Were you affected by the "Farmer Update?" What are you doing about it?
-
I woke up on Friday morning to see that my traffic from Google on Thursday was down 30% on one of my sites. Traffic hasn't bounced back, and I'm wondering why I've been lumped in with the content farms. My site only has original, high quality content. It has a great link profile with tons of links from .edu page, and I've always played by Google's rules.
I can't understand why my site has been negatively affected, which makes it hard to do something about it. Right now, the only thing that I can come up with is to work really hard at building more links.
Were you affected? What are you doing about it?
-
Hi WillyF, we're wondering if you have any progress to report with your rankings, or if Google responded to your reconsideration request with any more information. A lot of people are real interested to see if anyone is recovering from Panda/Farmer, how long it's taking, and how they did it. Would love to see an update here!
-
If you have a very large site, check google webmaster tools, and run a custom SEOmoz crawl to look for a rise in site errors. Larger sites appear to have been heavily crawled pre-panda and subsequently shown large numbers of errors on some sites as panda was rolled out.
If your content is all unique, i would check your site structure/performance and see if there are any nasties there first.
-
Has there been any progress on your site's rankings?
-
I'd like to see a larger data set. After most algo updates, that significantly impact rankings, there are likely to be large fluxuations in the days, weeks, and months following the update. You may find your traffic "bounces back", but it may take several months.
-
The farmer update was great for us. We sell prodcuts on our site and have original content. Our rankings went up.
-
I did file a reconsideration request right away, though I didn't have anything to fess up to. I also was featured in a Wired article on Good Sites Caught By Spam Cleanup, so hopefully there will be some forward progress soon.
-
I'd attempt to contact Google. I know it's really hard, but there are ways. Good luck man I feel for ya.
-
It's all content that I wrote myself. There's not even a question whether it's unique.
-
Does your site have a lot of unique content? All of my clients experienced increased rankings. They're ecommerce based sites with unique products descriptions. Some of their competitors that drop ship are using product descriptions from the manufacturer and they all experienced a drop in the rankings.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does changing text content on a site affects seo?
HI, i have changed some h1 and h2 , changed and added paragraphs,fixed plagiarism,grammar and added some pics with alt text, I have just done it today, I am ranking on second page QUESTION-1 is it gonna affect my 2 months SEO efforts? QUESTION -2 Do I have to submit sitemap to google again? QUESTION-3 does changing content on the site frequently hurts SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
Thousands of duplicate website links at "Who links the most" in Google webmasters. Any risk being duplicate website links pointing to website?
Hi all, As I mentioned some days back here, our duplicate website got indexed a month back. Unfortunately there are links to our original website. I noticed that thousands of links are from our duplicate website at "Links to Your Site". Will this hurts? Now we have blocked the duplicate website getting indexed. What to do to remove these links from "Who links the most"? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Is it Okay to have "No Response" pages?
Hi all, I can see some "No Response" pages which gives a error message "Site cannot be reached" or keeps on loading but don't. I have got this list from Screaming from spider tool. Do we need to fix these or ignore? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Post penguin & panda update. what would be a good seo strategies for brand new sites
Hi there. I have the luxury of launching a few sites after the penguin and panda updates, so I can start from scratch and hopefully do it right. I will get SEO companies to help me with this so i just want to ask for advices on what would be a good strategies for a brand new site. my understand of the new updates is this content and user experience is important, like how long they spend, how many pages etc social media is important. we intent to engage FB and twitter alot. in New Zealand, not too many people use google+ so we will probbaly just concentrate on the first two hopefully we will try to get people to share our website via social media, apparent that is important should only concentrate on high quality backlinks with a good diverse set of alt tags, but concentrate on branding rather than keywords. Am i correct to say that so far? if that is the principle, what would be the strategy to implement these goals? Links to any articles would also be great please. Love learning. i just want to do this right and hopefully try to future proof the sites against updates as possible. i guess quality content and links will most likely to be safe. Thank you for your help.
Algorithm Updates | | btrinh0 -
Affect in SERPs when moving footer links off the homepage
I have several pages that rank highly in the SERPs and these pages are linked directly to my homepage in the footer. I want to clean up my footer because I have too many site wide links but don't want to hurt the SERP rankings during the transition. Will removing these page links from the footer impact SERP rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | braunna0 -
Understanding the concept of "Keywords"?
To run my campaigns on SEOmoz or google or other search engines, i need to have some clarity on what exactly a keyword means. firstly, how do the comibnation of different words work? Example : Buy apple laptop in india, 2) Buy apple laptop india 3) apple laptop india Are 1, 2, 3 considered as keywords OR Apple, laptop, India, Buy, considered as keywords? to run campaigns in SEOmoz how do i use the tool more effectively, should i chose how my users would search in the search engine or use certain keywords. in the above example the only difference between 1 & 2 is the word "in", and i see a significant difference in the search results. How do use/target my keywords?
Algorithm Updates | | NikhilM0 -
Toolbar PageRank Updated
Just reporting that there has been a public toolbar PageRank update. What did Santa give you this round?
Algorithm Updates | | Dan-Petrovic1 -
Another Panda update?
Our high quality (IMHO!) editorial technology site got hit by around ~20% of Google search referrals when Panda went live in the UK on the 12th. But the last couple of days it's returned to "normal". Is that the effects of our frantic scrabbling around trying things, or have Google tweaked the algorithm again, to remove the editorial sites which got caught accidentally?
Algorithm Updates | | StuartAnderton0