‘content farms’

The Google algorithms change all the time and as such announcements about the company targeting low quality content don’t cause tremendous ripples on the surface. The general speculation, however, is that content farms are next on the chopping block. Google Panda has search engine marketers work round the clock to ensure that their client sites comply with all requirements for good ranking and are free from so-called junk or spam type content. The newest adjustment to their Google Panda algorithm may be a bit more difficult to address.

How Does Google Evaluate High or Low Quality Content?

One will first have to know how Google evaluates content and identifies spam before pro-active steps can be taken to limit the effects of Google Panda. Unfortunately the information has not been shared widely, but the following factors may play a role:

• Whether a website is generally a content farm where numerous topics are covered by a range of authors or whether the site covers a specific niche.
• Author Rank may become more important as Google will give more attention to articles written by a higher ranking author than one with a poor rating.
• The general length and depth of the articles as well writing style may be assessed (doing so will take loads of manpower or highly intelligent bots though).
• Authority level of the author and site on a topic. A site containing articles about maize seeds for instance, will be frowned upon if it also covers pregnancy, televisions etc.
• The age of the site will still be important.

When considering Google’s announcement one must agree that it does seem as if content farms are the targets rather than normal websites. Whereas one in the past would have added an article section to a website where the marketing articles featured, it may become necessary to integrate the articles in the various website categories as to prevent Google from viewing those as spam type content. This of course, is still mere speculation, but it does pay to reflect on possible scenarios.

Shallow Content

Google mentioned low quality and shallow content in their announcement. The normal website publisher may become wary of the terms, especially if the site owner has not hired a professional content writer. In general, it should not affect the average website where the content is not churned out at an enormous rate simply to have information that could be indexed. If a site owner or SEO company focuses on the provision of in-depth quality articles rather than marketing the company in every possible article, they have no reason to be concerned.  The content farms are known for some low quality content, but many of the articles are well written. Some articles may get a push in the ranking simply because of the author rank, while others can get a shift into the sandbox.

Why the Drastic Steps?

Google has not announced loud and clear that the target is content farms, simply that they are considering numerous changes because they want to ensure accurate, relevant and high quality search results for their users. Google has come under fire recently specifically on the topic of quality of search results. It is thus an effort by the company to save reputation and thus restore integrity of their search engine. Sites offering content that is strikingly similar to information at various other sites may also become targets.

The recipe for success in search results thus includes the major ingredient of originality. Sites such as Article Base, eHow, and Ezine obviously will have to do cleaning and be strict on the acceptance policy. It is difficult to control content which comes free. If you don’t pay anything for the articles, you thus don’t have much leverage. According to Google around 12% of searches are affected in some way or another by the changes Google has made in its algorithms.

Matt Cutts heading up the spam cutting at Google mentioned in a recent blog that high quality sites will be rewarded. Just how, one will have to wait and see. It does seem that anonymous articles don’t fall in the category of quality and as such the name associated with an article, may very well become even more important.

The Upside

High quality content creators have on numerous occasions complained about the copying of their content by other sites. The new changes in the algorithm will help to reduce copying of articles and simply rewriting content sourced on the Internet. As such the SEO companies making use of high quality content writers will have no problem and may indeed benefit from the changes made by Google. It is rather frustrating for a company to invest in solid quality content generation to simply find numerous websites with strikingly similar content two or three weeks later. The changes will bring back integrity to SEO and content generation and although some may feel the panic attacks coming on, for the most part, quality content writers and SEO companies will appreciate the changes.

Tips for Getting On the Good Side of Panda

• Remove content that is similar on all you pages. This means that if you have a little paragraph or sentence that is placed on numerous pages of your site that it will be best to remove such.
• Check affiliate sites for duplicate or similar and low quality content about your products and remove where necessary.
• Delete any pages from your index which are no longer used – cut the dead wood.
• Remove small letter links from the bottom of your pages – not all, only the ones that can be seen as spam links.
• Control the content at sub-domains to minimize duplication and low quality content.
• Remove any graphics and navigation which can cause slow loading speed.
• Ensure that there are no repeats in the headings of pages.
• Create original titles and ensure that when you add articles to your site that the content is not only original in the sense that you have generated such instead of copying, but each article must differ considerably in content from other articles on your site.
• Keyword selection becomes important as articles covering similar keywords can be seen as too similar. Choose distinct keywords and where you can, remove tags which can get the Panda upset.

Numerous high quality sites have been hit by the latest Panda changes and are struggling to make a comeback. The best advice is to keep creating original high quality content that offers value to the reader and to follow the principles of good SEO practice to ensure that your website is not seen by Google as one of the content farm sites.

SEO companies and website owners have to work around the clock to adapt their online and website marketing strategies to ensure that the sites they promote don’t fall victim to the latest Google algorithm changes, which highlight the importance of original well-written content aimed at the reader and not the search engine.

Not too long ago, most of the articles written for the purpose of search engine optimization were still around the 450 word mark and before that you could find hundreds of long copy in the range of 600 to 700 words. At the same time also came the notion that all you needed to pass the Google algorithm was about 250 plus words. It became more cost-effective for website owners to have several pages of just over 300 words focussing on keywords, than paying more for high quality articles in the range of 600 words. SEO companies have employed several content writers paying them for mass production and thus a lower tariff rather than paying more for high quality articles.

In effect it has been fine up to now since the general agreed perception is that online users prefer shorter rather than longer articles. Web users often scan rather than read. Of course, you also need to consider that once the article goes over 600 words, the writer must be paid more as it also means a new ball game of quality. All of these factors have  contributed to a massive influx of articles rather than truly in-depth articles not saying the same old thing over and over just in different words.

Google isn’t trying to harm website owners. The opposite is true – to get better, more accurate results for searchers ensuring that the web doesn’t become one big mass of useless information. At the end of the day it all boils down to original content being the king. Google has through its algorithm changes targeted the content farms with names of numerous article directories and ‘how to’ sites being affected. Demand Media has been one of the sites hardest hit by the changes in search algorithms, but some innocent sites have also fallen victim to the changes in algorithms. The online search engine marketing strategy will have to be changed if it is focussed solely on rewrites and content creation without the user in mind. Website owners can still create stunning websites, but with articles aimed at informing and giving the user something of value.

What Is Value?

Determining what Google sees as value is altogether something else. Some have speculated that grammar mistakes, repeating of keywords too many times, length of articles, value of incoming links, age of the site, and loading time will all play their fair share in the website ranking.

How To Beat The Changes

Some tips on how to minimize the effect that the Google algorithm changes will have on your site are briefly shared below, but it should be noted that there are more than one hundred factors to be considered. Striking the right balance between search engine marketing and design of the site can mean the difference between landing in the sand box and still ranking in the top five for organic search results.

Share Traffic Between Sponsored/Direct and Organic Search Results

Don’t focus solely on the search results pages. You need to minimize the effects of any algorithm changes and with that then it will be better to have a loyal customer base coming back because you offer value. You will thus have to rethink quantity over quality. Rather have fewer new articles added to your site with keyword density carefully considered than having loads of shorter articles and blogs added offering little other than marketing value. SEO companies will have to reconsider their hiring policies and the pay rate offered to ensure that the writers will not simply write as many as possible articles to get enough income, but will take time to do proper research and of course, also because the articles will contain more words. Website owners will have to take note of this as higher ranks will also mean higher SEO costs.

Design The Site For Fast Loading

Not all users have the same Internet connectivity speed, but Google doesn’t penalise the site owner for that. Rather, it is looking at minimizing the effect on the environment by ensuring faster loading sites complying with the standards for accessibility and usability of W3C. Get rid of too much Flash and get back to basics. Focussed, easy to navigate, fast loading sites will do better. The website owners should reconsider videos at their sites. It may become better to have the videos run at YouTube and have them linked back to your site. Thus, having a YouTube channel for the purpose of website marketing will be better than showing all the videos at your site. Doing your part in minimizing the blue print we have on our environment, will help to decrease loading time and ensure the plus of better ranking.

Keyword Density Considerations

The keyword relevance to a site, topics discussed, and length of articles may in future play an important role. Keeping in mind that through the Google algorithm changes, sites adding the same old content just rewritten will be penalised, one must consider original content of value. With longer articles also comes the benefit of being able to space keywords better and reduce the risk of being noted as just a content farm.

Value Of Links

Incoming links will be judged according to the ranking of the sites from where the links are obtained and relevance to the content of the receiving website. Too many one to one links will be penalised. It comes back to good quality original content. If your site offers true value for the reader, other sites will link to it. Link exchange programs must thus be reconsidered. It doesn’t mean that one on one links will be out altogether, just that a balance must be maintained rather than relying on link exchange programs.

Impact On Article Marketing

Article directories have been severely affected by the Google algorithm changes on 25 February 2011. Some of the hardest hit sites are that of Wisegeek.com, Ezinearticles.com, Suite101.com, and Hubpages.com. Mahalo had severe staff cuts because of the changes and millions of dollars have been lost by the content farms. Website owners will find that article marketing will take on new meaning. Getting links in by submitting articles to the article directories can still be done, but with caution as to not to overdo it. Websites gaining traffic through negative comments at their forums will also see a severe drop in traffic.

Other Steps To Take In Meeting The New SEO Challenges

Create a Facebook account and build a business profile on the Facebook site. Ensure that blog posts are longer and offer real value. Join Twitter and move videos to a YouTube channel. Review your websites and remove any form of keyword stuffing or any resemblance to such. Rely less on article submission and more on the creation of well written longer original content. It may mean that the SEO companies will have to pay more than just doubling the amount for 300 to 600 word articles for the articles written by content writers because the depth of research must visible in the articles, but at the end of the day original content will be king in the battle of surviving the Google algorithm changes.

It feels like déjà vu whenever a new search engine make its appearance with the notion to take the internet by storm and set the new bench mark for what they think a search engine should be. The latest in line is blekko, a new search engine that was recently opened its public beta  and already claiming that they provide the average Joe with “better search results”.

What’s blekko’s claim to fame?

They want to slash spam out of search results completely, thus making search not only safer but more relevant too. It is evident that they are fed up with search results inundating users with content that is more about making the sale than providing high quality information to the searcher. The way they are planning to achieve this is by making use of human input into their algorithmic results which should then screen out content from content farms in the likes of Demand Media. According to reports the average internet user is completely oblivious to the fact that they are, in fact, consuming Demand Media content.

In a recent interview the chief executive officer of Blekko Inc., Rich Skrenta, stated that blekko was starting out without advertising, but since we all know how effective it has been – just look at Google’s AdWords – they plan to monopolize on this once their traffic has built up. He continued on to discuss the current market shares, stating that they didn’t really have to make a dent in order to be profitable, all they need is 1/10 of 1% of the billion+ searches done per day and it will still be a lucrative endeavour for blekko.

blekko is all about the ‘Slashtags’

Do you know what ‘slashtags’ are? If your answer is no then you don’t have to worry that you might be the only one as the majority of internet users don’t know either. Ok yes, most people in general are not all that clued up when it comes to online lingo, but this brings is back to the question as to what exactly ‘slashtags’ are. Basically it comes down to using the slasher symbol “/” to avoid the search results from providing the user with unwanted sites, including those used for spam as well as sites with phishing and malware infections.

The reality is that Google is light-years ahead of time. For instance, Google makes it possible to limit your search to one site by simply typing site:www.ilead.co.za. Then, of course, there are also numerous desktop power search tools to limit results.

When we gave it a try by doing a simple search for “online marketing South Africa” we found it rather alarming that their list of slashtags were very limiting and didn’t include basic factors into the search/results such as locations, as you can see below (result no.2 Chicago web design).

When we scrolled down a little further on their first page of results we even found one or two websites that had nothing to do with online marketing, never mind South Africa – point in case result no. 10 where the website’s content was far from what we were searching for:

You can, however, create new slashtags but in order to do so, it is necessary to create your own profile page. From here you can create a list of keywords for your subject after which you can opt whether you’d prefer to keep your slashtags private or share them with blekko’s users. You are also able to follow someone’s slashtags – similar to following somebody’s tweets on Twitter – which will appear on the left hand side of your profile under the header “following”.

Rank search results

Blekko seems to be very transparent as to how it works. Moreover, blekko allows website owners to see how they look at a site which can help owners to improve their search engine optimization (SEO) for blekko. Some information they provide website owners with includes:

• when last their search bots crawled the site;
• how many pages they looked at; and
• if/where they found duplicate content from your site on other websites.

For online marketers such as ourselves, one thing that stood out was that it didn’t show data on the terms users used most often that drove the traffic to a website in the first place. For optimizers this is a key factor they’ve overlooked, especially if they want website owners to optimize their websites for blekko.

Our conclusion

Although it is impressive enough that blekko was able to get backers who were willing to provide them with $24million to create a “new” search engine when Google owns the monopoly, we are rather doubtful, however, that this will lead to a “slashtag revolution”. As stated, many search engines tried to leapfrog Google before, but Google is still pretty darn good and we think that their search results are far more relevant in comparison to blekko’s – as we’ve shown you. Ok, yes, Google will have to keep on being innovative, but they have been doing a brilliant job thus far. Which brings us to the point – such a moderate improvement will hardly vault blekko’s search engine into prominence, making them nothing more than a little scratch instead of the swashbuckling slash they were going for.