Google declares war on content farms

[Flash4Ever]

Does this mean that we should have our sites be at 400 words or more?

And why would Ezine put links at noFollow? Is Google going to look at Dofollow links as a bad thing?

Nothing new, you should know that for a SEO optimized content page the minimum number is 400 or even 500.

It seems that the NoFollow issue is frozen now, maybe thay have read some wise comments in this thread.
The truth is that all these article directories are useless, the web shouldn't change a bit without them, their unique purpose is to give link juice to money sites.

 

[Nohel]

I've written a couple articles for Demand/eHow and haven't gotten paid jack...its more for the links that I do it for, not so much the pay.

Demand paid out between $15-30 last time I heard (I don't write articles but have tried to learn about them) with actual editors doing quality control. They were a victim of their own success, you can give google what the want only as long as the unwashed masses think you know as little as they do as to what google actually wants.

 

[fatmoocow]

I think it's short sighted to say google is killing individual sites rather than changing things algorithmically.

Let's say you wanted to kill these sites, how would you do it?

- Reduce the value of domain authority. Just because a domain has 11ty billion pages and 11ty billion backlinks across those pages doesn't mean an individual page with no backlinks has any real value just because it sits on that domain.
- increase and/or rework the duplicate content penalty so that content spread over many many sites (directories) gets an even bigger penalty than content duplicated fewer times
- kill the domain authority of domains with a large percentage of duplicate content
- kill the domain authority of domains with a large percentage of engrish/spun content
- kill individual pages or domains that are getting poor click through rates from search results. People don't click on these sites, so reduce their value based on these clicks

This can be done algorithmically.

The whole reason google can't stay ahead of us is because they have to do things algorithmically. They can't just kill one type of link, profile links, links from an individual domain, forum links, blog comments, etc. The very links they need to kill most are also some of the most valuable when they aren't spam. Forums for example are full of really high quality links to sites with great content. Blog comments when they aren't spam, link to active bloggers who write original content.

Google is google because they use backlinks to determine search rankings. They can't ever change this, and because of that, building backlinks will always work as long as you're producing quality and those links look natural.

 

[schockergd]

I think it's short sighted to say google is killing individual sites rather than changing things algorithmically.

Let's say you wanted to kill these sites, how would you do it?

- Reduce the value of domain authority. Just because a domain has 11ty billion pages and 11ty billion backlinks across those pages doesn't mean an individual page with no backlinks has any real value just because it sits on that domain.
- increase and/or rework the duplicate content penalty so that content spread over many many sites (directories) gets an even bigger penalty than content duplicated fewer times
- kill the domain authority of domains with a large percentage of duplicate content
- kill the domain authority of domains with a large percentage of engrish/spun content
- kill individual pages or domains that are getting poor click through rates from search results. People don't click on these sites, so reduce their value based on these clicks

This can be done algorithmically.

The whole reason google can't stay ahead of us is because they have to do things algorithmically. They can't just kill one type of link, profile links, links from an individual domain, forum links, blog comments, etc. The very links they need to kill most are also some of the most valuable when they aren't spam. Forums for example are full of really high quality links to sites with great content. Blog comments when they aren't spam, link to active bloggers who write original content.

Google is google because they use backlinks to determine search rankings. They can't ever change this, and because of that, building backlinks will always work as long as you're producing quality and those links look natural.

The question is , what can we learn from the update (More, how did google penalize the sites).

All my sites increased in traffic, so I'm not complaining.