The Farmer Update and What You Should Know

Recently, Google have started testing a new way to deliver information and search results to its users, which was supposed to remove some websites that kept copying content from others and “spinning” it, releasing new batches of articles by the day. The so-called farmer update (named after the practice of “farming” content which was apparently being used by these websites), has so far been nothing but controversial in the online communities.

What should you know about it as a blogger though? For the most part, your own blogs shouldn’t be affected – unless you’ve been directly copying content from someone and putting it on your own blog, but even then it’s not very likely you’ll suffer in any way. Why? Because the farmer update was targeting entire websites and not just particular sections of them.

To put it in another way, entire directories for content have been excluded from Google’s search results after the farmer update, and they don’t display any of their content in Google any more – not even the legitimate articles, which comprised the larger portion of content uploaded on these websites.

So unless you’ve been hosting your blog on a domain that’s been marked as a bad one by Google, you shouldn’t worry about the farmer update affecting you – but you should still take a stance in this situation as it’s a problematic one, and it’s definitely going to set a trend for the future practices of Google – it’s up to us to make sure that trends is a good one!

Originally posted on March 18, 2011 @ 4:30 pm