Google's Farmer Update - Article Marketing is DEAD

It's the equivalent to shooting a cantaloupe with a Howitzer or smashing an ant with a tank. Google's recent "Farmer" update has killed article marketing.

According to data from Sistrix and posted by SearchEngineLand.com some of the biggest losers in ranking positions are articles websites EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, FindArticles.com, LovetoKnow.com, AssociatedContent.com and Mahalo. If Google wanted to keep the content from someone's view, it's likely that a good portion of those won't pass link juice either. In a recent forum post I noted this trend around the same time the update began going live as I watched article sites disappear from a Google Webmasters backlink report on several websites.

The update also had an adverse affect on SEO darlings Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com


So what now? Websites YouTube.com, eHow.com and Facebook.com all seemed to improve substantially after the update, problem is they all provide only nofollow links if at all.

Instructables.com also saw improvement, a que from Google that this is a more trusted website and looking over the content seems to have very good editorial review.

So what does all of this mean? The days of creating cheap content for a link and some traffic are over, Auto-blogs are now completely useless and $3 articles are not going to cut it anymore.To get links you will need to create high quality content with images and possibly video and find niche websites that are willing to display the content through guest blogging or heavy editorial review.

read more:
http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173
http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors

 

I think, it's true. I'm also loosing article & other content copier websites as backlinks. Some of the websites like: digitalpoint forums are still counting as a back-link for me.

I've stopped spending hrs on hubpages as well as I saw down traffic on this.

 

Yeah,, here's an interesting article

http://www.neilshearing.com/2011/02/27/ezinearticles-to-go-nofollow/

 

I always had more luck simply adding articles to my web site vs posting them at some article web site database...

 

If i only had a cent for how many times i heard X Method being Dead ..... etc etc ..

 

So we're already seeing the fallout from the update. Major article sites going NoFollow, YouTube videos getting a major SERPs boost. I would find a YouTube video as irrelevant to most search queries such as "how to knit" as an EzineArticle or a Hubpage Page

 

perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the update. Chasing article marketing now would be akin to keyword stuffing. It's dying a quick and very painful death.

 

UPDATE: Ezine Artlices has again changed their mind and made a public statement in the comments of their own blog regarding the links. http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html#more-11693

it would seem that Ezine has been talking with Matt Cutt's and he is not pushing the nofollow attribute, but insisting on higher quality articles site wide.

 

Yes this is really unexplected action of Google. They just did it.
A few of my friends got loses of 50% and more in the visitors, mostly from US. According to the statement of google first this will be implemented in USA and then world wide. So just can see what will be the loses for large companies and large websites.

 

I'll share with you guys the predictions i made with my boss a few months ago as the yelling about 'content farms' got louder.

- ehow wouldn't be touched. (the websites unique approach also includes making videos which they add to youtube, ironically enough many of those are appearing in SERPs now)
- article directories would be torched
- counted links from article directories will decline, become harder to get
- Squidoo and Hubpages will take a hit, squidoo less so.
- auto-blogging will come to a stand still and become worthless
- ezinearticles would take drastic action to adjust to the sudden change
- guest news websites would begin sprouting up - these are blogs that masquerade as news websites and accept 'guest blog posts' with a focus on quality and uniqueness (no two news posts alike) they could escape the 'content farm' label.

 

Interesting you have a squidoo link in your footer... Do you intend to stop using squidoo?

 

Yeah this update decreased traffic to my site 60-80% : (

 

It's not really dead but it will play a weaker part in internet marketing. Not as many people will use Article submissions but it's still going to exist for years to come.

 

If no one has noticed yet, YouTube is ranking on page one for nearly every term known to man. Not sure how long it will last, and not sure Google is in much of a hurry to fix it.

 

I have not seen anything, from reliable sources, that Farmer update is targeting Articles'. From what I gather, they are targeting pages that lack meaningful content and/or have a high advertising to content ratio. It seems many Article Sites where hit hard, because they obviously have tons of pages lacking content.

Farmer could impact any type of Website (Blogs, Answers, Forums, Static Pages). I think most will agree, they are trying to clean the useless links from their Serps. I read this morning a statement saying Websites with a high ratio of low quality (Low-Quality = Personal Perception) may find site-wide decline in Search Traffic.

With that in mind, Article Directories must step-up their standards or size requirements. Many of them lack the dialogue that a Blog, Answer, Forum, etc.. offers. Therefore, Authors may want to assess the entire community. If there is a lot of small meaningless content, the entire site could be effected. I doubt that means the Article Authors' site will suffer, as a result.

Another thing to consider seems to be emphasis on social bookmarking. Articles circulating in Facebook, delicious, etc... may influence serps even greater. It's a new tool for measuring human voting aside from links.

 

This is very sad situation. As the algorithm change, Sites like Ezine etc also strict their policies and till then my articles are not getting approval
I don't like this at all. This is simply disgusting..!!

 

Well this just sucks.

 

Articles are a big portion of my work. Have not seen any drops what so ever. Some nice boosts on some target keywords. This new change is only going to affect the the lazy scrapers and re writers. Get a good writer or do some old fashion research and put something ORIGINAL together that is deep in content and information. Don't litter your content with anchor text and ruin all that work 1 link in the resource box is enough.

 

yes I read the search engine land article as well - it would be interesting to know if the theory is due to wide distribution of duplicate content as in-content links still seem a viable seo tactic.

 

article directory is not good enough for google panda