The world’s biggest search engine Google has made it known that it’s out to get the Farmers and all those in the SEO consultancy arena need to be aware of the changes.
Now, all those owning a combine harvester needn’t worry, because in this case, farmers refer to websites that are there to provide banks of content, not for the reader, but to attract traffic which can be monetized by page ads and affiliate campaigns.
In other words, content farms are in the Google cross-hairs and webmasters will do well to ensure that their sites do not resemble these type of sites, otherwise they could be penalised.
A content farm is basically a website which has masses of freshly updated content which is either of mediocre, or poor quality, and spread across a huge number of websites. Indeed, it might also include good quality content, but is there not to sell a product, or service from the pages, but to support ads, affiliates, or links.
The attack from Google comes in the shape of a search algorithm change which has been labelled the Farmer Update. It has caused consternation amongst the SEO consultancy professions, a number of which are complaining that many legitimate content farm sites are being unfairly penalised by having their rankings adjusted downwards.
The other issue is that links from such websites could also have been depreciated, although experts believe that the old links will remain true to their original values, whereas new links won’t get the weight they once did.
But it’s not just content farms that will be hit; sites that have high volume, low value content (which is deemed to be duplicated, or not relevant), could lose their rank as well.
So, farmers beware, the good days could be over. And SEO consultancy operations will have to take note as well; things are changing!