Following Google’s crackdown on content farming sites, it has emerged that several fairly high profile sites have suffered in their search results as a consequence.
Independent analyst Systrix has shown that over 300 sites in total have lost out, including medical resource the British Medical Journal, PR Newswire, which issues press releases on behalf of other companies, and Technorati, the blog indexing site.
The company examined over 60 million domains spanning six countries, and indexed the million most common search keywords.
Such analysis is carried out by search engine optimisation experts everywhere, in an effort fine tune marketing campaigns and increase the standing of search results in Google. The search giant, responding to complaints about material from ‘content farms’ appearing too high up on its search results, rewrote its search algorithm to punish them. However, notable for its absence from Systrix’s list is ehow.com, a site owned by content farmers Demand Media. In fact, the changes have arguably helped it – other content farms such as lovetoknow.com, which published an entire encyclopaedia online, have been pushed further down in the results pages.
As ever, Google is keeping tight-lipped about what its search criteria are. After all, it changes its search algorithm at least once a day, it may be that sites that publish relevant information, which is of genuine use to users, will see their search engine results improve over the coming weeks. If not, they may have to take a long, hard look at their search engine optimisation strategy.
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Hello Matt Jones,
One can observe the drawdown of the number of indexed pages in Google, it may not only affect content farms, but also normal sites.
I’ve seen one site with 600 000 indexed pages two weeks ago, turned to a site with only 150 000. Google may diminish its contents ?