Were you affected by the "Farmer Update?" What are you doing about it?

[WillyF]

I woke up on Friday morning to see that my traffic from Google on Thursday was down 30% on one of my sites. Traffic hasn't bounced back, and I'm wondering why I've been lumped in with the content farms. My site only has original, high quality content. It has a great link profile with tons of links from .edu page, and I've always played by Google's rules.

I can't understand why my site has been negatively affected, which makes it hard to do something about it. Right now, the only thing that I can come up with is to work really hard at building more links.

Were you affected? What are you doing about it?

[SeanStewart81]

Does your site have a lot of unique content? All of my clients experienced increased rankings. They're ecommerce based sites with unique products descriptions. Some of their competitors that drop ship are using product descriptions from the manufacturer and they all experienced a drop in the rankings.

[WillyF]

It's all content that I wrote myself. There's not even a question whether it's unique.

[Hondaspeder]

I'd attempt to contact Google. I know it's really hard, but there are ways. Good luck man I feel for ya.

[WillyF]

I did file a reconsideration request right away, though I didn't have anything to fess up to. I also was featured in a Wired article on Good Sites Caught By Spam Cleanup, so hopefully there will be some forward progress soon.

[totalvac]

The farmer update was great for us. We sell prodcuts on our site and have original content. Our rankings went up.

[Gyi]

I'd like to see a larger data set. After most algo updates, that significantly impact rankings, there are likely to be large fluxuations in the days, weeks, and months following the update. You may find your traffic "bounces back", but it may take several months.

[KeriMorgret]

Has there been any progress on your site's rankings?

[IPINGlobal54]

If you have a very large site, check google webmaster tools, and run a custom SEOmoz crawl to look for a rise in site errors. Larger sites appear to have been heavily crawled pre-panda and subsequently shown large numbers of errors on some sites as panda was rolled out.

If your content is all unique, i would check your site structure/performance and see if there are any nasties there first.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi WillyF, we're wondering if you have any progress to report with your rankings, or if Google responded to your reconsideration request with any more information. A lot of people are real interested to see if anyone is recovering from Panda/Farmer, how long it's taking, and how they did it. Would love to see an update here!