Further Tweaking to “Farmer Update”
John Borkowski, March 3, 2011
As any one of us could have imagined, the first announcement last week by Google on their “Content Farm Update” would not have been the first and only news we would have heard about this. In a report released yesterday (March 2, 2011), Google’s Amit Singhal announced that they are further “tweaking the algorithm to make sure it is 100% accurate”. This further reinforces their commitment to only delivering high-quality websites to users. After all, “search results” is the main product in their portfolio.
"We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem," Singhal said.
This is comforting news for those Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies that practice white-hat techniques to properly increase the visibility of their clients. The whole idea behind the “content farm update” is to penalize companies that use black-hat SEO to gain favorable page rank and populate high in the Google search engine results. Content farms have been in the SEO news heavily as this update marks big changes in the industry.
Kenneth C. Wisnefski, Founder and CEO of WebiMax, states that “At WebiMax, we embrace these changes and view them not as ‘changes’, but ‘enhancements’ to the SEO industry. Our clients will see improved results from this because of the proper strategies we employ. The SEO industry has unfortunately been an industry that has gotten somewhat of a bad name because of unscrupulous firms that utilize questionable techniques to help improve the online visibility of their clients. We adhere to a SEO Code of Ethics that gives our clients peace of mind, knowing that they will never end up in the news as some companies are starting to.”
With the content farm update announced yesterday, Singhal commented that there is an army of engineers at Google that are working to perfect the algorithm and add new layers to it until it is 100% accurate. This will obviously take some time to accomplish. In the meantime, Singhal says there is a “once in a while” chance that good sites can get caught up in this, and if so, notify Google via their webmaster forums.
Wisnefski adds, “Given this continued evolution in search engine parameters, I anticipate that only the truly good firms will survive, which is a good thing. I have spoken with so many countless clients whose natural results were damaged by companies using less than reputable tactics and I think it’s good that this sort of news has helped bring light to this very concerning problem.”