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Goodbye Link & Content Farms
People who are trying to make money online quickly learn that the first rule is what works today probably will not work tomorrow - unless you are delivering quality content, products or services to happy customers.
Everyone tries to chase the Google algo because free traffic from the Google search results pages can lead to lots of traffic and money. The problem is that Google continues to make changes that sometimes wipe out years worth of work. People who got used to lots of free traffic from Google can sometimes find themselves with almost no traffic.
In the beginning, a lot of people just stuffed keywords into their pages. These sites started geting penalized so people moved on to other acticities such as trying to build links into their sites. Link spam, farms, and brokers rose up and became the new hot thing until Google slapped these strategies back to where they belong.
Everyone always talks about how "content is king" so lately people have been trying to produce as much content as possible. Most of this content is very poor quality, but the more content and the more pages was seen as giving people a higher percentage chance of getting into the search results.
In the May update ("Mayday Update"), Google is starting to penalize sites that are producing a ton of low quality content. Content farms are now going the way of link farms - out to pasture.
This always seemed obvious to me. If your primary reason for writing something is to get into the Google search results, then sooner or later Google would sniff this out and ban it for the spam that it is. Article marketing and big content farms such as Squidoo, StumbleUpon, etc... are all in danger of seeing lower rankings. Many of these sites had already lost a lot of their high rankings, but now Google is taking theings a step further to find high quality content instead of just high quantity content.
What this tells me is that for the long-term health of my sites, I need to focus squarely on what the customer wants. I need to deliver a high quality experience and gain the trust of the user to generate repeat visits. Google will continue to get better at recognizing which sites are good sites and which sites exist mainly to attract and sell traffic. Google wants searchers to be respected and impressed by a site, not just havested and sold.
How are you building your sites? Are you tryiong to follow the latest tricks for getting into the Google search results? Are you focusing on Google or your customers?
Tags: Content Farms, Google, Mayday Update
Views: 3
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by James Scott on -
The link farms make sense because it is pretty obvious that people are trying to game the system by selling links or by creating huge directories of links. The content farms are little tougher to figure out.
Yes, I hope Google stops rewarding websites that produce a bunch of junk content. However, there are a lot of people who work very hard creating content that might be considered junk even though we work very hard to produce it. Is a forum considered a content farm? Is a wiki considered a content farm? I'm not sure where the lines are being drawn and of course Google will continue to redraw the lines as they try to deliver the best results.
The old "content is king" is now being challenged directly by Google. Good, quality, relevant content will still be rewarded, but the goal of just cranking out as much content as possible can get you ranked lower if you don't produce quality content. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
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Permalink Reply by Tom McCann on -
I can't imagine building a company like Squidoo or some other online company that relies on a concept that gets hit hard with new Google policies. We all are in the same boat, but I couldn't imagine having office space and employees dependent on a revenue stream that Google can destroy with one decision.
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Andover on -
My strategy is that if I am going to spend time building content, it needs to be valuable content that supports what my site is trying to do. If I do that, I am happy with what I am doing and hopefully the search engines will recognize my honest efforts and send some traffic my way.
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Permalink Reply by James Scott on
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If you look at the stats, the content farms have gone way down in the search results. If you haven't seen this yet or heard about this, please stop building content on content farms and start building content on your own sites.
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