Content farms are dead. Long live content farms. Well not really. May they never bounce back again. Please. Yet like every major update Google rolls out, some innocents were harmed in the making of this one. Don’t expect the ACLU or any human rights groups to come to the defense of them. It’s going to have to be us. People who know better. People who understand why they got hammered. You know – SEO professionals. What a crazy notion huh?
What it really comes down to is Google needs to stop deceiving site owners in competitive markets. Playing it off as though they can be a self-managed experience. Because they can’t. No matter how much Google, or SEO H8er web developers say otherwise.
Innocents Harmed
It’s the age old story all over again. Site owners create sites, try to do what they can, maybe they even read Google’s webmaster guidelines. Everything seems to be working for a while. They get comfortable even. Happy. Ecstatic as the money rolls in.
Then Google takes action against spammers or against some other perceived problematic aspect of their SERPs. And inevitably, some of those otherwise innocent site owners watch as their sites take a nose dive. Money lost. Hearts broken. Chaos ensues…
No, this latest problem for some otherwise innocent site owners is not the first of its kind. Last night, Ted Ulle even pointed to a link over on Webmaster World about the legacy reality of this going on since at least 2002.
The Latest Victims
You can read all sorts of articles and theories and perspectives on the Farmer update. Lots out there already, just a week into it. Andy Beard has even come up with a handy Google Farmer Update Self Diagnostic Kit!
For this article however, I want to discuss what I found with my newest audit client. A legitimate site not breaking any “rules”. A Site that offers valid product offerings in a user friendly presence.
Some Legitimate ECommerce Sites Got Slapped Around
The day after the Farmer update was announced, I was contacted for help from a prospective client. In a panic. Sweat was dripping off the email they sent, they were so panicked. Eww that’s gross right? But seriously – that’s how intense the message was in that first email.
Can you imagine – owning an eCommerce site – one that’s your bread and butter – the life-blood of your income and the income of everyone in the company? It’s been online since 2005. Not the oldest site around, but old enough for argument sake. They sell products, of course. Thousands of them split out among 23 categories. Legitimate products you can buy in most malls in America.
All the right things
Verisign trusted site, SSL encrypted check-out, Shipping policies, privacy policies, return policies… So all around, they’re just store owners who found a very popular niche, in a fairly competitive landscape. They set up the site, and took the job of SEO serious enough that they’ve been doing it in house from the beginning. Well, they’ve been doing SEO according to what they THOUGHT was the right thing to do.
Unlike most of their competitors, they don’t buy links, though at one point they had a few “questionable” links on their own site that they got rid of when they found them to potentially be problematic last year. Since they offer some great products, over the years, they slowly built up over 43,000 inbound links. The hard way. And through community outreach and social media engagement.
So where did they go wrong?
So how did they get caught up in the Farmer update? From what I can tell so far (and I’m only part way through one of my comprehensive forensic audits) it was primarily an issue of replication of thin content, reinforced by poor site architecture and lack of refined topical focus. So it gave the appearance of being a content farm. At least to the cold-hearted, take no prisoners Google system of algorithmic cleansing.
Sure, there are other factors that contributed to the fall that just made it worse. Yet the most important factors are the same factors I advocate as best practices SEO every working day of my life.
Replication of thin content
This is not duplicate content within the site. It’s the “appearance” of duplicate content within the site, and duplicate content across many similar sites. We’re talking about the fact that they’ve got thousands of product details pages with very little unique content on those. The kind of content that doesn’t even form full sentences.
So most of those pages are more confused in topic specifics because of the navigation, sidebar and footer content on them. Content that shows up on every other page of the site.
And product descriptions that are used on site after site after site. Over and over and over. They actually wrote most of it themselves, because they read all the Googleisms like
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
And
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Those are such broad stroke guidelines, it’s tragic.
Where things went REALLY bad for this particular site, is that over the years, competitors copied most of those descriptions. Lots of competitors. So original source attribution is non-existent. And by now, nearly impossible for these site owners to combat. Now that they know it’s an issue they should have been vigilant about for years. Which honestly, they didn’t know.
Because Google doesn’t say in those guidelines – “Perform routine searches to ensure nobody’s copying too much of your content” or “here’s how to know when we mean “too much of your content”…
Site Owners Are Not Supposed To Have To Be SEOs
How are most site owners supposed to know they have to hire a professional or that they have to teach themselves advanced SEO? Even if they stumble on Google’s guidelines, there’s nothing there that tells them “this is really more than you can digest in a lifetime as you run your business, so ignore these over-simplifications and just hire a professional…”
Then again, the same disclaimer is lacking from most of what we put out there as well…
Topical Focus Factors
The topical focus factor is really weak on this particular site because of these things, though it’s made worse in how they chose to assign keywords to their site.
Google tells them to:
Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
That’s it. One single line of instruction. They don’t say you should really only optimize a page for a couple important phrases and add in a few highly related phrases. They don’t communicate how to figure that out even. They just throw you a bone. And then it’s up to you…
This site’s got Topical dilution in some page Titles & URLs, topical over-saturation in others. Too many related phrases in some places, not enough in others. All because they tried to follow the rules based on what they had learned. From the company lording over their income stream. And there’s almost NO quality information in the sea of articles and how-to’s on what it REALLY means to properly optimize in a way that won’t bite you later on…
Innocence Lost
After years of trying on their own to figure out how to get found legitimately, listening to “just write good content”, or “use words relevant to your products”, only to be slapped like an ungrateful “guest” at a Charlie Sheen weekend “event”, they found they can’t keep going through this. Oh yeah – they’re codependent in their relationship with Google. This isn’t the first time they’ve been battered.
SOS – MayDay Mayday – Help Help!
Last year they took a hit thanks to the MayDay update. It hurt, though it wasn’t as severe as this beat-down. Not enough to get them to realize that the ever changing landscape gives them an unfair disadvantage over people who make a living studying and experimenting and learning the Google game.
Yet enough that it should have been their first warning that they needed outside professional help. Because the underpinnings of the Farmer update taking out innocent site owners were hatched last spring. No doubt about it. Yet they never even heard of “The MayDay Update”, let alone how to deal with it.
Like most in codependent relationships, they tried to just muddle along, hoping things would get better.
With this latest change they took such a massive hit, it woke them up. Big time. So powerfully that they finally realized they had to reach out for help. To admit they couldn’t keep repeating the same things over again hoping for different results.
The Dirty Little Secrets Most Site Owners Never Learn
To many of us IN the industry, this isn’t rocket science. At least not what to do in addressing these issues. Sure, with a site like the one I’m auditing, there are many issues that need resolution. And there’s going to need to be a lot of changes. Not just to deal with the Farmer Update, but to inoculate the site against other changes I anticipate Google will be making in the coming months and years.
But the core issues are pretty obvious to me.
Just To Be Sure
To be sure my intuition was right once again, I spent the past several days pouring over data across a lot of sites I’ve had direct responsibility for the tasking on. Small sites, mid-level sites, mega sites… Sites in weak competitive markets, sites in fierce markets. Sites where they haven’t yet implemented Title and URL recommendations. Other sites that have implemented those but haven’t implemented enough link work. And sites that have implemented all my recommendations…
And every single one of them either went unchanged this past week or went up. And for the ones that went up, some went up a little and one even went up as much as 20% organically. Yes, I was very happy about that. Indeed. Each site has or had different issues to deal with, and though there are many other possible causes and factors to consider, it appears to have given me a decent basis of understanding when I compare these to this latest audit.
I had to take the time to look at seasonal factors, other marketing promotional factors, localization factors. And so my life has been pretty filled with data for days now. And the patterns that have emerged tell me that my perspective is, in fact, accurate. Not to 100% certainty, more like to a 90 – 95% certainty for sure though.
The Ever Moving Target Dilemma
I want to take what I’ve observed this past few days and turn it into its own case study. Except by the time I can do that, in between all my client work and everything else on my plate, Google will probably have rolled out a half dozen more minor changes, and maybe even one or two bigger changes. So I don’t know if I’ll get that chance.
And besides – would you rather I focus on a boring case study, or make sure I pick a really good venue for the next two #EpicDinners I’m working on for SMX West and Advanced? #Duh
We’ll See What We See
In the mean time, I’ll wrap up this particular audit, and make recommendations. Then we’ll see what happens. If it’s like every other major update Google’s pulled in the last few years, my educated guess is that this particular site will bounce back. Maybe not to where it was, maybe better. Because for all the changes they’ve made, the fundamentals about content organization, content relationships, outside authority validation, and uniqueness of content have remained fairly constant.
And just maybe, Google will find it in their hearts to be more clear about what it means to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.” Especially when you’ve got thousands of products. In Categories and sub-categories.
So innocent site owners who don’t realize or can’t afford to hire professionals won’t suffer as much.
Except that would mean the sick family member everyone else relies upon will have changed their ways. And since Google hasn’t to my knowledge, sought professional counseling, somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon…
