It comes as no surprise to anyone in the SEO “game” that the latest Google algorithm update (Panda), came down hard on those websites with weak content, thinly-veiled duplicate content, and a habit of linking to other content farms or made-for-adsense type websites.

While it may sound repetitive to say that you need to supply original and unique content on your own website, it carries further in that if you hire the resources of labour-force content writers, your website could be adversely affected (at least in the search engine results) by the use of weak, re-written, spun content.

Newest Google Update

If your website relies on low-content, low-quality articles, and yet your site is intended as an authority website on your topic or niche, you might (quickly) wish to reconsider your business model. It is apparent that the newest Google update, the Panda update, has focused on reducing the visibility of poorly-written, duplicated, content-farm oriented material, and is trying to weed out the written articles and stories that are basically clones and copies of other articles, or written in a manner or fashion that makes it look like low-quality writing.

The term “content farm” more or less refers to the above-mentioned practices of producing weak content, usually a mere shadow of a more thorough and in-depth article on the same subject. These labour-force style writers who can produce upwards of 50-100 “unique” articles on the same subject are the ones who are likely to lose out on this update!

We all know and recognize that there is absolutely no value whatsoever to the end reader, as it would be more beneficial just to read the same material from the “original” source. We shouldn’t need some third-grade rewritten version.

Rewritten Content

The damage that this has done to the Internet is apparent, but the greater damage can be to your own website, where the likelihood of this type of rewritten content showing up can be tied to your SEO marketing campaigns, where perhaps an SEO expert has hired an Indian content writer to produce a multitude of articles to promote your site on other link-farm style websites.

The old adage that all backlinks are good backlinks cannot hold true when big G is calling foul on those content-farm articles and penalizing them in the search results, and those sites they link to and from.

SEO Strategies

To protect yourself from this sort of depreciation in your own search results, you should re-examine your SEO strategies, and identify if you are relying on weaker sources to strengthen your results, and see if you can improve on your marketing techniques. For starters, if you are using a content writer, ensure that the content writer is either an authority on the subject he/she is writing about, or ensure that they can produce well-written, in-depth content that provides a value to the end-reader, as well as be in a position to promote your product/service/website.

Social Media Websites

It’s not always going to be as simple as all that, as if it were, the Internet would be reduced to Wikipedia as a authority source on everything, and there would be a single web directory and a handful of social media websites.

SEO Marketing

SEO marketing is a difficult game to play, especially when the bigger game players change the rules whenever they feel like it. While the Panda update is likely to cripple many of these content farms, be assured that they are already working on new methods to prop their limp content farm websites back up to the top of the search results!