Google’s Latest Farmer Update – Were You Affected?

A question came up last week about the latest  Google algorithm change that they’re calling the ‘Farmer Update’ because it’s mainly directed at websites that farm or scrape content.  These are sites that basically have less original content on them.

Here’s what Matt Cutts had to say:

“My post mentioned that “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.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

There were many websites affected with this change, one of them specifically was ezinearticles.com.

That brings me to my next question, will writing articles continue to be an effective method of promoting?

I personally think it will be, but we may need to rethink our method of transportation, so to speak In other words, my guess is that guest posting on other blogs or websites may take the place of submitting to article directories, and personally I hope it does.

Guest posting been one of my favorite marketing methods and I’ve talked about it quite a bit over the past few months and with good reason:

- You’ll get more traffic with guest posting because you’ll be exposing your work  on high visibility blogs.  And the more you guest post the more visible you are.  This isn’t just for bloggers, guest posting works for all websites.

- With a good call to action you will boost your subscriber base.

-Your building quality links

- You’ll be  expanding your reach because you’ll be in front of audiences that you my not otherwise get in front of.

A good mix of marketing methods is always wise but I think that writing guest blog posts could be one of the smartest, and easiest ways to increase traffic and rankings without worrying about the latest changes to the search engine algorithms.

P.S. Since the new farmer update negatively affected so many websites, room was made for other sites to rise up in the rankings.  How has your site fared?

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Tagged as: Internet Marketing