Google’s Panda Killed The Farmer

I received some good feed back regarding yesterday’s post about the “Google farmer update“.

Today I’d like to go into a little more detail why Google targeted these so called “content farms” and why it’s good for the search engines.

As you discovered yesterday, content farms are websites designed exclusively to target millions of keyword searches every day in order to generate ad revenue from web visitors.

They have done this by publishing thousands of pages of content.

And In some cases… millions.

Most of this content is created by freelance writers or paid employees.

These sites target everything from real estate investing to how to raise Gerbils.

Where these sites have gone astray is most of the content is of poor quality.

Meaning very basic articles are created or rewritten. In many cases the articles are taken from the site, rewritten and then published back to the site.

So why is this a problem and why did Google have to fix it? ( And in some cases as I’ll show you…didn’t fix it)

Let’s take for example a search term like “migraine headache.”

Below you’ll see the top 4 search results as shown by Google:

As you can see some of the top search results reveal trusted sites like the Mayo Clinic, Medicinenet.com, Wiki and a Woman’s Governmental health site.

Now change the search term to “How to get rid of migraine headaches” and you’ll see some very different results:

So what you’ll find are results returned from sites like Youtube.com, Ehow.com, GetRidOfThings.com and oh yeah…Ezinearticles.com.

So let me ask you, would you rather take advice from someone writing for the Mayo Clinic or some random person who shoots a video giving tips for eliminating migraine headaches?

(This is an example of how Google hasn’t fixed everything…nor can they in my opinion)

This is the dilemma Google is trying to solve.

In fact wired magazine published an interview yesterday with Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, Google’s top anti-spam crime fighters.

I’ll post a link to the article at the bottom of this post but I point out some of the top points I took from the interview.

1. Internally Google has called this algorithm update ” Panda”. They named the update after a Google engineer who was responsible for discovering the algorithm breakthrough Google was looking for.

2. Google has gotten so good at indexing new content their index grew very quickly. They were able to filter out the gibberish type of spam but could not eliminate “thin” content.

3. Google defines “thin” or “shallow” as the minimum one can create and NOT be considered spam.

4. Google was able to identify a mathematical equation which would identify “thin” or “shallow” content.

I think one of the best pieces of information was volunteered by Matt Cutts.

Matt said Google asked human reviews when reviewing websites the following questions:

1. Would you be OK giving your credit to this site?

2. Would this article be OK if you found it in a magazine?

3. Does the site have EXCESSIVE ads?

Boy this is gold if you ask me. You need to ask yourself these questions about your website or web-page as you’re creating it.

In fact, I read a post yesterday on the SEOmoz blog where Rand Fishkin revealed his thoughts on possible factors causing lost rankings.

Rand points out the following possibilities:

1. It seems sites with larger and more intrusive blocks of Ads lost. Those with little or no ads won.

2. Ugly looking old school type websites lost.  More modern well designed websites won.

This would support Matt Cutts statements where they were looking to drop sites with lots of ads and did not portray trust to the user.

So there you have it. The skinny on the Google Farmer Update….I mean Google Panda Update.

And here’s the link to the entire Matt Cutts Amit Singhal Wired Interview.

I hope you enjoyed this post and if you have any questions or concerns please post them in the comment box below.

Have a GREAT weekend!

Now go dominate Google, Bill Parlaman

Related posts:

1. Google SEO-How To Leverage Googles Ranking System