Did Google's Farmer Update Positively/Negatively Affect Your Search Traffic?

[randfish]

See the attached image, showing a comparison of SEOmoz.org's search traffic from Google over the past 6 days and the prior week.

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[mikecp]

Awesome use of the new Q&A Rand!

One of my biggest content sites actually has seen an increase in traffic since the "farmer" update. The content on it is definitely a tick above content farmed crap, but it's also not 5-star.

For what it's worth, it's monetized with AdSense ads and there's really no branded traffic to speak of naturally.

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[KrisRoadruck]

Oddly the handful of sites that I have which should have most probably been affected negatively actually saw boosts in traffic, CTR on ads and eCPM on ads. Not huge jumps.. but yeah.. I benefited which was odd. These domains are testbeds I set up a long time ago to find the upper limit of what you can "get away with" in google so I know where to draw the line.

Other interesting facts. I rand some tests over the weekend (may not be large enough to be statistically relevant yet) but it seems the farmer update has almost no impact on indexation of poor or duplicate content given enough raw link juice (no anchor, ip diversity or any other cool factors, just a flat link from a big ol' bucket of link juice) which I find disappointing. =/ I expected a bit of a challenge after all this hoopla. Even though I rock the greyhat Im still pretty anti dupe/crap content.

[Julich]

Strictly no impact.

We (a French real estate company) currently receive around 600K unique vistors per month from search traffic and as far as I can see, there is strictly no impact on our traffic coming from search engines.

By the way, the new Q&A forum for PRO is just f*cking awesome! Just love it! Keep up the great work guys,

J. from Paris, France.

[randfish]

Kris - awesome that you "rand" some tests. I like to do that myself

One thing we've been noticing is that sites with very aggressive ads (AdSense, overlays, display, etc.) seem unusually hard hit, while content farms that are less agro on that front weren't. Maybe a user/usage data thing?

[KrisRoadruck]

That could very well be it. I rode the line on a lot of things but ad placement wasnt really one of them. I just have the standard 3 adsense blocks and they are well placed and blended into the site. I also intentionally sold some links on the site (like I said its a testbed) but they arent designed to stick out like a sore thumb so I doubt that would make a diff one way or the other.

P.S. Haha fruedian slip of some sort I'm sure.

[tedster]

One client site did very well - it made the SEO Clarity chart for the top ten winners. A small mom & pop level ecommerce client lost 4 out of 5 number one rankings. Fortunately most of their revenue is from repeat customers - we've been working on customer retention for ten years. Still studying to come up with ranking recovery plans, if the algo doesn't self adjust soon.

But most of the sites I work with do not seem affected at all.

[gfiorelli1]

If your site - I imagine - is targeting the French market, therefore Google.fr, therefore I believe you don't have seen any change yet simply because the farmer update still in not alive on regional Googles (as Google.fr is).

But mine is just an assumption, not knowing the real target (therefore Google version) of your site.

[Julich]

Hi Gianluca,

Thanks for the notice. You are right. I just checked our trafic coming from Google.com (and not Google.fr) and it is actually increasing...

Just glad for not beeing impacted by this farmer update.

J.

[gfiorelli1]

Personally I have not seen any change actually. And reason is simple: the farmer update still is not alive in the regional Googles, as advised Matt Cutts in its post.

What would be interesting would be to see:

1. how the web farms affected in the Google.com ranks in the regional Googles? This can be especially interesting examining all the english based regional Googles (discounting the localization factors);
2. how big the difference in traffic will be when the algo update will affect also all the Googles, as - I suppose - then we will see its effects over all the translated/international versions of the websites, which are seriously vampirezed from local farmer sites.

[StalkerB]

No change, pretty much at all, overall at least.

However some pages we had some poor quality links on have dropped a bit in ranking, but weren't huge traffic generators anyway.

I'll certainly be keeping an eye on it.

[ilyaelbert]

no, and I noticed that merchantcircle, one of their 'top 25 biggest losers' still ranks quite well for long tail service-industry queries.

[Matthew_Edgar]

I've not seen any change either. One of my clients has a news site that is pretty ad heavy. While the site does run some non-original content (wire stories for example) at least 60% is original content. Overall Google traffic for that site is up 4% in the last week - with 10% more keywords delivering traffic than the week before. That is right on average with our normal week over week increase.

[ilyaelbert]

actualy I lost about 10 places on my main keyword; strangely NO other keywords were affected and long tail traffic did not get adjusted as well.

[DanDeceuster]

I haven't seen any impact on my sites or on my day to day searches. I think most people took the line that 12% of queries were affected to mean that 12% of websites were affected. Far from true. I think while 12% of search queries may have seen the rankings visibly change, this does not mean 12% of Google's indexed sites were affected in some way. I think this was a handful of sites that accounted for a lot of long tail search results.

[FrankWickers]

On many of our client sites we've actually seen positive impacts from the farm updates.

Previously, some of our clients were being beat out for the top few positions by some content farms for various long tail search terms.

After the Farm Update we've seen those content farm page results drop off into oblivion and our client sites have stepped right up into their positions. Our client's have gained dozens of new 1st, 2nd, and 3rd position SERP results on long tail keywords.

So in summary - none of the websites we manage/seo have been hurt by the Farmer Update. We have, instead, been rewarded from it.

[daveschappell]

We (www.TeachStreet.com) have been pretty negatively hit, with a reduction of ~44% week over week (comparing Thurs-Mon vs a comparable prior period).  We're trying to be calm, and find out what's driving it -- we think it's because we are a directory of classes/courses, and many of these classes can be found on the sites owned by our customers... but they're all formal relationships (not scraped content, etc.) so we're not sure what to do.

Any ideas welcome / appreciated.

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[mikecp]

Dave,

There is a considerable amount of research being done by Moz and the Moz bloggers at the moment on this topic. A blog post is planned once the team reaches a conclusion. I would expect it within the next few days (if not tomorrow).

If the post doesn't answer your question, you might think about posting your own separate question to get feedback from the community.

Mike

[randfish]

Teachstreet doesn't fit the profile of a lot of other sites that got hit. Were some pages affected and others not? If you could show off a dozen or so of affected vs. not, that could really help sort out the issue (and possibly give us a roadmap to help).

That sucks Dave! Teachstreet has been getting so good lately, too.

[StoreCrowd]

We got hit at StoreCrowd by around ~40%, whilst it's not devastating for our business it does raise some concerns about what we're doing (in comparison to competitors).

I've made a few observations:

1. Many of the websites that I've seen hit appear to have a large number of indexed pages (TeachStreet you have over 1M+ for example)
2. It appears to have hit sites that don't have a high amount of unique content to page ratio. For example we currently have a lot of blank "placeholder pages" & we also split out our merchants into 4 areas (store, coupons, deals, reviews).
3. The penalty appears to be sitewide, we have a large number of links & quality on our blog but even these pages have been hit hard.
4. The dropoffs in rankings can be a few spots or ~30 spots, I can't explain why this is - for less competitive keywords the dropoff appears to be less. This leads me to think this ain't a penalty but Google is simply reranking based on new factors.
5. I don't think this has anything to do with links.

What we've done so far:

1. We're working on increasing the unique content to page ratio - we've noindex,nofollowed all pages that have 0 content (or the placeholder pages I spoke about)
2. The next step is to further increase the uniqueness of our tag pages & store level pages.

But, we have competitors that have a lot more duplicate content than we do & they seem to be fine. So, we're merely testing & speculating at the mo!

Happy to hear any suggestions.