Farmer Update Case Study. Please question my logic here. (Very long!)

[YesBaby]

Hi SEOmoz community!

I would like to try to give a small (well...) case study of a Farmer victim and some logical conclusions of mine that you are more then welcome to shred to pieces.

So, I run MANY sites ranging from low to super quality and actually have a few that have been hit by farmer but this particular site had me scratching my head as to why it was torched.

Quick background: Sitei s in a very competetive niche, been around since 2004 initially as a forum site but from 2005 also a content driven site. Site is an affiliate site and has been ranking top 5 for many high-value commercial KW's and has a big long-tail of informational kw's. Limk profile is a mix between natural, good links and purchased links from various qualilty sources.

Content is high quality written articles, how-to's, blog posts etc. by in-house pro writers plus UGC from a semi active forum (20-30 posts a day).

Farmer: After Farmer, this site's vertical is pretty much same as before with the biggest exception being my site. I quickly discounted low-quality content (spider-food) and focused instead on technical reasons. I took this approach since this site isn't the most well kept site I have and I figured the crappy CMS + PHPBB might have caused isseus.

I didn't want to waste my time crawling the site myself so I quickly downloaded all the URLs that Majestic had crawled. Too my surprise the result of Majestic's crawler was over 3 million URLs when the real number would likley be 30-40k and Google has about 20k indexed.

After scanning through the file with URLs I knew I had issues. Massive amounts of auto-generated dupe pages from the forum and so on. By adding around 20 new lines to robots.txt I was able to block millions of pages from being crawled again.

My logic: Ok, so now I think I've found what caused the drop. Milllions of dupe pages and empty pages could have tripped the Farmer algo update to think the site is low quality or dupe or just trying to feed the spiders with uselessness.

My WEAK point in this logic is that I can't prove that Google even knew about (or smart enough to ignore them). Google WMT tells me they've crawled an average of around 10k pages the last 90 days. Given this I'm doubting my logic and if I've found the issue or not.

My next step is to see if this gets resolved algorithmically or not, if not i feel I have a legitimate case to submit a reinclusion request but i'm not sure?

Since I haven't been a contributing member to this community I'm not looking to get direct help with my site, but hopefully this could spark some discussion about Farmer and maybe some flaming of my logic regarding the update

So, would any of you have drawn similar conclusions as I did? (Sweet blog bro!)

[KeriMorgret]

Good to hear that all your rankings have recovered. How have things gone the past couple of weeks, do you have anything you can share here? Or maybe even for a YOUmoz post?

[YesBaby]

The site is back, all rankings recovered.

[YesBaby]

Hi Barry,

Thanks for bringing up some great points!

I probably should have talked about the effects the update had on the site in my op Well, it was a drastic drop in rankings for pretty much everything the site ranked for, at least 20-40 positions drop acroos the board EXCEPT for the most commercial/highest volume KW's that only resulted in a 3-6 position drop (still top 10 for the most part.

The landing pages, that dropped the least, for the commercial queries is obv. where all the paid links go to (mostly from sites in my niche that are still doing fine). The informational pages that got hit the worst only ranks because of natural links from great/good sites that were not affected by farmer and domain authority.

I really see your and Dan's point about Google not caring about the millions of urls but i can't shake the feeling that it might have tripped the wire somehow

FTR, I'm not complaining about my situation, just generally surprised about this site getting hit when I have a ton of sites that deserved to be torched when I feel this site is actually "clean". I think this is why my logic seems strange to you

Anyway, another great reply, thanks!

[StalkerB]

What's actually changed for you though? Have you looked in the analytics to see what pages are no longer bringing traffic, what keywords are no longer bringing you traffic, that kind of thing?

Is it across all pages and all keywords or is it just a few high traffic keywords and pages?

Just because your niche has many link buyers doesn't mean that you're not getting penalised for it

I don't think Google will have known or cared about those millions of pages, I assume none of them have shown up as a landing page for visitors so I would guess they were effectively invisible to Google.

Paid links (and indeed normal links), you may not be getting penalised for them, but if some of your highest value links are themselves being punished or in some way devalued you may be losing out there as well.

I asume no other significant change occured at this time?

[YesBaby]

Hey Dan,

Thanks for replying! I figured the purchased links would come up but I have pretty much discounted that since the niche is crowded with link buyers and no-one got hit. I'm also active in other verticals where lik buyers prosper and I haven't seen any impact on just about any of them.

In comparison, my sites link profile is pretty vanilla compared to many other sites. That said, I know I can't discount the links 100% as being the reason here since I've been paying for them.

Really appreciate you taking the time to reply!

[DanDeceuster]

My first knee jerk response to this post is to target the part about purchased links. If you have paid links, then I would remedy that problem before I look at anything else.

Do you have a lot of adsense on this site? I've been hearing left and right that a lot of sites that got hit hard were those with 5 or 6 adsense units on one page. Excessive ads drive users crazy, so Google could be torching you for that.

As for the auto generate dupe content pages, Google may or may not have found them. Were there links to these pages? Do you know how Majestic found them?

If you never linked to these pages it is unlikely Google ever found them. Google tends to only crawl content with links or found in a sitemap. If you never had links to those dupe pages and they weren't in your sitemap, I doubt it is causing the problem. Plus if that were the issue, you probably would have been torched long before this algo update.