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

[StoreCrowd]

Just to follow-on from my last post, apparrently Google is working on a fix 

[RealSelf]

Our Google.com traffic dropped 29% last week, and we get a fair amount of International traffic too (24%), so we'll probably drop further when the change is replicated to .ca, .co.uk, etc.

Looking at our keyword traffic (or our SEOMoz ranking report), it's really clear that our biggest decreases in visits came from stem keyword searches like [botox] or [invisalign] where we were on the first page of results.  The ironic thing is that those pages have low bounce (17% and 27%) and no AdSense ads. We removed the AdSense ads from the landing pages a few months ago to simplify the initial visitor's experience.

It looks like Google is treating those pages as a list of blogs instead of a TripAdvisor hotel listing.  Many of the sites that were hit in this update were faux blogs targeted to high CPC keywords.

Since last May, we've been frustrated that Google keeps ignoring our meta description in favor of the first review snippet on the page.  (Bing doesn't do this.)  Even if our rankings are down, we at least want to present an accurate view of the thousands of reviews, photos, and answers that our site has and not be treated as one person's blog.

We've tried a lot of thigns to get Google to pick up a better meta description, but at best it only works on our site search for a few hours and then Google takes user text from a freshly updated review.  At this point it looks like our only option is to pass the first words of each review in a JSON array and display it using Javascript, possibly on mouseOver.  Its frustrating that we have to do such contortions, but as Fred Wilson says, it "sucks being a Google bitch."

organicfarm.png

[daveschappell]

Thanks for your response Stuart (and Tom/RealSelf and others as well) -- some extra color from us:

• Yeah, we have a lot of indexed pages.  However, there isn't much we can do about it, as we truly do have more than 500,000 class listings alone (not to mention Teacher and School Profiles, category pages, etc), and these are all unique in some way (price, date, geo-location, etc.).  You could argue that we could include that all on one summary page, but then we'd equally frustrate users who are looking for their exact match.  We decided to focus on humans in this instance, vs. the needs of bots.
• We're working to reduce some placeholder-like pages.  For instance, we've been creating pages for something such as 'Wichita, KS Programming', but it may only have Online Classes.  In the next 24 hours, those pages (that don't have any local/in-person classes) will redirect to the online/non-geo versions of Programming pages.  Here's an example of one of those pages:

http://www.teachstreet.com/wichita-ks/sewing-fabric-arts/50564-385

After our change, this will redirect to this 'online class' page:

http://www.teachstreet.com/sewing-fabric-arts/classes/385

• We've also seen the impact to be pretty much sitewide.  And we can't identify any specific geographies, categories, or page types, that have been specifically impacted.
• As part of our review, we HAVE found some sites that looks to be creating some pretty eggregious copies of our data (for instance, the family of sites owned by www.hellometro.com, that spawns 1,000s of similar sites like www.helloseattle.com, have our content on them, with no link-backs).  So, we submitted those types of sites to Google for review.
• We also resubmitted TeachStreet to Google for consideration, in Webmaster Console.
• We're removing some legacy 'seo spammy-type content' that we've had on the site since we launched, that we've never bothered to remove (meta-keywords, top-of-page-category descriptors, some excess footer links)
• We had removed some 'Article' and 'Q&A' type content from our Category/Subject pages (to increase their page-load speed)... we'll be moving some of that back, because the content is unique, and high-quality, and also because we think we can do so, without impacting page-load times

Any other ideas?

Dave

[daveschappell]

I look forward to seeing the Moz Reply -- I've been refreshing your blog since yesterday!

[RealSelf]

Good ideas, Dave.  Your housecleaning ideas prompted us to delete 2,500 old skin care product pages that we had converted to static pages after switching off Drupal.  It constituted 1% of our pages and visitors, but the poor metrics from those pages could have acted as a bad signal (2,500 pages is a lot for a human to create) and tarnished our overall site.  1% rotten is still too much.

Good idea about bringing back more content onto the Category/Subject pages.  We're going to do the same for our main landing pages.  The data I've seen indicates site speed seems is only used to break ties between pages with a similar ranking.

• Eric (CTO at RealSelf.com)

[RealSelf]

Can someone who didn't see a drop confirm or deny if the "Requesting reconsideration of your site" link is in the yellow Help box on the left side of your Webmaster Tools?  That link just appeared for us, and I wonder if that's because Google has set some site-wide penalty on our site?  It seems more likely that Google added it for all users after the update, but it would be significant if someone doesn't have that link in Webmaster Tools_._  We don't want to further anger the Google Gods so we're going to wait for the updated algorithim instead of requesting reconsideration at this time.

reconsideration.png

[Blargh123]

Looking at the traffic, our sites have seen an increase, seems to be assisting getting rid of some of these affiliate farmers for ecom as well.

[kurus]

Has anyone seen a recovery after taking remedial action?

[Blargh123]

Prob wont be an imediate recovery, there will certianly be a peroid of reduced flow.  but legitimate sites that are not using "farmer" tactics will likely see signs of recovery soon when google indexes enough of the new links.  Set up 301's on all your old links point them all to related pages in your new structure..... it could be done just rattleing off ideas here.

[Francisco_Meza]

Woot Woot! I don't see eHow above me anymore!

[sichristie]

Hey Dave,

I would love to know what kind of errors and warnings were being thrown up in crawl diagnostics on you seomoz campaign.

I am responsible for 3 large E-Commerce sites that have all the normal duplication issues, too many links etc. We rank fairly well, but the algorithm change hasn't hit our shores yet. So I'm curious what errors and warnings you have, so that I can raise the argument for acclerating our seo changes in-house.

Would be interesting for us all to know so that we can attribute a possible correlation between these and the Farmer changes

[shor]

A few more reference points to add to this thread:

• Google opened up a thread in their Google Webmaster Central help forum titled Think you're affected by the recent algorithm change? Post here.  huge bunch of responses, you can compare your situation with the hundreds of case studies listed

• There definitely were some 'goodies' whacked in this update, hence the Cult of Mac website getting whacked and then getting reinstated: http://www.cultofmac.com/crisis-over-google-has-reinstated-cult-of-mac/84362

• Australia has not been hit by the update yet, AFAIK. We're bracing ourselves on our network and watching for changes

I wish Google would release 'patch notes' for each algo change. Any competitive gamer will understand what I mean - most competitive games have balance tweaks where it is essential to release patch notes

For example:

Panda Update 1.12 (released 04/03/2011)

• Fixed a bug where high karma websites with low external inbound links were downrated in Panda Update 1.11
• Increased brand authority factor to 20% from 15%
• Google Adwords background changed from pink to yellow
• etc etc

One can dream...

[Dr.Cyke]

We have this and we have a ranking drop. But can it mean anything?

[RealSelf]

Rand said it has been added to Webmaster Tools across the board.

[cvos]

Virtually none of our client sites have been affected, and in many cases traccic/ranking have improved. Also noticing continual speed increases in new content being indexed and showing in the SERP's.

[AmitBhawani61]

Hey everyone,

We went through different websites which posted about this Google update and found that a few of our websites got a positive trend in Traffic. Attached is the screen capture [ http://snpr.cm/jYl ] which can help you in getting a clear picture.

I think one good reason for this is the websites which were ranking for long tail key phrases have lot huge traffic and rankings.

jYl

[PCampolo]

Hey RealSelf,

With regard to your meta description problems, have you tried using a NOODP meta tag on affected pages.  I've used this as a successful tactic for years and looks like other have recently tested it's effectiveness..see this most or search for NOODP http://seogadget.co.uk/the-impact-of-noodp-on-titles-in-serps/ .

Hope that helps.

[RealSelf]

Thanks for thinking about it, Stefan.  We did try the NOODP meta tag for 2 months (Jan 4th through last week) and Google seemed to ignore it because they weren't pulling a description from the Open Directory project -- they were pulling users quotes from the page.  We're not listed in the Open Directory...

The approach we've been using since last week where the snippets only show up on rollover has forced Google to accept the meta description but has increased bounce.  So we're going to tweak that further by inserting 1 line of text for each review in the onload event.

We've seen similar meta description problems for our doctor Q&A where Google pulls the doctor's name because it's in a div with class = "author".  We're going to rename that div to discourage Google from picking it up.

[rodnic66]

PRNewswire.com was listed in the original Sistrix post and was indeed hit, though not nearly as badly as their data suggested.  Overall the site is down ~20%.  We're obviously not a content farm, but we do have a ton of content on a vast range of topics, and therefore a very dynamic set of keywords.  We've alerted Google and I have some theories as to why we were targeted, but we're still picking through the data so forgive me for not sharing them until I'm more certain.

Cutt's and Singhal's comments re external testers were fascinating.  If they've really codified qualitative factors that accurately quantify a user's experience on a site/page then that is going to get very interesting.  SEOs will have to grow natty little goatees and start calling themselves Optimization Experience Designers...

[Receptional]

I don't know Teachstreet - but checking my theories/tests, it does fit the model of what has been hit. I took a snippet af exact match content from a Teachstreet directory listing and put it in google: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q="Get+ready+for+the+SATs,+connect+with+a+math+tutor+or+improve+your+LSAT+score"&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

So what I see is Google taking note of exact;y what it would take note of - trying to put the original source of the content at the top and penalize (ignore) content tat mimicks the original.