0 Content Farms For Poor Content-to-Link Ratio

Content Farms For Poor Content-to-Link Ratio

How do updates impact search engine algorithms? Richard McCreadie, a computer scientist at the University of Glasgow, U.K., researched the subject at great length, and this recent article in The New Scientist summarizes his findings well.

The most promising news is that of a Panda update, a search engine algorithm update from Google, which was initially released in the U.S. in February of 2011. It restructured parts of the algorithms to integrate a rating system of sorts for websites. One effective part of this update was penalizing content farms, which are typically sites with thin or shallow content, or sites with a poor content-to-link ratio.
Danny Sullivan, an SEO guru who heads up Search Engine Land, took to a recent article to define content farms as companies or people who look for popular searches in a particular category and generate shoddy content tailored to those searches, usually spending little time, effort and money to do so, with the sole goal of getting clicks.
McCreadie’s research further shows the ever-increasing intensity of the war between search engines and content farms, and, luckily for users, search engines seem to be prevailing. Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google, agrees that search engines are winning, and improving the user experience in the process.
“This win against content farms is good news for reputable SEO firms that adhere to white-hat techniques,” Husayni says. “Many sites were hit hard by this update, but none of our clients lost rankings.”

This reinforces the point that Master Google’s SEO is on the right track and that good SEO services will continue to be in demand. Some critics of SEO have said that the industry is dying and losing relevance due to social media and networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but Husayni is adamant that they are wrong.
“The industry is constantly evolving and SEO has grown to encompass much more than on-site optimization. It’s really only five or ten percent of the total work,” Husayni says. “As long as we continue to grow with it, SEO will continue to be relevant.”

The vast majority of SEO is generating useful, high-quality content on a regular basis, technical research for keywords relevant to the company, and a long-term link building campaign to get the new information out to the readers who are searching for it.

Google’s search engine algorithms are constantly being refined to get more effective at mimicking human readers’ behaviors. Husayni says he is just glad that the updates continue to weed out the SEO companies that give a negative reputation to the industry he is so passionate about.