Last month saw Google update its search algorithms to filter out duplicate content, in a bid to produce higher quality results and combat so-called ‘content farms’. But have some good quality sites suffered as a result? Emily Hill, Managing Director of Write My Site, looks at the case of one publisher, ezinearticles.com.
Digital content agency Write My Site welcomes the recent Google ‘Farmer’ update, and believes it signals a new age of high quality, original web content. However, the agency believes sites like Ezinearticles.com – which saw its traffic plunge by 35% the day after the update – have been unfairly penalised.
The so-called ‘Farmer’ update, launched in the US on 24 th February, is Google’s first serious crack-down on low quality content, affecting 11.8% of search queries. The aim of the update is to bury ‘content farms’ containing poor quality articles written for no other purpose than to repeat certain keywords and build links.
Emily Hill, Managing Director of Write My Site said: “For years we’ve had to fight a real battle against content farming. Not only does poor quality content clog up the SERPs with spam, it also damages brands’ reputations when their agencies spread this junk around the web in their name. However, it’s unfair that Ezinearticles.com has been labelled a content farm when it already has stringent editorial controls in place to weed out spam.”
Write My Site believes that Ezinearticles.com and the handful of other humanly-edited article syndication sites should not be lumped in with the thousands of automated content farms that implement no editorial controls. Ezinearticles.com already rejects content that is advertorial, or has too high a keyword density.
CEO Chris Knight posted a blog piece to say his company was working with Google to tighten editorial controls even further. Extending the minimum word length to 400 (previously 300) and removing articles that appear ‘thin’ and badly written are two of the proposed measures.
Hill said: “If Google can work with the established article syndication sites to agree editorial boundaries, there’s no reason why this update shouldn’t be considered a very good thing indeed. We’d love to see the back of keyword-stuffed articles that offer no value to users, in order to make way for informative, engaging, original content that people – as well as search engines – love to read. After all, that’s what article marketing, done properly, is all about.”
www.writemysite.co.uk