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
-
Is "Author Rank," User Comments Driving Losses for YMYL Sites?
Hi, folks! So, our company publishes 50+ active, disease-specific news and perspectives websites -- mostly for rare diseases. We are also tenacious content creators: between news, columns, resource pages, and other content, we produce 1K+ pieces of original content across our network. Authors are either PhD scientists or patients/caregivers. All of our sites use the same design. We were big winners with the August Medic update in 2018 and subsequent update in September/October. However, the Medic update in March and de-indexing bug in April were huge losers for us across our monetized sites (about 10 in total). We've seen some recovery with this early June update, but also some further losses. It's a mixed bag. Take a look at this attached MOZ chart, which shows the jumps and falls around the various Medic updates. The pattern is very similar on many of our sites. As per JT Williamson's stellar article on EAT, I feel like we've done a good job in meeting those criteria, which has left we wondering what isn't jiving with the new core updates. I have two theories I wanted to run past you all: 1. Are user comments on YMYL sites problematic for Google now? I was thinking that maybe user comments underneath health news and perspectives articles might be concerning on YMYL sites now. On one hand, a healthy commenting community indicates an engaged user base and speaks to the trust and authority of the content. On the other hand, while the AUTHOR of the article might be a PhD researcher or a patient advocate, the people commenting -- how qualified are they? What if they are spouting off crazy ideas? Could Google's new update see user comments such as these as degrading the trust/authority/expertise of the page? The examples I linked to above have a good number of user comments. Could these now be problematic? 2. Is Google "Author Rank" finally happening, sort of? From what I've read about EAT -- particularly for YMYL sites -- it's important that authors have “formal expertise” and, according to Williamson, "an expert in the field or topic." He continues that the author's expertise and authority, "is informed by relevant credentials, reviews, testimonials, etc. " Well -- how is Google substantiating this? We no longer have the authorship markup, but is the algorithm doing its due diligence on authors in some more sophisticated way? It makes me wonder if we're doing enough to present our author's credentials on our articles, for example. Take a look -- Magdalena is a PhD researcher, but her user profile doesn't appear at the bottom of the article, and if you click on her name, it just takes you to her author category page (how WordPress'ish). Even worse -- our resource pages don't even list the author. Anyhow, I'd love to get some feedback from the community on these ideas. I know that Google has said there's nothing to do to "fix" these downturns, but it'd sure be nice to get some of this traffic back! Thanks! 243rn10.png
Algorithm Updates | | Michael_Nace1 -
Does Google giving more important to internal pages than homepage recently? Especially after the recent Major algo update?
Hi everybody, I can see the change Google brought in the SERP. Previously website homepages will be shown for primary keywords, now it's slowly and almost switched to showing most related internal pages in a website. You can check same for keyword "SEO", Most or all the results are internal pages. I can see this change for our primary keyword from last one month. So basically Google is trying to show a page explaining about the primary keywords rather than website, that's how "what is seo" pages are ranking than homepages. If there is no such pages existed or not well written, Google is just showing the website homepage. But I noticed that websites ranking with homepages are dropped compared to the websites with dedicated page about that primary keyword. Please share your thoughts. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Hit by an unnamed Google update on November 30th - Still suffering
Hi, Moz Community. Just decided to sign up for a free trial because I'm absolutely at my wits end here. Here's my site: cheapgamesguru.com I run a small PC gaming blog monetized by affiliate marketing. I do all the writing, SEO, etc. myself. The content I write is, from what I can tell, fully complying with Google's guidelines, and in and of itself is pretty informative and high-quality. My site was started in December of 2015, and it was doing very well for a good 10 or 11 months - until late November of 2016. Then something happened. My traffic started plummeting - I went from getting nearly 300 organic users a day (Not sessions - actual unique users) to 80, then 40, and now I'm lucky to get over 15 a day. I do not do ANY black hat SEO whatsoever. I have not taken part in any shady link building schemes, nor do I try to trick Google in any way. I just write good content, do good keyword research (Targeting only low-hanging fruit and low-difficulty keywords using KWFinder), and do my best to provide a good user experience. I run no ads on my site. Glenn Gabe wrote about a potential Google update on November 29th, but the stuff he said in his article doesn't seem to affect me - my mobile site is perfectly fine, according to Google's own metrics and testing tools. Here's the article in question: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/november-30-2016-google-algorithm-update/ At first, I thought it was possible that this was a result of my competitors simply doing far better than me - but that doesn't seem to be the case, as their rankings did not actually move - mine simply pummeted. And many of their sites are far worse than mine in terms of grammar, spelling, and site speed. I understand backlinks are important, by the way, but I really don't think that's why my site was hit. Many competitors of mine have little to no backlinks and are doing great, and it would also not make much sense for Google to hit an otherwise great site just because they have few backlinks. A friend of mine has reached out to Glenn Gabe himself to see if he can get his input on my site, but he's had a busy schedule and hasn't gotten a chance to take a look yet. I recently obtained a backlink from a highly relevant DA 65 site (About a month ago, same niche as my site), and it now shows up in Search Console and Ahrefs - but it hasn't affected rankings whatsoever. Important Note: I'm not only just ranking poorly for stuff, I'm ranking in position 100-150+ for many low-competition keywords. I have no idea why that is happening - is my site THAT bad, that my content deserves to be ranking on page 15 or lower? Sorry for the long question. I'm struggling here, and just wanted to give as much information as possible. I would really appreciate any input you guys can give me - if any SEO experts want to turn my site into a case study and work with me to improve things, I'd also be open to that 😉 I kid, of course - I know you guys are all busy. Thanks! P.S. I've attached a picture of my SEMRush graph, for reference, as well. mhgSw
Algorithm Updates | | polycountz0 -
Google October 2015 Algorithm Update?
According to Accuranker (https://www.accuranker.com/blog/google-october-2015-algorithm-update/), "Google has made some big changes to their algorithm". Other than that one article, I haven't noticed or even heard of any considerable fluctuations. Even Mozcast is looking pretty normal today. Has anyone noticed anything or have any other sources on this? If so, any ideas on what this update seems to be targeting?
Algorithm Updates | | Silkstream0 -
How could Google define "low quality experience merchants"?
Matt Cutts mentioned at SXSW that Google wants to take into consideration the quality of the experience ecommerce merchants provide and work this into how they rank in SERPs. Here's what he said if you missed it: "We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.” My question; how exactly could Google decide if a merchant provides a low and high quality experience? I would image it would be very easy for Google to decide this with merchants in their Trusted Store program. I wonder what other data sets Google could realistically rely upon to make such a judgment. Any ideas or thoughts are appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | BrianSaxon0 -
Any PR Lose? Google Made a Update ! Heavy Traffic, Followed SEOmoz Tips - Dropped to PR4 ?
I followed the rules to minimize the links in the page. Getting Same Traffic to my blog and increased only. But my PR5 to PR4 ? why even 404 Error was reduced o 5 or 6 which i updated now ! not accepting any Text Link ads ! too past 6 months also !
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
Can visitors duration time affect Google Rankings?
Does the time a person stays on a website affect Search Rankings? If so, could the lower time from Adwords Visitors be effecting organic rankings? And the same for bounce rate. If Non-Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration time is 3:55 and Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration is 1:59 Could the low duration time be affecting our website rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | hfranz0 -
Lesser visited, but highly ranked landing paged dropped in rank on Google. Time for a content update?
I noticed that my page one ranked landing pages that don't get a lot of love from me have dropped in rank big time on Google this week. This is a site that has static (meaning, I can't freshen up the content easily) landing pages for products that we sell. The pages that dropped are the ones that have the fewest inbound links, and don't get much attention on the social media side. Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one. This is a first for me. Does anyone think that this is a "lack of freshness" penalty? We are still number one on page one for our brand search terms. Would fresh content give me a shot at getting the pages back up? I'm willing to update them slowly, but before I go crazy, I'm reaching out to the pros here.
Algorithm Updates | | Ticket_King0