About a week ago Google made a public annoucement about some of their most recent changes. Many people felt that the changes would impact their online businesses in a negative way and if it did impact yours, the odds are that you were using some black hat techniques in the first place. However, the change did drop traffic for some of the largest sites on the net today. Google has been getting torn up in the news about them allowing “content farms” to outrank higher quality web sites. The real question is “how do you judge quality” on the information on the internet. Google refuses to use the human factor (except for social site input) to alter their algorithm, this is a good thing because it does stop your competitors from gaming the system. If we could up vote links, there would certainly be teams of marketer marking their own sites up and there competitors down. What they have done is manually dinged some sites that seem to be repeat offenders in bringing sub-par content to the net.
So Who Did The Google Farming Update Affect?
The quick answer is A Lot Of People. The Google update has been commonly called the farming update, because it had one sole purpose and that was to raise the relevancy of their search. The changes had a huge impact and Google says that it will affect over 11.8% of the search queries on their site, this means 1 out of every 10 searches are altered by this big change. There are certain sites that have very loosely moderated content that have mostly been affected
Google continues to address the major changes in this official blog post : Finding More High Quality Sites In Search
What Content Sites Got Hit The Hardest?
2 of the biggest sites, well at least to online marketers that took some serious hits from the Google farming update was Hubpages and Ezinearticles. These sites do have some great content but they also have so much “loose wait”, “male enhancement” and “make money” content that they may have been bundled in with the rest of the low quality content farms and penalized rather seriously during this algorithm change. These sites are still valid for link building purposes, but don’t expect as much traffic from them as you used to see, because that just isn’t going to happen.
Here is a complete list of the sites that got hit the hardest by the changes: Google Traffic To Content Farms List
How To Avoid Google Penalizations
The best way to stay ahead of the curve, is to create original content and base your content on a web site you own. Generating engaging content that really speaks to the reader is one of the best ways to retain readers and also let Google know that you are for real. Linking in from other content on low ranking sites can also hurt, so make sure when you create supporting content that it is also on topic, well written and only placed on web sites that have other great content.
You will also want to stay away from very small and useless posts. The auto-poster plugins may not be effective at all after the complete transition to filter out lesser content is complete. Make sure that you write content that uses proper English and that has a reasonably sized body. For the most part, the 100 word to 300 word articles are done. You should see a lot less Q and A sites getting ranked for a one paragraph question with no answer, but this also means you are going to have to pay for or produce longer more quality content if you want to compete with the big boys.
What About The Tools You List Here On Link Building Ninja?
No worries, if you are using the tools we suggest you will still be able to automate your link building process and not worry about betting the good old Google slap. Tools like the Free WP Autoresponder and Free Traffic System abide by solid so rules like no footprint and they also use the highest standards for quality. The FTS system will not even let you submit an article if it is not original or if it is less than 500 words, so right there they filter out most of the junk and would be problems for their members.
As we add new programs and systems to our set of approved tools for internet marketers we always put them through a rigorous vetting process. This way you never have to worry about them harming your page rank or web site search standing. Using the suggested tools in the suggested manor will only bring you oodles of traffic and hopefully some change in your pocket too!
Feel free to comment below and let us know how the Google updates have been affecting your online business.
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