a marketer, from the user’s point of view I can understand why a shift had to be made. The horns had grown too long. My understanding is that Google makes changes at least a couple times a year. Although there were losses, in my opinion, the Google change will undoubtedly improve the quality of content and force a shift to those marketers using “questionable” tactics to increase their rankings.
Jim, thank you for your article. I am one that doesn’t mind reading long posts or articles as long as they are worthy. Every update you have sent to my inbox are the ones I read all the way through and save for future reference. Thanks for a fantastic article.
Appreciate the props, Raena.
And here’s another really great tip that I used in the forming of the title of this article — which was different when it was published.
There was some actual keyword research I did as I was looking up articles on this particular on Google and as Google was suggesting some that I assume give priority to other words.
The original title of the article was “Google Algorithm Shift — Did you get spanked by the Farmer?”
As I noticed with Google Suggest when you enter a keyword phrase into the search box, “Google Algorithm Update” was coming up even though others, including myself, coined this as a shift. But who am I to argue with what Google is suggesting when that is a deciding factor?
So I altered the article name here a number of times to tweak it just right to attract and magnify the website traffic it could attract in the coming months — because I anticipate folks will be searching on this topic for a residual amount of time.
Will I just stop at just tweaking the article title?
Not a chance!
I’ll also take this article above and condense it to an 800-1000 word article and submit that to article directories with appropriate keyword anchor text to get this article to stick at the top of Google for a prevailing amount of time.
In fact, when the next Google update arrives, the article should still be there up at the top and I’ll have a little update box at the top directing folks to the most recent update that may occur in the future — syphoning even more residual traffic for many years to come. That’s the kind of strategic thinking required to continually build stacks of traffic once you create content that is worthy for a top ranking.
If this were just a sort of a temporary type of occasional topic, why bother. But this one is worthy
And this concept can be applied to any niche market or industry.
And yes — you are right — this Google algorithm change will absolutely force marketers to think differently about the future and their longevity.
I know many marketers that just thought too much about doing joint ventures and when they burned out the bridges, much like PPC traffic, once the JV partners stopped promoting, there was NO MORE traffic.
When you work on organic traffic — it becomes an unstoppable force.
Hi Jim,
Wow..trying to get my head around all of this. Maybe it’s been touched upon and my whirling head missed it…
What about posting youtube videos on a site…either with one here and there to augment content…or a separate section of videos that can be clicked to? Is this a big no-no ya think?…
I for one HATE going to youtube per se and hunting thru all the stuff. I think that an auto generated type of inclusion in a site can be of value..based on keywords…to give a continually updated offering of what’s being submitted on a topic.
Would it be a ‘slappable’ event to post such within a blog or site to give a reader some extra options beyond text?
Rss feed content…. with appropriate citations….. the same?
As long as not overdone…and interspersed with one’s own content… is this a BAD thing?
My newbie brain is trying to learn to do the right things.
Thanx sooo much for your efforts!, Jim. I’ve found a great mentor in your teachings.
Sparky,
I see NO problem whatsoever with YouTube videos posted to a site — even plenty of videos. I’ll be doing a post today that does just what you’re talking about.
As long as you have content on the page that gives your own unique perspective on the video or riffs on someone else’s perspective and we’ll talk about that more in the next post and ideas to whirl around your head.
And yes — auto-generated stuff is absolutely appropriate and why not do it daily — but therein lies the way to do it. And I’ll be covering what I believe is an acceptable method to do auto-posting content.
With WordPress plugins that take care of the leg work, there should be NO reason to have to go to YouTube or any other content source to grab the content when a WordPress plug-in can do it for you. Same thing for having to look for a product or Amazon listing or eBay auction to promote.
And no — I don’t think those things would be slap-able event — but I would recommend about 5 minutes of time to inject your own SELF into it. Not that hard to voice something and we’ll cover that more in detail in the next post.
I appreciate you reaching out Sparky and asking for guidance (which is something I have trouble doing myself at times).
And it really comes down to asking yourself and checking in…
“Is this way of posting going to look like regurgitation if others blogs and sites are doing this?”
“What can I do in the space of 5 minutes to add some uniqueness to this post?”
I mean — EVERYONE has 5 minutes out of their day to attend to one auto-post on a given blog. In fact, I reckon a lot of people could maintain 3-4 blogs with just a little unique amount of time and really come out with awesome organic traffic after a year.
Hope this helped — but the next post will be more focused on the topic of how to do it right all the way.
Great article Jim.
Makes me wonder, does the length of your article and the huge amount of replies correlate to the real problem of rubbish on the www and also in our in-boxes? I guess so. I wish Google and co had carried out this update years ago.
Much appreciate your time, effort and commitment to making the www a better place.
Terrific insight Jim – I completely agree that the quality of our content is becoming even more important than ever. You mentioned the length of articles that you recommend:
“I would even try to go above and beyond by producing 1000 to 15000 word articles or web pages.”
I assume you mean fifteen hundred and not fifteen thousand words?
-Ella
Ella,
No! I really meant 15,000 words — which, for some people that would be extreme in some cases and tantamount to a small ebook — which this post has turned out to be with Q&A.
I was just giving a WIDE range as I have personally produced some 15,000 word articles — and while big, they could have actually been chunked down into a five-part series of 3,000 words each (which is actually a great idea).
Seriously, most articles I sit down and plan to write about 800 – 1000 words and I just can’t stop my fingers once I really get into it because more and more thoughts come floundering into my head and I continue onward. It then turns out to be a mini-novel I post.
One of my old partners used to call my articles, posts and forum posts “War and Peace” and I guess rightfully so.
But my rule for writing is simple — I never write a sentence that has NOTHING to say. No fluff, no filler — just all meat and protein.
No need to twist my arm. The minute this came out, I printed it immediately to have beside me for reference. I remember, too well, your update on the latest FTC changes. You produced a quality article that not only enumerated the major changes that would affect internet marketers, but even guided us on our next steps. So, I had every reason to believe this mini-ebook on the Google Farmer Update was just as great – and it is! Many thanks. These updates alone are, among other good reasons, make my subscription to Nichebot worth it.
What if I want to twist your arm Diane? Is that okay?
I really appreciate all the comments and they are taken with all the humbleness and gratitude that one Jim can muster.
And your post actually just pushed me to stretch even further so everyone can just download a PDF to read later — and that’s my next WordPress plug-in endeavor — with much thanks to Dr. Neil Shearing.
Hi Jim! Just a note to THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!! for your incredibly generous and insightful reply. And yes,…somehow you detected my ‘shyness’ of asking for help. I hate to feel stupid… You are so respectful and sooo helpful to all.
I’m salivating over you rnext post on HOW to do this all correctly.!!!!.. I haven’t seen an update yet…Hope I didn’t miss it.
Again…deep, humble Thanks for your helpful replies to all… for your integrity, which is nearly an extinct dinosaur in these times…Yand your kindness. You have gained a loyal ‘convert’!
Hey Sparky,
Sorry about that — I wanted to take my time with this post — so I put some TLC into it — and made it as Google pleasing as it is visitor pleasing.
Hope you enjoy it.
http://www.insidenichebot.com/ninja/autoblogging/
I searched around and found the list of the 7 Deadly Topics on eZine and, thank goodness, I don’t write about any of them.
I’m a customer for a couple, but I don’t generally write about that.
Thanks for that excellent article, I am interested in knowing when this will be rolled out in the UK. We haven’t seen any significant changes in our site rankings and traffic but then we are very careful about quality content and back links.
Does anyone know if it has it happened in the UK or not?
Has this been rolled out in the Uk yet?
Thanks for the excellent article.
very good advice Jim. I just finished talking to a guy that suggested that I read google’s webmaster guide yesterday, and to stumble upon your website and find out about google algorithm change, has cleared up all the speculation I was hearing. I must agree with you about word press. I tried to learn html coding, and I actually build a decent website, but it was time consuming. Word press does have more advantages and saves a lot of your time.
Wow, these are some great tips! I tried to follow many of the tips you mentioned and somehow got caught in the Google Farmer update. I now realize why my website disappeared during the google Farmer update and Waht I did to fix it: http://www.seanscarpetcare.com/CleaningTipsBlog/?p=249
Maybe this info will help someone else…Thanks…Sean