There’s been a lot of talk recently about Google’s latest algorithm update, which seems to have two names, initially the ‘Farmer’ update and now, labelled by Google as the ‘Panda’ update. If you are involved in SEO then you will probably have come across this already and any comments you wish to make would be greatly welcomed. In this blogpost we’re going to be looking into what the update is and, more importantly, what it means for SEO in the UK and hence rankings on google.co.uk.

What Was the Farmer Update?

Google regularly makes tweaks to its algorithm in order to get the most relevant results back to its users. However, this one was on a larger scale to normal updates, with Google claiming that 11.8% of all searches will be affected.

Essentially, there have been a lot of complaints recently about low-quality content rising to the top of the SERPs, which was hindering the search experience for users. Google relies upon people using its search to find what they are looking for, and if people stop finding relevant results then the fear is that they will simply move to another search engine.

Google therefore made the update to ensure that only the best results show up when people make searches. Although many sites have been affected, it seems that the principle targets of the update were the so-called ‘content farms’.

Prior to the update, it was common for browsers to find pages published on article and other so called content farm sites ranking high for many mid to low competition keyword searches. These article pages ranked so high mainly down to the high PageRank and trust these domains often have. Post update, many of the high rankings individual article pages held have now been replaced by actual websites (not article pages) that are relevant to the keyword searches. This Google feels offers a better result for the browser as it now means browsers find the actual websites most relevant to their enquiries right away – without first having to click on an article, and then from that article to the website the article was seeking to promote. The algorithm changes has (in many ways) removed the ‘middle man’ ranking.

What Is Exactly A Content Farm?

The phrase ‘content farm’ has been mentioned a lot lately, even in the national media, so you may have heard the name before. But what is it exactly?

Basically, content farms are websites which display content compiled by thousands of contributors, usually in the form of articles. One of the main focuses on all the sites is keyword-optimised content that generates traffic via the search engines. AdSense ads and links to other websites are then included in the content pages to make money from advertising and to direct visitors to specific web pages.

There are a number of these types of site in existence, with EzineArticles, HubPages and Associated Content being a few of the largest ones. Many of the sites have high PageRanks and, due to the fact that many of these sites were ‘human’ edited, had high trust factor from Google. As stated above, this often meant their article pages ranked well with far less SEO and link building than a standard domain with the same article would do.

How Have Content Farm Rankings Been Affected?

It’s still too early to see exactly how content farm rankings have been affected, but some of the sites are reporting huge drops in traffic and drops in the number of keywords that they are ranking for in Google.

It’s also worth mentioning that the sites have been affected differently depending on the region where the search is made. For example, in the USA, where content farms have typically ranked quite high in the search engines, searches are now showing fewer results from content farms. However, in the UK they have never ranked as highly as they did in the USA anyway, mainly down tot he fact hat most content farms operate from .com (ie American) domains so it’s hard to tell how much they have been affected on Google UK.

In Ireland (on google.ie), where I happen to be living at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much difference in results so far, and I can currently see an Ezine article appearing on page one for the keyword ‘rise and recline chair.’

EZA still ranks high in Ireland - Click to Enlarge

Overall, results vary across the world. US rankings have seen the largest change and whilst UK rankings have changed, this may do far be down to the loss of link value from backlinks hosted on downgraded .com domains. In fact, many people believe a UK update will come soon that will take in the full effect of Google’s recent algorithm changes (plus subsequent upgrades) and start delivering SE rankings on google.co.uk that have far more in common with current rankings on google.com!

What Does this Mean for Your SEO?

The thing to remember is that content farms have not been banned by Google: their power has just been reduced.

Many SEOs use sites like EzineArticles because of the powerful keyword-embedded links that they provide. It’s fair to say that a link from EzineArticles is probably worth slightly less now than it was before the update. But having said that, a link from EzineArticles is always a good link and should still be used for SEO purposes.

However, it’s now more important than ever that you publish your best content on your own websites first rather than on your favourite article sites. Google is trying to deliver the best and most relevant results to the web browsers keyphrase search. Hence, you need to make sure that your site offers the ‘best and most relevant’ content within it’s pages. Bookmark your new content once you publish it to your site, this will ensure Google understands that your own domain was the first place this content was found.

You can still build links with your content, more or less as you did before – most of these content farms allow you to post your content to their sites as well as long as you are the author of the original content (with the exception of a few such as HubPages which now won’t publish anything that has already been published elsewhere).

Why Now is the Time to Get Involved in Social Media

In a recent blog about my SEO predictions for 2011 I spoke about the greater integration of social media with search engine rankings. Prior to the last six months, you could get a good ranking just from building links to your site. Now, however, Google expects that where there are lots of links pointing to a page there will be some kind of social media reflection of this.

For example, if you attract 2,000 links in a couple of weeks, Google will expect people to be mentioning your site on Facebook, Twitter or social bookmarking sites. These social media links are essentially a verification of the links that you build to your site.

As a result, creating good quality content and using social media to publicise it will bring in natural links that you will not be able to generate from low-quality content. If you only create low-quality content with lots of links but without any from social media sources then this won’t add up in Google’s eyes.

Prepare Yourself for Change

As already mentioned, the main changes of the Google ‘Farmer’ update were felt in the USA. However, it’s likely that a more in-depth update will be coming to the UK, Ireland and everywhere shortly. Now is the time to prepare yourself by writing some high-quality content for your own site and integrating more social media links into your online promotional activities.

Take the appropriate action now, focus on good content and finding those online who would most appreciate it and you won’t have to worry about any changes that Google makes to UK search.

It’s been a little while since I’ve written and I apologise for the delay in posting. It’s been hectic, (fun hectic), since returning to the UK.

A few people have been asking me to write a little more about blog carnivals – which you may recall I’ve previously mentioned as a great way of building good links. So here goes….

When you hear the word ‘carnival’, music, dancing, games and costumes are probably the first things that come to mind. Well now there’s an online carnival in town and, although it might be low on dancing and merrymaking, if you’re serious about your blogging then it could well be worth checking it out.

Welcome to the blog carnival.

What Exactly Is a Blog Carnival?

A blog carnival is a kind of ‘travelling’ blog consisting of a single post that contains links to a selection of other blog posts in a particular niche. Each blog carnival is set up by an initial organiser who chooses the subject area, the submission criteria and where the carnival will appear. Different bloggers then volunteer to host the carnival on their own blogs each week, fortnight or month, depending on the carnival.

Bloggers then submit their posts to the host for consideration in the next carnival, and the host collates these submissions and decides which of them to feature. If your blog gets chosen, you will receive a link to your blog post which will normally be accompanied by a short description or comment.

Find Carnivals & Submit Your Posts

There are many different blog carnivals on every subject imaginable, and you can find all of them at the Blog Carnival website . Head to the carnival index (click on ‘More blog carnivals…’ at the bottom of the home page), find a suitable topic and then visit the profile page of a carnival by clicking on its name. Here you’ll find out more about the topic, the guidelines for submission and the schedule for hosting, as well as previous carnivals so you can take a look at what’s expected.

Once you’ve found a carnival that looks suitable, sign up to the website (it’s free) and then simply submit your posts to your chosen carnivals (you can submit the same post to multiple carnivals if you want). It’s a relatively simple process, and if you’re lucky your post will get chosen to appear in the next carnival.

Top Tip: If you don’t run a blog BUT have some good articles on your website, go ahead and submit these. Use the url to the exact page where your article exists on your website, ie http://www.yoursite.co.uk/yourarticle.html and you should find they are treated exactly the same as a blogpost.

An Excellent Tactic for Building High-Authority Links

The main reason that you as a blogger/website owner would want to submit your posts to a blog carnival in your niche is that it is a fantastic way to generate high-authority links. The host of the carnival will often have a high PageRank, and on top of that, because all blog carnivals are ‘human edited’, Google and other SE’s consider them a very high authority link to have. In short, your SE rankings will benefit!

As a secondary bonus, readers who find your post via the carnival and consider it worth reading might provide you with additional backlinks that you would not have gained without appearing in the carnival in the first place.

More Reasons to Join the Carnival

Building high-authority links is one of the main benefits of submitting your blogs to a blog carnival. But there are a number of other reasons for doing so:

Traffic Boost – many of the carnival hosts generate a lot of traffic to their blogs, so it stands to reason that if your post gets included you can expect to see a traffic spike.

Increased Exposure – a blogging carnival is a great way to attract target readers within your niche who may end up becoming regular readers.

Authority – the fact that someone has chosen your blog over many others increases your authority in your niche.

Networking – by getting involved in blogging carnivals you can make new contacts and network with other bloggers, which can often lead to new opportunities.

The Carnival Awaits

If you haven’t explored blog carnivals yet then it is a great way to get some powerful links, boost traffic and increase your blog’s exposure. It’s free, easy and won’t take long to make submissions once you get the hang of it, so try it out for yourself.

If you read through last week’s post about ‘being social‘, particularly the section about ping.fm, you may have gathered that good work upfront can pay long term dividends for SEO. This especially true if you have more than one website to promote, or if you have ambitions to rank a number of urls on page 1 for the same keyword (we’ll delve more into this last thought next week ) Today, let’s look at three fine ways to spend your time in order to reap long term SEO benefits.

Ping.fm

As discussed last week, ping.fm allows you to update many social media profiles at once. This is very useful for letting both browsers and search engines know about any new content you publish. Additionally, every social profile post is one good link to your new content. Of course, there is some time consuming work in creating all of the profiles you need. However, this is a purely administrative task and requires no real knowledge of SEO, more a familiarity with the internet. As such, it’s an easy job to delegate if you have that luxury. If you’re simply ‘time limited’ right now, then I would suggest you create profiles for at least the following networks: twitter, identi, typepad, vox and posterous.  For an extra boost, note down the RSS feed urls for each of the profiles you create and submit these to as many RSS directories as you can.

SocialMarker.com

Similar in a sense to ping.fm, socialmarker.com allows you to submit your urls to up to 50 bookmarking websites at once. Bookmarking is especially useful in getting new content indexed quickly. As above, it is quite a job to register and approve all of the accounts initially. However, invest a little time now and you will produce a tool that you can use again and again to ensure all new content is indexed quickly and often within 48 hours.

If creating numerous social media and bookmarking accounts is not something you wish to create time for right now, have a look at Onlywire. Onlywire is a cut down version of ping.fm and socialmarker that submits your urls to a smaller number of profiles.

Ezinearticles.com

EZA is the daddy of article directories and definitely one of the best content driven links you can create for your websites. If you have recently created an account at EZA, you may have noticed that it takes up to 2 weeks to get your content approved and published. The good news is that things won’t always take this long. In fact, once you have successfully published 10 – 35 approved articles (the difference in number is dependent on the quality of your article submissions), your account will be upgraded to EZA ‘platinum’ level. From here on, you’ll see most of your articles being published within 48 hours of submission. Hence, it makes sense to get yourself to ‘platinum’ level as fast as you can! I recommend asking your friends, colleagues and clients whether they have any articles they would like you to publish online for them. It’s much easier to publish content your given than content you have to sit down and write – but do be careful, make sure that any article your given meets EZA’s strict guidelines!

If you can find some time to develop these three platforms, you’ll have three powerful SEO tools that you can use over and over again. Next week, we’ll look at how such tools can help you push your website AND strongest web 2.0 urls towards page 1 for your target keywords.

It takes time to write content. Time, I believe, is the most valuable asset we have. Hence, I am always looking for ways to make one well written piece of content work harder and harder in it’s ability to generate good backlinks. Today I’m going to take you through my favourite ways to utilise a good article again and again.

First off, let’s look at where a well written 4 – 500 word article should definitely be published:

1. On your website: It’s your content, so you should certainly publish it. Always publish your articles on your own website first, bookmark them to ensure the search engines are aware that your website should have first published credits.
2. On the top article directories: At the very least, you should publish your article at the top five article directories. These directories are crawled often by search engines and offer well trusted links back to your website. Last month’s post on ‘how to index your new website quickly‘ listed the top five article directories.

Now, if you did nothing other than the above with your articles on a regular basis, you would certainly still see the benefits. The above, however, is really only the start of what you ‘could’ do. To utilise articles to maximum efficiency you have to get a little creative. Here’s my current favourite ways of squeezing links out of your articles:

1. Turn An Article Into A Press Release
   Did you know that there exists online a whole network of Press Release websites dying to distribute your stories across the web? Many of the bigger ones, like prweb.com, charge for using their service. However, there are also a large number of services which offer a good distribution service free of charge, the best known of these is probably prlog.org. You will have to do a little editing to turn that article into a press release, but once you have, you’ll find a number of new places to publish that content AND receive high quality backlinks in return. To get you started, here’s a useful guide to turning an article into a press release and here’s a good list of free press release websites – there are many more, so do search out your own additions to add to these.
2. Turn An Article Into a PodCast
   I discovered an interesting new service this month called Odiogo that will turn any rss feed into a podcast. I’ve actually added this very blog to their service and as a result, you can now ‘listen’ to all posts in audio (just click on the ‘listen now’ link above), mp3′s are also downloadable should you wish to place them onto your ipod or player. Now, not only is this a fine and cool way to turn written content into multi media, it also offers you the ability to upload your Odiogo files to a range of podcast websites out there. Google particularly adores multi media content, and hence links back to your website from such podcasting places are high authority and, more importantly, ones that your competitors probably don’t have.  Here’s a comprehensive list of podcasting directories.
3. Turn An Article Into Video
   Having turned your article into audio, it perhaps comes as no surprise that I’m going to recommend you turn it into video too. If you downloaded the top100links, you’ll know that YouTube is the number one rated link you can have . Turning that article into a video easily means you can create that, and many more, fine site link back to your website.  There are a number of online software services emerging that turn an article into video almost instantly, the best known of these is Article Video Robot, this one will actually also submit your video to the top video distribution websites – including the mighty YouTube.

So, hopefully by now your getting the idea. The internet is a vast world of multi-media content. The more ways and formats that people can come across your content the better, both in terms of attracting traffic and in terms of growing your link base across a wide variety of IP addresses. With a dose of imagination, you’ll uncover a host of further methods for making your written content stretch and morph further across the web. Of course, I’d be most interested in any ideas you have, so please do post them here!

If you have read through some of our earlier posts, you may recall that, back  in January, we discussed the importance of looking for IP diversity within your link building. Today, were going to look at how the same rule should be applied when placing links on your articles and other web 2.0 properties.

Last week we took a good look at creating an SEO friendly article. If you followed this post, you will have added three links in total to your article, two pointing at your new website and another pointing to another web 2.0 property (ie blog, another article etc). For a new website, these two links back to pages on your new site will help push search engines towards indexing your whole site quickly.

However, once indexed and ranking, you can start looking to change this approach slightly. Just as discussed back in January, when you have two or more links to your main domain from any webpage, only the first one gets full credit. This is true even if your second, or third, link points to a page deep within your website.  As your website grows, and in particular as your collection of web 2.o properties grow,  linking out from your articles to three different domains will utilise these links far more effectively.

What’s the next best thing to a link back to your website? Answer: A link back to a page that in turn links back to your main website. Hence, when placing links, the trick is to link out once to a page on your main url, and then to domains that link back to main your url.

Link Placement Action Plan

1. Keep a list of all your web 2.0 properties, ie published article, blogpost, video, podcast and other media urls.
2. Track rankings of these urls and keep a note of the highest ranking web 2.0 pages.
3. Look over your best web 2.0 pages and place a tick beside all that allow you full editorial control.

Your highest ranking web 2.0 pages that also allow you to edit your content are the very pages you should link to, after your main url, when placing links on articles and indeed all web 2.0 properties. For a list of places to create web 2.0 properties click here.

By linking out your main domain and other pages that link to your main domain, you’re getting the most out of each of your links. Not only are you boosting the authority of your own main website, but also that of your links too. In the long run, this approach will only make all of your links all the more powerful.

Article marketing is my favourite form of SEO/Web Marketing.

With a little care and attention, articles can become fabulously powerful online marketing assets. I could take you all the way through at least one bottle of single malt if I were to relay all of the reasons I believe this…for now, let’s stick with a brief intro!

Article Marketing is perhaps the easiest form of content distribution out there. Creating links with your own content is a very positive method of building links. By sharing information, you contribute to the very essence of the internet. Not only do you increase your own topic authority BUT you also get to do this in your own words.

One article can create many good links. If you take a little time to write quality content, it will be rewarded with lots of publications in lots of good places, which in turn send lots of high value one way links back to your website. There are also a number of ways that a good article can in turn be quickly transformed (something we’ll go into in a later post) into a video, podcast or audio file – again, offering more ways to distribute your content and create good links.

Good articles published on the top article directories bring well targeted traffic. It is not uncommon for an article published on the top directories, (especially Ezine Articles, Go Articles and Articlebase), to rank page 1 for low competition keywords.

So, with one well written article in hand, here’s the parts of an article directory submission I recommend taking special care over:

1. Make sure you have a main keyword target for your article. Ideally, this should be one of your website keyword targets.
2. If possible, place your keyword target directly into the article title. Try to write this in a way that still reads well for browsers. I often use a ‘Top Tips For…’ title style, as this title format makes it both easier to write an article and to place a keyword into my title, eg ‘Top Tips For Buying Cheap Shoes Online’.
3. Don’t worry too much about placing your keyword target all over the copy. Again, think about your ‘human’ article readers first and foremost. If possible, place your keyword target in the first and last sentence of your article.
4. Many article directories, including EzineArticles, Go Articles and ArticlesBase, let you get away with a link placed towards the end of your article. Link your keyword target placed within the last sentence of your article to the url of the most relevant page on your website.
5. Every Article Directory allows you to write a ‘Resource Box’, telling readers about you, the author, and where you are from. First off, aim to write an engaging resource box, one that seeks to entice browsers to click through to your main website. I usually have a ‘click here to…..’ sentence within my resource boxes. Place a secondary keyword, one related to your main keyword target (eg for ‘cheap shoes’ a related keyword might be ‘budget shoes’) within the resource box. Link this 2nd keyword to your homepage url.
6. Place another secondary keyword within the resource box. Link this third keyword to a web 2.0 url outside of your website. Examples of web 2.0 urls could be your blog, your twitter/facebook page or even another article on another directory.

On occasion, you might find that a directory asks you to remove your keyword link placed within the article body itself. In this instance, simply link from within the Resource  Box with your main keyword target to the most relevant page within your website , leaving out the secondary link to your website homepage but keeping your link to your web 2.0 page.

Hopefully, the above six points will ensure you get the most ‘link juice’ out of your individual article submissions. Next week, we’ll take a look at how published articles can be pushed higher up the rankings… taking your website url with them.