Vishal Batish

Google recently deployed its latest algorithm intended to reduce the rankings of so called “Content Farms” — websites that contain or focus on low-quality content, built merely to pick up Google rankings and drive advertizing. In large number of cases, this algorithm has performed its task and Google searches are now cleaner than before.

Change in Google’s recent algorithm has affected nearly 12 % of total queries carried out in Google. This implies that a lot of websites, whether big and small, are taking a look at their web analytics reports and witnessing that the traffic graphs are going downwards and to the right consequently. It can be hard to conceive tactically and accurately in such a situation and your first responses may result in terror and wrath.

Apprehensive, but if you wish to regenerate your website’s traffic, you require actionable measures for evaluation and modification. Even if it is genuinely the case that you were unfairly struck as a consequence of collateral damage, you like to pass your limited time and resources on techniques that are inclined to fetch your traffic back. Keep reading for more strategical things you can perform now, and practices you might like to avoid.

Google has altered its algorithm to an extent that websites liable for raising keyword focused articles in vast volumes have witnessed their rankings vanish overnight. The ‘farmer’ name was minted by Danny Sullivan, though internally it was cognized as the ‘Panda Update’.

Like any Google update there has been a good number of hand wringing and arguments in the market. But most of the arguments have neglected the main point. If you or your customers were being out-ranked by a content farm, you experienced grave problems. An even more significant issue is the possible inference in these alterations. If these pages have lost their power to rank, they have mislaid their power to pass a respectable amount of link equity.

The primary thing to notice is that Farmer has been charged as a conscious effort to wheedle out what Google reckons to be low quality content farm websites. This is the region where you stumble upon affiliates and site-owners trailing the long tail with very finite articles or pages either directly on their own website, or on a third party website like Squidoo, Buzzle, Ezinearticles and so on.

The biggest losers here are distinctly two very specific websites ezinearticles.com and Hubpages.com. On the other hand, www.2knowmyself. com which seems to be piled to the gills with long tail articles is not stirred at all, and neither is iVillage.

What Specifications Could Have Resulted In Lost Rankings?

1. It appeared that websites whose pages had fewer and or far lower intrusive blocks of advertisements on them tended to be in the achiever bucket, while those with progressively intrusive advertising were likely to be found in the loser grouping.
2. Similarly, websites whose UI design would probably be depicted as more advanced, superior quality, heedful and “attractive” were achievers vs. the “ugly” websites that tended to be in the loser bucket.
3. When it came to user-generated-content (UGC) websites, those which tended to pull in “thin” contributions (like Hubpages, EzineArticles, or Buzzle) suffered, while those with productive, often more reliable, non-paid, and not-intended to build SEO value or links (like DailyMotion, Etsy, Facebook , LinkedIn) gained.
4. In the “rich content” sphere, pages with less usable and easily-consumable content (like AllBusiness, FindArticles) tended to suffer as compared to the content-rich websites like LOC. gov, and HuffingtonPost that gained heavily.

Primarily based on these, we have some suppositions about what signs Google may have used in this update:

User usage data - Signs like time-on-site, click-through-rate and “success” of the search visit (based on other usage data).

Quality raters – A machine-learning type algorithm which takes into account the quality rating given by the people or the quality raters may be an unsafe method to construct algorithms. This is so because no human can actually say why a site is grading higher vs. lower or what the elements are – they might be derived functions of very weird data points rather than interpretable mechanisms.

Content analysis – Topic modeling algorithms, those that compute or score readability, singularity/robustness analysis and in many cases even visual “attractiveness” of content display could be utilized.

How Does It Affect You?

With this new Google update, it is the right time to re-work the SEO strategy altogether. In case you opt for methods to trick the search engines into ranking you better; you might pay a big price for this. If you are indulging in techniques to drive up the ranking artificially, Google would not tolerate this anymore.

If your business largely depends on the Internet, then you just can’t afford to do this sort of stuff. It might incur immense monetary losses to the companies that are involved in the same.

What Should You Focus On?

With this strategy of Google, it has helped the people in the right direction. We can now expect higher quality search results. The part of being “High-Quality” is beneficial for the users now. If the users think that your website is of High-Quality, then you would become more relevant. Thus, this would finally increase your Google rankings.

Considering all these elements into account, the response is wearyingly familiar. Establish trust in your website. Engage with your clients directly either on your website through good content by going out onto the internet and witness the complaints and enquiries about your merchandises.

Try and create a great website with original and informative content as far as possible. To escape from this issue, focus on making a good user experience rather than laying stress on quick and filthy short-term techniques.

What To Do If You Are Hit By The Farmer Update Unfairly?

If you feel that you are a unjustified victim of this Google Update, then you can tweet at Google’s spam captain Matt Cutts, as the Cult Of Mac did. But, Google was very sure that this is not what assisted the Cult Of Mac nor can it be something meant to assist particular websites separately, because they are not doing alterations like that. The whole system is created to work automatically and no manual favors or alterations are done.

If your website has been affected by this Algorithm change, bear in mind that this modification was not a manual activity and does not aim finite websites. Google cannot thence manually restore a website’s rankings. This alteration is dependent directly on algorithmic signs.

Now it’s time to have a glance at your analytics data:

1. What is the bounce rate of the website from search? Do searchers click through from the search results and stick to the site or do they bounce back and click on some different result?
2. If the bounce rate is higher, you need to analyze whether is it high for all the queries or only for few topics?
3. Do the pages searchers distinctly respond the searcher’s queries?
4. What pages on the website have external links? Do big sections of the website do not have external links at all? What can you do to make the website content more interesting and worthful or elevate consciousness that it lives?
5. Is the content on the website unique or is it syndicated from some other place? If it’s not unique, what value do the pages append further than the genuine source?

The positive mindset is that as you make alterations to your website to get back the rankings, the website will turn more worthful to your audiences and it will become more enlisted. So invariably seek to be with unique content and relevant backlinks.

Drop me your comments on the same!