Google Targeting Content Farms, Low Quality & Shallow Content as Spam

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Ever since the Mayday update last year, there has been a lot of complaints about low quality search in Google and a wide rise in reported spam. Matt Cutts announced last week that Google has approved a change in the search results algo that discounts low quality content.

Oh shit… not another friggin change at Google right? Yup… But if you write good quality content and aren’t just auto-generating pages on your site… you need to look at the upside and make some lemonade with this one!

How does it affect You and I?

I guess that depends on how you get and use content for your sites. Primarily, I make use of a killer content writer so its not a big deal for the most part, but I did start noticing traffic fluctuations on a few sites that reprint “press releases”, so I stopped immediately and even went to the extreme of no-indexing the duplicate content so it has no further effect on the rest of the site.

Barry Schwartz published an article this morning that refers to the algo changes starting around the 26-27th of January. On my own sites, I started seeing traffic fluctuations on the 25th-27th as well, and as Matt Cutts stated on the 28th, the change was complete. Press releases and industry news account for about 8% of the content on the (19/165 indexed pages) site I built in October. Since Jan26th, it has seen roughly a 25-30% drop in traffic, but at this point, I cannot attribute it to the algo change. (It’s seasonally driven as well, and it was a mild weather week in many places)

Barry goes on to mention that John Mu, one of the Google employees who monitors and helps out at the Google Webmaster Forums, was spotted “suggesting” that a webmaster separate out the non-original content and block it from crawling and indexing. That’s a mouthful…but means a lot!!

We can all read whatever we want between the lines of this latest update… but its pretty clear to me.

John Mu Statement: (I wish there was a tag of some sort to designate that the following content is a reprint, hmmm block-quote?)

One thing that is very important to our users (and algorithms) is high-quality, unique and compelling content. Looking through that site, I have a hard time finding content that is only available on the site itself. If you do have such high-quality, unique and compelling content, I’d recommend separating it from the auto-generated rest of the site, and making sure that the auto-generated part is blocked from crawling and indexing, so that search engines can focus on what makes your site unique and valuable to users world-wide.

My Take on it?

Don’t reprint content unless you keep it from being indexed!
Don’t publish duplicate content unless you keep it from being indexed!
Focus on providing Unique and Compelling content to users AND SEARCH ENGINES
If you DO have duplicate content, IT CAN HARM the rest of the website!

Sounds to me like not only are the eHow’s and Mahalo’s being weeded out… but any kind of auto-generated content sites are going to take a hit also?!

Watching Stats on Pins and Needles

I know a lot of people use WordPress plugins like WP Robot, ReviewAzon, Caf-Content, Article fetchers etc… I guess if it were me, I would take a step back and look at the amount of unique content you have on the sites in addition to the fed content. Only YOU know if you will see any effect from this algo change or not, but it’s auto-generators that are in the gun-sights right now…

I would be watching my stats on pins and needles, and if I saw a bunch of peaks and valley’s in the last 5-10 days… I would review how I was using that content and how to get it separated from unique content!

Have you seen any effect?

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About the Author, Mark Hansen

Mark Hansen has written 573 article(s) at the Niche Store Builder site.

I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.

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10 Comments »

Eric said:

I had my highest traffic day ever on the 26th (then again yesterday) so I am definitely seeing the flux. I’m not sure if it’s Google, the relative young age of my site and it’s gradual/natural climb in traffic…or both.
So, for me…just by looking at my stats and very limited, short term data starting at the 26th, it’s been a positive. But, I agree Mark…I cannot attribute it to the algo change w/o more time…

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# 1 February 2011 at 10:48 am

Mark (author) said:

@Eric – Awesome Eric! That rebuild is going to pay off well for you! :-)

Its the same here… up and down in traffic. Sites using press releases seem to take a hit on one end (the news sections) but are also seeing a slight increase on the unique guides side!

Gonna be fun to watch shake out!

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# 1 February 2011 at 11:12 am

DaveT said:

Thanks for the heads up Mark. As usual I am a step behind the curve I just started to use news reprints on some of my sites. I guess the information in them may still be good for the viewers even if not for the stats. Maybe in the future you can give us a crash course on how to block those sections from being crawled.

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# 1 February 2011 at 12:25 pm

Mark Hansen (author) said:

@DaveT – I know your site well Dave. I will reply to you one-one via email. :-)

To anyone else who may want to block pages or posts… I use the “robots meta” plugin, which adds a sidebar widget to the wp-editor. Depending on your SEO plugin, you may already have a built in solution.

Mark

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# 1 February 2011 at 12:55 pm

Sonia said:

Matt C. says:

we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

I thought that’s what they always were doing, so I’m not exactly sure what has changed in this new algorithm?
Can you not have one sentence of duplicate content ever on a page? Will this page be penalized because you quoted someone and is considered duplicate content even though the rest of the page is unique? I would hope not. What is the point of transition between low-level and high-level original content? As usual, Google is making my head spin.

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# 1 February 2011 at 12:55 pm

KCMark said:

I don’t really buy most of this. Cutts keeps talking about doing away with sites that have “shallow” or “low quality” content. Those are completely subjective terms. Google is nowhere as smart and advanced as most people think they are. How are they going to automate the process of evaluating the content of every site out there and making a judgement on whether it is good or bad content. Take everything that Matt Cutts says with a grain of salt.

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# 3 February 2011 at 9:03 am

ShanonM said:

Just ran across this data on the algorithm change.

http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html

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# 27 February 2011 at 2:45 am

Mark Hansen (author) said:

@ShanonM – Great find Shanon! I have been following along in WMW on this one, and it has had huge positive effects on all but one or sites in our network!

We have 1 site (its in this sidebar, DIY) thats loaded with general info that seems to have suffered from the content-farm update. All others are reaping the benefits… some are up 200-300% (from 2000 daily, to 6000 or more daily visitors)

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# 27 February 2011 at 8:43 am