There’s been much speculation since 26th February (the Google ‘Farmer’ update and also my birthday!) about the value of SEO in the modern web. My own experience is that some of my sites are seeing less traffic… but some are also seeing more. I’m probably typical of the middle-of-the-road small webmaster – from what I’ve read most people have had experiences similar to mine.
The key to gaining valuble traffic is (now more than ever) good quality content that provides value to the visitor. Ignoring SEO if you have a good quality site is like leaving money on the table – SEO is certainly still relevant and will continue to be for some time. Google appear to be weeding out lazy SEO’s – in fact the nickname of the update (farmer) suggests that the update has hit the AdSense content farms the hardest… leaving those of us with higher quality websites with more traffic to share.
If you have a website but don’t find the time for SEO why not consider hiring a full service company such as seo kansas city ? Even having a simple site review to make sure that you’re not blocking spiders from indexing your content, duplicating your own content, or linking out to unsuitable domains is well worthwhile.
The internal name at Google for the ‘farmer’ update is ‘Panda’… Google have gone as far as making comment (analysis on SearchEngineJournal). Notes include:
- Avoid duplicate content
- Clean up your spelling
- Check your analytics – high bounce rate, low time on page etc. are key indicators of low quality content
- High Ad-to-Content ratio
All in all this update is certainly going to make life more difficult for the content farms such as Associated Content et al however it may prove to be a good thing for publishers of quality content.