Farmer Update Case Study. Please question my logic here. (Very long!)
-
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!)
-
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?
-
The site is back, all rankings recovered.
-
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!
-
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?
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Nov 19th & 20th Update?
Did anyone see any big changes around Nov 19th & 20th? Mozcast had some high temps around there. If you saw any big changes in organic search, any ideas WTH that was all about? Any guesses? One site I work with took about a 15% hit and has since sort of skidded sideways.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010 -
Keyword in alt tag and future G Updates
Hello, I notice that it is common practice to put the page's keywords directly into an alt tag. I don't see how this helps the user and how it helps the user using screen readers and such. Do you think future G updates will slightly penalize pages with alt tags that are just the page's keywords and not a helpful phrase? What do you recommend to put in alt tags in light of future G updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW1 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
2 Questions about 301 Redirects
So I have a couple of questions about 301 redirects: Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301? I've done 20+ domain 301s in the last year and have yet to see it happen, but the other day I read a an article (or maybe it was a QA post?) that suggested doing 302s to avoid transferring penalties. Has anyone seen any authoritative information regarding this? I 301'd a domain in February that another SEO firm had built a lot of spammy links and I began building contextual links for it at a very slow rate (like 10 or so a month). Within a month, my domain authority was a 26 on the new domain and my inbound links were non existent. By month 2, my links were 70k and domain authority was 34. By month 3, down to 25k inbound links and domain authority of 29, where it has settled for the last 3 months despite some really high quality links. My question (don't worry it's coming), is does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped? I'm assuming the 301 links kicked in and then only about 45% ended up 'sticking'?? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrianJGomez0 -
To Disavow or Not to Disavow - that is the Question!
I have had two SEO 'specialists' look at my site after the 2012 Penguin update as I was hit badly for one very important keyword. I took off any bad sites links but I never did anything with inbound links. One says my link profile is fine and do NOT use the disavow tool but I should improve my site (landing pages, content, photos, put blog on site, articles, social media etc etc). This I tried for several months but my site never improved. the second 'expert' said I HAVE to take certain ones off and he identified inbound links from spammy sites. He found links from 65 links from malware/untrusted sites and 267 from spam articles and 124 from link farms plus hundreds more from pages that no longer exist or never provide traffic What would you do? i should point out the anchor text for these inbound links is the one keyword that is the most important to the site and the one that got hit by the Penguin 2012
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero0 -
My website disapeared from google rankings, please help?
Our website url is http://www.phoria.com Around January 16th we disappeared from google for the keyword 'kratom' We were on page 3 for the longest time. We have no critical messages in webmaster tools however I did notice most of our links seem to be website directory links.We still rank for a couple terms like buy kratom on page 6.I think a google update occurred around this time so I've read however if we had a variety of links that went against google guidelines wouldn't we have received a message stating so in Webmaster Tools?This month has been very confusing to say the least. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gregdotcom0 -
Guest Blogging question
Once your guest posts go live do you do anything to promote them or do you just wait and hope they get indexed? If so what do you do exactly?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0