Matt Cutts announced that last week Google made a change to the algorithm focused specifically on tacking their issue with web spam. You can read more here however in true to Matt Cutts fashion the statement can be read in multiple ways.
Apart from tacking wholesale duplicate content Matt states…
…and sites with low levels of original content.
Does this mean sites that have a lot of duplicate content on them or sites that have a small amount of original content per page?
..I’m confused already.
I just missed out on the JAN 2011 page rank update part for my SEO Orange County website. Man, this means that I will probably have to wait for another 9 months or more for the next PR?
I know PR is not important from traffic and business conversion point of view, but the client wants to see a good PR! And they are adamant! So is the tentative date for the next PR after 9 more months?
@susmit, sounds like you need to convince your client that PR isn’t important for traffic and conversions. The publicly available PR figure is just a badge of pride for webmasters.
Hi there, Mark:
It seems like you haven’t updated your blog for a couple weeks now, so you haven’t had time to share your thoughts on the Farmer update. (As of this writing, the farmer update may not have even been rolled out in the UK and Europe, so I apologize if this is a US-centric post).
As you have probably heard, many sites were nailed. suite101 claims to have lost 94% of their traffic starting on February 24th. Mahalo says they will immediately begin laying off 10% of their workforce.
The farmer update (officially known in google as the Panda update – farmer is the name given by Danny Sullivan), is geared toward weeding out low quality content farms.
Many of those sites that have been accepted publish freelance articles – thousands of them – millions of them in some instances. Many have stated that they will start having new “quality” guidelines. One site boasts proudly that they are increasing the number of words required per article from 250 to 350.
I believe that those sites are headed in the wrong direction, and will make themselves worse. More content, and less people to edit that content, is a recipe for junk.
Having worked five years as a print journalist, I can tell you that we had about 1 editor and two proofreaders for about every ten writers. So we basically had a support staff of 3 people for every ten.
The idea that you can provide high quality content while having a minimum number of editors is laughable. They need to see what the ration of writers to editors is at the New York Times (a site that Matt Cutts said was something of a gold standard when it comes to quality), and implement that.
So if those sites want to rank better, the first thing they should do, IMHO, is to hire MORE people to proofread, edit, and cite references to the articles. They need to figure out how to make those pages quality resources for people that go above and beyond the hundreds of other pages that are similar.
Matt Cutts has said over and over that if you just create great content, and it will rank well. Having GREAT editors is one of the best ways to ensure having great content.
Thanks in advance for letting me rant about this.
lol yeah ive been busy getting a new job as head of digital in manchester… interesting times.
love the rant. as an seo i predict 1 of 2 things. article marketing will tighten up controls and turn into resource based marketing (im already seeing this) whilst the unmanaged sites are inundated with junk spun content; and
the seo community will move from article marketing to guest posting in a big way to fill the gap left by articles and increase the unique link domain metric
either way content should improve which i guess is googles goal