A handy guide to determine if Google is gunning for you.
Last week Google announced some changes to its algorithm that affect a whopping 12% of search results.
The target?
“low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”
While some say this is aimed at so-called “content farms”, here are the warning signs that this change is aimed at your web site(s):
– You created your web site with the click of a button (or a few buttons)
– You didn’t create any original content for your web site
– Your web site asks questions but doesn’t provide answers — and is waiting for a “user” to generate the answer for you (ahem)
– When users do answer those questions, the answers suck (ahem)
– You developed a hundred sites in a weekend
– Although your web site presents existing information in a “unique” way, hundreds of other web sites have also tried to present that same information in a “unique” way
– Your web site is a splog
– Your content is similar to that found on other web sites; you just re-write it in a different way
– Your only plan for traffic generation is search traffic
SL says
– Your domain name includes the letters “e”, “h”, “o” and “w”.
(Close call for dnw 🙂
Andrew Allemann says
@ SL – will be interesting to see.
Larry says
Part of the issue is that it is nearly impossible to define these sites in a way that would let an algorithm decide if valid or not. This is similar to “I know it when I see it” with regards to porn ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
And even by the “i see it” method a site could contain 10,000 pages of invalid content and 2,000 pages of valid content.
S. W. says
No exact word yet on how question/answer sites have been affected by the latest algo change, but it appears article sites like ezinearticles, suite101, buzzle have been hit the hardest, at least according to complaints found at the Warrior forum.
So Elliot’s DomainQuestions site seems safe, for now.
Andrew Allemann says
@ S.W. – yeah, when I think of Q&A site problems, I think of sites that upload tens of thousands of unanswered questions.
S. W. says
@Andrew – Agree, same thought process here as well.
I should clarify that Q&A sites like Elliot’s fill a much-needed niche and the answers from the domain community at large has made it quite useful.
bernard says
For sure, a website that “presents existing information in a “unique” way” has no added value, just like technorati.com
But a ministe with great 300 words unique articles for TopFloridaBeaches.com is a great added value!
Seriously, the value of a website is the ratio of added-value related to the production cost. A modest added-value with a more modest investment means a great ROI.
And Google cutting down by 10-20% the traffic of such a website by a yet another algorithm cooking receipt isn’t a noticable change.
Frantisek Mrazek says
I agree with “I know it when I see it”. about.com = good, answers.yahoo.com good for entertaining value (but also can find answers there sometimes). Answers.com = not so good, should get lower priority than it has now. Etc
rob says
good. hopefully it will shake things up a bit. many of these sites do not even attempt to provide the info needed, or link straight out to irrelevant sites. infuriating. google, HIT THEM HARD IF YOU CAN.
Jack says
I think one of the biggest content farms on the internet is google…stealing from libraries, and all the indexed websites of the world.
Will it be deindexed?
Jason says
Will the other search engines follow? Or Google wants to take the lead for now? You don’t need to prepare content to be sucessful. Job sites can work to provide job positions that work under online job platforms.
It’s easy to prepare quality content on employment and career services. There’s always a writer that is willing to prepare quality work if you can’t deliver on various topics. Ehow can be helpful in Econ. Most Econ sites communicate more so at an expert unfamiliar to a beginner.
Thanks for the article.
Michael S says
Perfect example is answerbag. Check out the Alexa graph tanking.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/answerbag.com#