The new Google Algorithm change on Feb, 2011 (Content Farming)

In January 2011, Google announced that it was planning to do a major change in their algorithm in a way to deal with websites that thrived on duplicate and shallow content and the SEO strategy of link building through these shallow content. However, no one anticipated the impact of this so called ‘farmer algorithm’ also referred to as the ‘Panda’ Update. The algorithm change that was brought into effect on February 24th 2010 impacted a whole 11.8% of its search ranking. Given that Google controls over 80% of all searches in the world, an almost 12% shift in search engine result positions (SERP) means that thousands of businesses and websites were impacted by the change. The hue and cry that followed this infamous algorithm update was definitely expected. The update dominated most of the SEO news items, blogs and social media for the rest of February and way into March 2010. The details below will help you understand what the Panda update was, who were the victims and what to do to be on Google’s good books as far as the Farmer algorithm is concerned.

What Necessitated the Update

For many years now, article writing has been a major SEO and link building strategy. Google’s search engine ranking, as with other major search engines, is mainly based on the number of inbound links to a site. Therefore, to gain inbound links, SEO firms and webmasters sort to submit articles in article directories with links to their sites. For long, these article directories, which have come to be known as content farms, thrived in Google ranking with many of the link building articles enjoying high SERP. The draw back with many of these article directories was that no much supervision was done especially as concerns the quality and facts of the content. Therefore, there were many articles with shallow content, poor grammar and false facts that found their way to Google’s top search rankings. Since Google has become synonymous to ‘searching’ and more people are turning to Google as the source of information and facts, it was up to the search engine giant to live up to its name. Therefore, on this fateful day, Google cracked the whip on these content farms. It is this move to try and curb the dominance of the content farms that impacted more than a tenth of Google search results.

Impacted of the Update

According to statistics released by both Sistrix and Searchmetrics, companies that monitor and provide search engine data, most article submission websites got impacted by this update. These websites including Suite101, Helium, Mahalo, Wisegeek, Ezinearticles and Hubpages. The statistics revealed that these sites lost on average over 80% of Google ranking on their articles. Furthermore, for the remaining 20% or so of their articles that remained ranked, most moved to further positions and pages in the search results. These statistics left no guessing as to who Google was targeting. The after-shock of this hit was that websites whose link building was heavily skewed to these content farms were also adversely affected by the update. Many webmasters reported drastic loss of favorable SERP and some even saw loss of PageRank. However, there were still genuine and quality content sites that became part of the collateral damage and lost significant Google ground without any connections to the content farms. Google was quick to admit that this was expected and they said they were willing to make adjustments for genuine cases as far as they could make such exceptions. However, by and large, the Panda algorithm update was quite successful in weeding content farms and the associated impact of these farms.

How to Survive Panda and Other Related Updates

While announcing the Panda update in the Google official blog, Google made it clear that it was not through dealing with low quality content that found its way to top rankings in its search results. Therefore, the saga is not yet over for any SEO firm that thrives in low quality and duplicate content. Therefore, as an SEO, blogger or webmasters, there are certain steps that you will need to take to ensure that you remain in Google’s good books. For starters, link building needs to seize being a churning of cheap low quality content. Google is clear on this and it will keep its fight against such strategies. Webmasters must purpose to give high quality at all times. This way, building Google’s trust to top SERP may even be much easier. Besides this, people now need to look beyond article submissions to other SEO strategies including social media marketing, quality blogging and content baiting. Link building must also be done from a more diverse source to avoid being majorly impacted by other future Google updates.