Tag Archives: Google Farmer Update
Google Panda Update & Google guidance on building high-quality websites – Google Webmaster Central Blog
In recent months we’ve been especially focused on helping people find high-quality sites in Google’s search results. The “Panda” algorithm change has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality websites, so most of you reading have nothing to be concerned about. However, for the sites that may have been affected by Panda we wanted to provide additional guidance on how Google searches for high-quality sites.
Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals. Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.
What counts as a high-quality site?
Google Panda Update/Google’s Farmer Update and what it Means to Your Business
Google announced what may ultimately be one of the biggest changes to their algorithm yet.
From the Official Google Blog: “Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”
Notice the language being used. Specifically, “…reduce rankings for low-quality sites…” That means it’s not only individual posts or pieces of content will be penalized for being deemed “low-quality” but entire websites. The announcement also mentions “low-value add for users” and sites that “copy content from other websites.” The target? Content farms, to start. These sites exist and profit based on volume. The more content produced (often for a pittance) the better they do – or did.
To most observers and users, this focus on volume resulted in millions of low-quality pieces of content cluttering the search engine results pages (SERPs). The writers producing content for these content farms are paid largely based on views. No indexing in Google, no views. No views, no pay. No pay, no writers … and no content.
