Were you affected by the "Farmer Update?" What are you doing about it?
-
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?
-
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!
-
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.
-
Has there been any progress on your site's rankings?
-
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.
-
The farmer update was great for us. We sell prodcuts on our site and have original content. Our rankings went up.
-
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.
-
I'd attempt to contact Google. I know it's really hard, but there are ways. Good luck man I feel for ya.
-
It's all content that I wrote myself. There's not even a question whether it's unique.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Our Sites Organic Traffic Went Down Significantly After The June Core Algorithm Update, What Can I Do?
After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady, or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?
Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM2 -
What does it exactly means when Google brings the "brand name" to the beggining of the page title in search results when it was actually given at the end?
We see many times...page titles starts with "brand name: page for etc" where actually "brand name" has been given at the end and keywords at beginning. Why does Google make this change? I noticed this happens when similar title tags are used by multiple websites for high difficulty keywords. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Am I hit by an update????? Please help
Hello. Is possible to have just a page or two penalized?? From 24th april ( around that date i heard was an update) two of my pages ( out of 37) do not rank for their main keywords but are indexed. Also, lately a lot of my pages drop out of top 100 and get back on their position. Any help? Am I in trouble? Anyone has the same problem?
Algorithm Updates | | Ag96adc0 -
Does my website need the SSL Cert / HTTPS Update?
So, I own a car shipping company called Car Shipping Carriers ( www.carshippingcarriers.com ) and I am trying to find out if I need the SSL Cert / HTTPS for the site. I attached a picture that shows I dropped a HUGE amount of rank back in the beginning of August 2014 and that the SSL/HTTPS update happened at nearly the exact same time. I do have a quote box on my website asking for: Name, Phone, Email, Origin, Destination, Move Date, Year/Make/Model of Vehicle, and Carrier Type. I was unsure if I needed the HTTPS because I am not asking for sensitive data, but it seems that I might need to bite the bullet and update the site to HTTPS. What do you all think? Any expert opinion and/or advice? JWV4N1o
Algorithm Updates | | Dutko23850 -
Yandex Update
The traffic from my website significantly decreased from Yandex last month. Was their a major update?
Algorithm Updates | | theLotter0 -
Has Panda update made you lose your ranks but put them back again?
I noticed recently that one of the main sites I run dropped ranks quite heavily across the board. I then noticed that with very link building during the time that the ranks were down (about 1 month) that my ranks went back up again really quickly. All this with very little link building effort, and its the same link building campaign I've been running for a while. So I'm wondering has any been experiencing ranking flux between jan and feb? I know that people reckon if you fix some things your ranks can improve again, but I barley fixed anything on the site and yet it dropped some keywords from 1st page to 3rd page and then back to 3rd page; some keywords went back to original position some were lower but non were higher.
Algorithm Updates | | upick-1623910 -
Google new update question
I was just reading this, http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/220662 We have our official site, which has 200+ service pages, which we wrote once and we keep doing SEO for them, so they rank high all the time. Now my question is, how does Google handle the site freshness ? Service static pages or if we are adding blog items, then also they consider them as fresh site, right ? So, we dont have to update those service pages, right ?
Algorithm Updates | | qubesys0 -
Was I Kicked Off Google Page One by Panda/Farmer?
Took over this site in March. Got a Panicked call from client Mid-March that all of a sudden keywords that put the site on Page One weren't working. There are still 9 that work, but apparently there were more. A large percentage of the backlinks are from Article Directories and Link Farms. Is this my problem? Also, a large percentage of the 149 pages suffer from keyword stuffing and were obviously written for Search Engines and not people. How much of a difference does that make?
Algorithm Updates | | reeljerc0