This article was provided, unsolicited, by Musa from Article Ranks, which is STILL currently a recommended solution for getting backlinks to your sites.
Begin article:
So, Google has officially released a statement that they have launched a new algorithm targeting content farms and un original content sites. We have had a lot of people contacting us and saying they are worried about the changes and where the future of article spinning stands. So how does this new update affect article spinning and services like our own ArticleRanks.com?
Let me tell you now that in most instances this is going to not affect us a huge amount and let me tell you why.
1) Google are cracking down on sites with duplicate content
2) Google are cracking down on sites with very low quality content
Now in essence none of these facts apply to article spinning (maybe a low percentage does), but the whole purpose of article spinning was to do the following.
1) Create unique content and avoid it being marked as duplicate
2) Make sure that each of these unique versions were high enough quality
So we have concluded that article spinning is much higher quality than scraper sites and it is not spreading duplicated content across the web. Saying this though, article spinning is also going to be slightly hit by this change and the people/sites that are going to be hit are
1) People who have not bothered to spin articles more than 100% ( Alot of people become lazy when it comes to spinning and spin articles just enough to get good distribution numbers)
2) Site owners who have been accepting content that was spun only 50% (For example on ArticleRanks, you now have the option of only accepting content spun at least 300%)
Overall if you are article spinning make sure that you are creating good content that reads well and that is spun at least 250%, this will not only get you higher quality links, but they will not get devalued by any of the search engines. In the end that is what Google wants and has always wanted, unique content which is useful to the user.
People that will feel the full wrath of these changes are going to be people who have been
1) Traditional article marketing (Submitting the same article to hundreds of different outlets)
2) Sites such as ezine, hubpages and more which have a vast amount of duplicated content.
On a site note. Google have been saying for years that they can easily spot duplicate content. So why has duplicate content been ranking so high? Why have scraper sites been in the top 10, top 5 and more? Were we not all told years ago that Google could easily detect duplicate content? As I have always said dont take Google’s word for anything, do your own tests and come to your own conclusions.
End Article:
From Dan, admin of this site:
1- Yes, there’s been a duplicate content filter upgrade
2- so Yes, you need to spin more, or spin better to see same results as in the past
3- and Yes, some sites that relied predominantly on article spins to rank the destination sites got hit
Why did EZA, Squidoo, and HubPages get hit (maybe just temporarily)?
EZA and HubPages care about their content supposedly, and disallow content that doesn’t pass THEIR dupe content filters, Squidoo much less so.
But if you’re an SE Nuke user, you know that you’re not building mini-sites on those web 2.0s, but merely creating one one-hot, one-page wonder after another and Google realizes this, therefore has started to treat the aforementioned entities that are rife/replete with one-page, one-hit wonders….as content farms.
This kinda stinks because most SEO gurus will tell you to start with those 3 web 2.0 properties when trying to get backlinks from sites not under your control, but I find it rather sad that Google can’t differentiate between good and bad content yet, which is why they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater by treating lenses EZAs and hubs this way, then again it might be a temporary thing, which is why I don’t like to speculate on things in SEO, just reveal what’s work.
Anyhow, read Musa’s article again in case I got you off track with my ramblings. Do better with your spinning and get more domains with PR linking to you, and you’ll withstand these recent algo changes and probably see improvements, too…
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{ 85 comments… read them below or add one }
The web 2.0 resources that took the most hit except EZ were the ones where people posted allot duplicate also. There were enough examples where someone would ripp a article post it to a squidoo backlinked the hell out of it and rank above the source of the article. Change doesn’t mean 100% bad, what is your take on EZ do you think they will get trusted again?
Thanks , your blog is a good read.
Good.
As someone who spins the a$$ off everything I welcome this.
Measuring spin after 100% is not always easy. BS and AMR jam at 100%.
I use the UAW method first (i.e 3 totally different versions paragraph spun) then do a synonym spin on the lot. I have 15-20 titles – then spin all of those, same with resource box.
Next I do HTML spin and maybe add a few “dead” or selectable paragraphs.
I spin it 3 or 4 times and if any of the language “jars” I go in and alter it.
Then I post only to decent sites (I measure what is decent by PR normally)
BY using speech to text and having an article length between 500 and 650 words I can get an article spun to 350-500% out in about 2 hours MAX.
I really have no time for SENuke – the whole process seems rubbish and highly fallible to me. It doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated algorithm to spot a one or two post wordpress blog with incomplete author profile, standard theme. It would take an idiot about 5 seconds to see the self serving nature of these “trash” sites.
Hopefully this move will sort the men out from the boys.
Quality should count. Trash SHOULD fail.
All in all – Great news.,
Hmm, looks like those Ultra Spinnable Articles would still work though. You checked them out yet, Dan? They’re actually pretty good.
Dan…
What’s “ALB”? Seems to be your own thing (according to the long form sales letter)
What is it? How come so cheap? etc etc
What does a 300% spun article mean? Where can I find additional information on how to do this?
I have TBS but thought you could only spin up to 100%. I would appreciate your help. Kickin’ site btw.
David, spinning 300% or more basically refers to the number of variations you provide in the article. Either spinning sentences, individual words, or ideally both. Achieving a 300% spin means that version 1 of your article is 300% different to version 2 and 300% different to version 3 etc. Services like AMA and AR allow you to spin as much as you like, but as far as I know AR is the only one that allows blog owners to only auto-accept content 300% spun or more.
I totally agree with Duncan. AMA doesn’t allowd you to auto accept content. And from what I have heard AR does have some gems from which there are some serious link power to gain.
Hope you are well buddy!
Hey buddy! Hope you’re well, hows the trip going?
email me and give me an update!
Duncan & Saurav,
Let’s start spinning at 1000% and see what happens!
All best!
OK, call me stupid but don’t see how is that 300%. I think that even if you change all the words it leave you with article that is at best 100% different (100% of the words is different).
Basically by spinning each sentence 3 times (say if you used different words each time – tricky I know) but this would in essence provide a 300% spun article. Duncan is right AR does seem to be the only one that allows you to cap an acceptance at no less than 300%. Because it is pretty much impossible to spin a sentence completely different each time, you may need to spin it more than 3 times each one, then you will end up with 300% plus. The more you do it the longer it takes, but in essence is more beneficial.
Hey Duncan / Saurav / Modi lol, hope you guys are all good, we are all in different places now lol!
In all honesty writing the entire sentence in a different way helps a lot. Yes AR does provide help but seriously use your initiative guys. God gave you brain for SOMETHING!
We are all in different place? Are we, I know I am in South India but you all are still in pensioners town aren’t you? Or am I missing something?
I switched from other article spinning services to Articles Ranks when they started allowing blog owners to set the auto-accept bar at 300% spun. This has (as far as I can see) attracted higher quality sites to the network and meant that I’m getting more power per article. I’m pretty glad I’ve both been using this service and heavily spinning my articles for a while now.
What does this mean to the effectiveness of services such as Linxboss? On the surface, it seems as though this algo change will heavily impact such a service but maybe (hopefully) I’m missing something. I only signed up to LB 3 weeks ago with the intention of giving it at least 3 months but now I’m thinking twice. What makes things worse is that I found an LB link to an LB exclusive site I was promoting (so it must of been an LB link as everything suggested it was, i.e. random content, random link placement at the end of some text) and it came from a site with no domain PR, and absolutely no pages indexed in Google! It was completely deindexed!
Anyhow, lack of LB transparency aside, are there any good and affordable spin services out there that will take an article, rewrite either sentences or paragraphs (or both), and then replace words and phrases with synonyms? Human Rewriter looks like one, but by all accounts their service is poor with really long delays on receiving your spun article back.
J…I posted a similar concern in another thread here yesterday. Your findings matched my and it’s too soon for me to say what I will do. I find Build My Rank (also listed on this sites recommended services) as possibly a better option for me.
I have around 30 websites , all wordpress custom design and original, quality articles written by my writers. They all lost their ranking yesterday. The only reason i can think of is ADSENSE.
I have also web design websites (Service) with no adsense, the content is duplicated as i have a website for each city and all of them rank higher yesterday.
My clients websites all are still good even some of them have duplicate content.
What i am thinking is Google attacking ADSENSE websites even if you have quality content. What you think?
I don’t think that the reason behind losing the rank for those 30 website is the backlinks because i use same types of backlinks on my web design websites and my clients.
What’s the solutions for those 30 websites that falls in ranking? should i build links for them? remove adsense or delete all articles and start over? or many buy new domains and 301 redirect those websites to the new ones?
Please advise.
“So, Google has officially released a statement that they have launched a new algorithm targeting content farms and un original content sites.”
How does linxboss and bmr fit into this? The content that gets posted is far from great — hell, it’s far from good. Will these sort of services start to degrade?
There’s a good chance of that, but it seems like when “slaps” happen, it only means you just gotta start all over again, in meantime your sites are older, probably have more content on them now than when you started, so less of the SAME linking is needed to get them back to where you had them recently(if you dropped in rankings at all). That’s what a lot of people don’t realize; that if they stop now then that makes things even worse, because if they got dropped back for any reason, sustained links will only help, but stopping the links will pretty much reduce any hopes of regaining lost rankings.
Yes, of course Google is devaluing their OWN revenue generating stream.
I’m sure their shareholders would LOVE that.
Maybe you lost rank because the links to your site got devalued.
Franco, internalyl there’s (ASSUMPTION) always been a conflict of interest between the search and advertising teams, and losing rank on non-Adsense sites cna probably be pin-ponited down to certain kind sof links being devalued, whethe rit be for velocity reasons, or link source reasons.
Yes, it doesn’t make sens eot decrease their own revenue by penalizing mini-site focused on one topic, but then again, I tried (unsuccessfully) to sepearate Adsense slaps form other types of things going on. People who don’t get slapped are either
1- not #1 for their term
2- didn’t do any grey hat, black hat stuff
3- used multiple link methods and sources
Content quality is not being measured.
If you think rationally about it – it never really can be.
One persons “Queen’s English” is another persons “l33t $peek”.
You may prefer one to the other, but Google is not about to set itself up as arbiter of what is acceptable language, or to judge factual writing in a critical way.
Google will not set out to measure factual accuracy (it has already distanced itself from this in a legal sense with the advertising space it sells – it’s hardly likely to go comparing every article written to the facts and figures in an encyclopedia to check they are true).
It will be incredibly hard to manage sites based on objective factors such as “Is this content duplicate”? or “Is this content full of swear words”? or “Does this link point to porn”? “Is the same phrase overused”?
All the above are objective. You can measure and check and judge accordingly. This is what Google will stick to.
I doubt very much it will ever say “Is this true”? or “Is this well written”? in anything other than the most basic of senses. I can’t see how it ever could.
Linxboss and BMR?
BMR is probably the safer of the two. You have to provide your own content and it’s checked for duplicate. How stringent this check is will decide how safe the network is.
Linxboss as far as I remember simply shuffles and spins feeds. I imagine it has been…or will be….very vulnerable to these changes.
Personally – I would supply BMR with genuine unique content, and leave Linxboss well alone till the dust settles.
Writing very well spun articles will still work. The alternative is the end of WEB2.0 if you think about it. As soon as Wordpress, Hubpages, Wikispace, Livejournal, Blogger and the rest lose all value, and article sites go with them..then WEB2.0 revolution is effectively over.
You might as well write posts for you Facebook mates on your “wall”, becasue no-one else is ever going to see them.
In the 2 days since this happened I have thought of so many ways to buck the system. All take a little more thought and effort – no bad thing in some ways.
If many lazy “cr%p farming” internet marketers’s now drop out of the business (and they probably will) this will mean the rewards are all the better for those prepared to stick at it and put the effort in.
After all – no-one is reducing the advertisers spend or saying you can’t market.
There is still the same money in the internet that their was last week
(On that – most of my sites have gone UP in SERPS since then – they are 100 post/pages in size minimum and are regularly updated and have no adsense on them)
However, this makes an earlier post by Dan even more apposite. It’s going to be so much easier to keep a small 5-10 site network up to date with unique content for links than a 100-200 site network.
Paul LinxBoss used to use open source non indexed content as their content source, now they have full time writers writing good spins, and spin 1 is measured against spin 2, and spin 3 against spins 1 and 2, and so on…
I have 3 sites in LinxBoss used solely for testing LB out (so these sites only get LB links) and SERPs were stagnant for a bit, but now slowly creeping up once a week or so.
I’m testing a twitter profile, an old emd, and an inner url this way, same results for all, slow but steady, a lot to pay for such slow gains, but gains nonetheless…
That’s good to know.
Perhaps the exception that proves the rule. Linxboss offers “unique enough” content – so it works.
I posted here a few days ago about the schizm between thye ad men and the sales men at Google. I run adsense promotions for a couple of clients, and over the past few years their return (and attitude) towards pay per impression has dropped steadily. A recent seminar tells me I’m not the only one affected.
(PS anyone else here at the marketing and SEO day at Earls Court this week? If you are and want a chat and a coffee I’m there Wednesday)
From what I can tell most of us are spinning articles and submitting them to various services in order to obtain backlinks that bolster the rankings of our own websites. It seems that this change would merely make it harder for the content we syndicate on article directories and web2.0′s to be ranked highly. So if your business relied on ezine articles/lenses/web2.0 minisites that were highly ranked referring traffic to your money sites I can see that this would be a big blow. I personally could care less where my syndicated content ends up ranking so long as my site is ranked highly itself. I mean sure taking up a few slots on the first page is nice but I’d rather have my money site ranked #1 vs. 5-7 articles/web2.0′s ranking between 6-20. I’m just doing this for the backlinks.
I’ve heard of lots of people that don’t even spin who seem to be doing alright, in that their money sites still get benefit from the links placed on dupe content that’s mass syndicated.
My question is:
Is there any consensus on whether content that ends up in the supplemental index(dupe content) provides an equally powerful backlink as one placed among more unique content?
Reading Google’s own forum on this subject, those being hit the hardest are large Content sites that have tons of content, but also have ads all over the place.
Sites like EzineArticles.com has been hit hard as well as some major niche specific sites.
All are complaining about being hit, and hit hard. All saying that their content is above approach and better than most other sites on the web.
These sites are complaining that sites with far less content/articles/blog posts are ranking better than they are.
This might be true. However, what Google is saying, is that every page, or almost every page on those sites are trying to make money. So they are content spam because they are content only created to make money, not make the internet a better place.
The suggestions from Google is to do NOFollow links for all the ads you have. Get more specific ads that go with your niche. If your gonna do ads, don’t have them on every page. And finally don’t advertise on your site that you can “advertise here”. Obviously, there is more to this, but after much reading this is what I have seen so far.
EzineArticles.com today came out with the following statement:
“http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html#more-11693″
That is how they are going to combat what is going on. So for people like me who creates content, its gonna mean more costs for our customers because we have to almost double our article size.
Is Article Marketing dead? No, it means your gonna have to adjust, and be very very careful. It also means that if you do have articles on others networks, make sure that they don’t have ads, or if they do (like EzineArticles.com) that they are so high quality that they make changes to ensure their relevancy.
Does this mean all other types of links are dead. No, it also means, make sure you are careful how you do your linking, and how you do your content.
One thing you all should learn is, put content on your site as well as other sites. Don’t over do content on your site, as it looks spammy just as much as doing 60,000 profile links for 1 keyword in a day looks spammy.
Love to hear every ones input as well.
Sammy’s post above brings up the real MEAT of the issue for most of us actively SEOing adsense microniche sites I believe…..the question:
“Is there any consensus on whether content that ends up in the supplemental index(dupe content) provides an equally powerful backlink as one placed among more unique content?”
If people were solely relying on domains they don’t own for their internet income, I honestly don’t feel too bad for them. I want to know how this change actually effects the link juice being passed THROUGH these sites, especially the sites that undoubtedly end up in the nether-regions of Google’s index. No matter how well spun your stuff is, thousands of properties are obviously not going to index/rank. If you are hitting these same properties(2.0s and article directories) with massive amounts of links, I’d think it really doesn’t matter after this update whether they are indexed/ranking themselves as they will still pass the juice, which is what most of us need.
If someone has noticed otherwise, I’d be interested to hear. Awesome blog BTW!
Jim, I think this is the most relavent thing that’s been on my mind. We can talk about all the sites that got hit and all that, but the real issue for most of us is, are the sites we’re sending articles or postings to, still in the index in some way, and if so, has the link quality been affected in any way from all of this?
On the surface, I don’t care where a site necessarily ranks as long as it provides a creditable link back to my site and provides some value in doing so.
I’ve got a site that is accepting content from AMA, UAW, SEOlinkvine and other blog networks. Since March 5th, my traffic is down by 80%.
Why should this be if the content is spun and unique?
Does this mean that Google is targeting these content networks too?
Try deleting everything on that site that’s not indexed, put uniquifier on site and start accepting articles again, see what happens
“If your gonna do ads, don’t have them on every page. And finally don’t advertise on your site that you can “advertise here”.”
Are you kidding me? What have Google got to do with people’s right to place ads on their pages? The majority of sites on the web make their money from advertising and Google cannot and will not inforce some sort of limitation on how much advertising you’re allowed and how you go about getting it. It’s nothing to do with them. (unless it’s Adsense of course, but I don’t think that’s what you meant?)
Duncan.
It’s not a limitation. You can put as much advertising on your page as you want. It just seems that Google won’t rank you so highly in their search engine if you put too much.
It’s their search engine after all.
What they rank and how is entirely up to them.
Google isn’t a “public information service” it’s a website run for profit, and like your own sites, they can decide what they want to show, and what they don’t.
Just as no-one has a right to post links on your site, in the same way no-one has an automatic right to have links on Google. It’s a private site where the owner makes the rules..just like yours.
I think the idea that Google is simpy a private website run entirely for profit and nothing else, is something that gets lost in translation somewhere.
At the end of the day, they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want.
So you have the right to have as many ads as you want – of course you have.
And Google have the right to rank your site based on whatever criteria THEY want on THEIR site.
They have adsense customers (people paying to advertise on their content network) who are getting discouraged at the returns they are recieving for the advertising spend. click through rates are down, sales are down. Competing with other content and ad networks side by side is something Google would rather avoid, they have never made much of a secret of it.
They decide who is allowed in their content network, they decide how and when their advertising is shown and in what context, and they decide where to put your site in their search engine rankings.
If they are going to make more money from another site in the same nuche as yours, they will rank that site higher than yours. Having competing advertising on your site seems a criteria that they will likely use. Why wouldn’t they?
There is no element of “public service” to Googles business plan. There is no concept of “fair or unfair”
There is just good profit and loss. If sites with other advertising on them reduces Googles customer satisfaction and eventually leads customers to consider other forms of advertising, then they will simply cut those sites.
Why would you think they wouldn’t? It’s business not public service.
Deranking you altogether or pretty much any other rule they want.
Google is just a website.
A private one. Run for profit. Just like yours
Yes, Google is a for-profit business with a right to do what is in it’s best financial interest, but since their mission is to provide the most relevant content to their searchers, discounting content based on whether there is advertising near the content seems counter productive.
Who does it benefit to refuse to acknowledge and display the most relevant content because of advertising? I can see figuring the advertising to content ratio as being a slight indicator of the probability of the content being useful, but in and of itself, the existence of advertising really has no bearing on the quality, relevance or usefulness of the content.
I agree about the google running their own website. It’s not prohibitively expensive to start your own search engine. Google does have plenty of VC aching to spend money mahalo, cuil, bukkkakaki and others.
I think the main factor of the content farm was having too much content like other content. Ehow and about both largely escaped unscathed and they don’t repeat themselves that often. Ezine you can find 9 articles or so on probate for example. (was submitting one myself and thought to check. ) I’d say internal linking could help but hubpages and squidoo do link internally and both got hit.
The other thing is this update makes me think of link buying as a valid strategy; however much it pains me.
Thanks Dave. Agreed.
The combination of various factors here comes into play.
Danny Mac seems to have hit an adsense review AND been hit by the new algo all at the same time. That’s a real nasty ouch.
The content review seems a different issue. I’m convinced that big G is hammering down on micro sites – and by that I mean any site with under say 20 pages of unique (as far as it can ascertan) content – maybe 30 (who knows).
A site set up with “about us” “privacy policy” “contact us” and 3-5 other pages of SEO optimized text must be so commonly found on the internet that big G’s bots can find one it their sleep.
If it has adsense on it – well it won’t take a genius to work out what that site is.
The question it asks tehn (according to Matt the Knife) is “Does it offer value”
I would guess factos here include uniqueness of content, spammyness of niche, abundance of advertising as well as on site SEO issues.
One thing i’m testing now is the value of relevant OUTBOUND links to authority sites. I’m publishing the results when I have them (I’m going BIG with this test)
AS I mentioned before, there are so many ways around this, mostly requiring a little more effort and thought.
The silver lining is, many of the “trash farmers” in IM may well baulk and bale at the thought of extra work, and leave a bigger slice of the cake for those of us who remain. Effectively giving you similar returns for the same effort but “condensed”.
I mean there is as much money on the internet post “farm algo” as there was pre “farm algo” The opportunity is exactly the same, it’s just the method that needs adjustment.
I think this will all end positively for those of us prepared to graft a little to make a living.
This should be of interest for people reading this.
http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html
” The SISTRIX VisibilityIndex is an index value calculated from traffic on keywords, ranking and click-through rate on specific positions. Let’s start with a list of the 25 biggest losers:”
Paul,
I 100% agree that Google can do whatever the hell they like, and if they want to devalue your pages then they will. I just don’t think that having advertising on every page or having an “advertise here” banner will cause any negative impact. There are so many very high quality sites that rely on a lot advertising for a great deal of their income, and it would be senseless for G to rule these important resources out of their index.
http://www.gumtree.com/
http://www.johnchow.com/
heck even http://techcrunch.com/ have ads on every page.
I do agree with a lot of the other things you say, and should have said so really, but I don’t people should worry about ads on their site as long as they arn’t spammy and are no-followed.
I think you have hit the nail on the head Duncan. It shouldn’t, but if you read Ezines reply to their contributors (link in a post above) you’ll see that Google have openly said THEY ARE devaluing URL’s (not sites per se) that have “too many advertisements on them”.
It’s borderline anti-trust.
“We want “partners” – but only on exactly our terms, and our terms are a monopoly on the sites”
Ok, that’s taking it further than Google have gone (so far) but it’s a road they seem to be travelling down.
No follow ads are a decent enough idea, and just a general reduction in the number (something many sites like Ezine and Squidoo have already reacted to over the weekend)
It is noticeable on my sites that the hardest hit URL’s are those with adsense on.
I think they want an almost exclusive relationship with high content high quality sites.
It’s something they have never made a secret of, in a way I am suprised it took them this long to do it.
My perspective?
All but my newest site (the one I link to here, and is still some way from being complete) have actually IMPROVED since last week. None have adsense, all have lots of content (all 100% unique written by me).
I am well on the way top drawing my own conclusions.
Great discussion here – as usual!
Shuold point out the sites of maine that failed and had adsense were in my old “micro niche” days. It’s a shame really, I had only posted a week or two ago that after being slapped into oblivion in 2009, some were actually on the rise again.
All gone again now though. TO the extent where I’m checking the domain names, deciding which ones to keep and put on my “development” roster and which ones to flip or just cancel.
Sorry to hear about your micro sites Paul. Are your sites UK or US based?
The smaller sites were based on a couple of different US based hosting accounts. I often mixed on amazon, com junction or clickbank product with one adsense block on each site.
Most stuff was sold to US buyers from US hosting and payment was in Dollars.
Paul
I signed up to Article Ranks in July last year and promptly removed my network of 30 sites as they were just farming out duplicate content.
I was pleased to read the first post above when Daniel said that they now had a 300% spinning option. I re-entered all my sites a couple of days ago only to find over the two days they are still just sending out duplicate content even with the 300% option ticked, what gives?
It just appears to me they are just wasting every-ones time again.
recommend an alternative article network that provides unique content as I have yet to find one?
There is no way a 300% article can be duplicate content, obviously one sentence may be the same. What do you class as duplicate?
Also you can choose a manual accept option
Hi Musa – I am in the middle of am Article Ranks review, and it was going great, till this algo change. (It survived the algo change of 8th Feb with flying colors, it’s the algo change of 25th Feb that was the issue).
I haven’t written up the latest results yet, but all the pages I was using article ranks to backlink have fallen back. It’s obviously too early to draw conclusions so will give it a couple more weeks for G to complete the rollout of the new algo, but here’s what I think the problem is:
The blogs in your network are too general and a lot of them are plastered with Adsense (with a few notable exceptions). In other words they look just like the content farms that G is trying to penalise – too general and too many Adsense blocks crammed within the content.
I understand that a lot of people who submit blogs into your network sign up for every single category, plus allow up to 30 submissions a day, to build up their credits. Perhaps being stricter and making people submit niche blogs and not general blogs will help. Maybe banning the use of Adsense will help.
FWIW, the articles I submitted were all manually spun to over 150%, with one spun to over 350%. So the issue is not one of duplicate content. They were backlinking web 2.0′s which ranged from hubpages (which got slapped) to squidoo (which didn’t get slapped) to stand-alone sub-domains (which didn’t get slapped). They all fell at the same time, back to where they started, which leads me to think that the problem is that the links created have been simply devalued.
Like I said, it’s a bit to early to draw conclusions, so will give it a few more weeks, but I’d be interested to know if anyone else is doing a review post algo-change.
So you were building links into hubpages etc? These sites have all felt the algo change, I do not believe it has anything to do with links ( I say this because we actually use the service aswell, but have been linking to REAL sites instead on web 2 properties). It could be your landing pages and web2.0 properties have been hit by the algo change
We have not seen any major reductions in sites rankings, proper sites not landing pages etc
Just because squidoo hasn’t been hit as much as the other sites, it doesnt mean it hasnt been hit.
Just on a site note, we also spin our articles around 500% both on sentence and word level.
If this means we have to tighten up AR and only allow content that has been spun at least 200% then we will make the change
So does anyone know where to find someone who can spin good quality articles cheaply?
Right now I’ve got someone in the Philippines spinning my articles to submit to article directories and post on Web 2.0 sites… But of course these sites don’t have high standards so I’ve been getting away with that.
But it sounds like services like Article Ranks and Build My Rank would need better quality spins that don’t actually read like a spun article…
I don’t want to do this myself – nobody should be doing this simple work if you’re serious about your business. So any ideas of where to find someone good?
I guess I’ll start with Elance and Warrior Forum…
If Google is after low quality sites they need to explain how they define quality. That is so subjective – what is high quality for one might be rubbish for another.
Although spun content does not seem like duplicate content (if sufficiently spun) the question is what does Google consider as duplicate content? Is similar content duplicate content?
What worries me is not the percentage of spinning whether being 100% or 1000%. The real issue is that all blogs within Article Ranks or AMA etc leave obvious patterns which means that if Google devalues any of these blogs then the link juice passes over to the destination sites will be minimal (if any).
Most blogs are too generic which means that unrelated posts all end up in the same places pretty much. With the recent introduction of Chrome’s plugin that allows users to report low quality content sites it is even easier for Google to detect such sites and possibly devalue them. Other obvious foot prints include:
- Posts consisting of approximately 300 words
- Posts containing three links, usually to 3 different pages on the same domain
- Anchor text links are the same or highly similar if spun
So, would it really matter how much an article is being spun if most of the blogs get de-indexed or devalued?
I can speak for AR in that only a small percentage of blogs get devalued or deindexed as I have done various tests on this. The ones that seem to get hit are.
1) New sites which within a week get thousands and thousands of posts
2) Sites accepting low spun articles as these tend to be of lower quality too
3) Sites with lots of links. I.E hundreds of blogroll links and default wordpress categories
4) Sites with 0 incoming links and thousands or articles, and 0 links into internal pages (One of the main reasons we introduced auto bookmarking monthly members articles)
This is what I have seen a pattern in personally.
We have seen from the algo change a lot of good sites have been hit.
Google are still in my opinion many years away from detecting HIGH quality spun articles (I mean most of the sites they slapped were scraper sites and site with dupe content, which is ever so easy to detect), if the content is unique and high quality enough why should it be slapped?
As long as we can keep the spun articles at a mid-high level, this is why we are introducing various limits into AR in the near future.
If Google are far from detecting high quality spun articles why do you recommend increasing spinning to 300% or even 500%? Do you believe there is a threshold in how Google detect similar articles? If that is the case and the threshold is constantly increasing, that means that article spinning would have less and less value in the future.
In my experience, article spinning was already hit before the Farmer update as it didn’t seem to be as effective as 2 years ago. I’m not suggesting it’s dead but it’s getting more and more time consuming to get half of the results I was getting in the past. Spinning at 500% in sentence and word level could take anything up to 3-4 hours.
I still think if Google would like to fight rankings manipulation through links originating from spun articles it wouldn’t be that hard to accomplish. They have some of the best brains working for them as well as they do not lack the resources, which makes me thing that at the moment they don’t want to do it.
That would affect so many people’s lives, from executives in the US to copywriters in the Philippines.
I agree, long term there is a level where it becomes so hard for duplication to be detected that Google stops bothering.
(the old 80/20 pareto rule – it takes 20 effort to detect the first 80% of rubbish and 80 effort to detect the last 20% – there comes a point where it serves little or no purpose to carry on)
I found even 12 months ago that some totally none spun articles worked fine. I had sites with the same article on (word for word) ranking side by side. Not any more.
There are issues measuring uniqueness levels over 100%. MAS is not very good at it at all. Once you get past 200% it gets tied in nots. I have an 800 word article 3x paragraph spun then synonym spun in the paragraphs and it detects stuff like “12 words 33%” even witht he whole article selected.
It works fine up to 100%, then starts playing up. AMR just seems to stop dead at 100% these days (it used to come up with massive figures, got close to 1000% once with little effort)
What tools do people use to get a reliable percentage these days?
Google can only measure objective quality.
The style of writing, language and other factosr wiil not (and probably cannot) be judged. Factual accuracy will not be judged.
They have issued statements in the past regarding their own adsense network distancing themselves from the factual accuracy of what is promoted on it – now claiming they just “offer a platform for advertisers who must be responsible for their own legality and accuracy”
They have no method of measuring factual accuracy, no algorithms that I’ve noticed to interrogate spelling/punctuation other that to ascertain what the language is and a quick count for words that are not in it’s dictionary (if a certain %age are not in it’s dictionary at all you risk getting slapped for “nonsense”) I’m not saying they don’t have alogo’s to check certain aspects of language – just I have looked and not noticed them.
If you are an imaginative writer, then churning out 10000+ words a day is a very simple matter. Enough to support a lot of sites
Forgive my ignorance. Not sure exactly what 300 % and 150 % unique means? Can somebody explain?
From my understanding of math, when something is 100% unique, it totally different than the original.
How do you get 3 times totally unique (300%)? I would really love to get there.
This new google slap is also about letting google users know about the new feuture, the red alert button, that works like this: don’t show me this site again.
And google is defently attacking article directories heavily with duplicate content, I think my skin care site got slapped because my rankings for my favorite keywords that i did own for a year has dropped and some has disapeared,
Some seo experts tell me that my site is in the google dance, well it has been now for couple of weeks.
I think the slap happened because i installed robot plugin that post amazon reviews on my site on autopilot,
now I have to delete all of these rubbish duplicate reviews from my blog that I should not have allowed to be published on my blog in the first place.
What do you think guy’s.
I think you have probably been slapped because of the dupe content
Yep, I had 2 amazon sites that got slapped, and each site had 90% dupe content.
Thing is, we all know google rank pages, not sites, and the page i wanted it to rank (my home page) was 99% unique content, but only 300-400 words.
So do whole sites get slapped, and not just the pages with dupe content? (i mean, i guess so…but is this to be expected?)
I’ve decided to continue backlinking to the more ‘thicker’ site of the two and will update if anything positive occurs in the next couple of weeks.
That said, I am inclined to think that amazon niche websites, with 90% of the content swiped straight from amazon, just aren’t going to rank very easily at all!
Anyone with thoughts on this?
Just to reiterate:
“Is there any consensus on whether content that ends up in the supplemental index(dupe content) provides an equally powerful backlink as one placed among more unique content?”
Are you asking if an article linking to you (for example an EZA) that dropped in its rankings, still provides an equally valuable backlink?
If that’s your question, my GUESS is, those links are less valuable, because now that they’re not highly ranked any more, they’re not getting traffic, they’re not passing direct traffic through (if it’s an article) and at some point will lose whatever PR it had.
At articlesontap.com you can get BMR optimsed articles pumped out at about $2.30 per link (150 words and depends on the quantity you buy). They come in .csv format ready to upload.
‘Cheaply’ of course depends on your own experiences with outsourcing but I think BMR’s own writing service is a hair more at $2.50 per link
Loving the conversation btw!
My home page has page rank 4, and my main keyword for my home page is still in top 10 in google,
but my 5 product reviews that i wrote 2 years ago and i have been steadily linking to them and got very aggressive in link builind for them for the past 8 months.
plus I re-write these pages every 3 months give it or take.
These pages has lost their rankings , some have have just disapeared, for weeks, they appeared again in top 10 about 4 weeks ago and then disapeared again.
These product reviews pages have page rank 3, these page are not amazon reviews.
But like i mention before, i have to many of these amazon reviews on my site for auto posting.
And I have also noticed that google webmaster and yahoo is not giving credit for all of my backlinks.
in google webmaster itsays that my site has 23000 and yahoo 2000 backlinks, I mean common,
I know my site shold have atleast around 100000 backlinks after all of my campaigns.
I have not stopped my backlinking campaigns, since i want my rankings back and if i stop anyway, i have admitted wrong doing, right.
By the way, do you know guy’s:
How curation sites are doing in the serp’s, i was thinking to go in that direction with my blog, be more like a news blogger inm my niche then just heavily promote the same products like a crazy person that just joined a cult.
Looks like the algo update really hurt my Linx Boss links. All Linxboss anchor text links have dropped considerably and are no longer ranking where they used to. Seeing drops like 4th place to 177th. Can other LinxBoss subscribers confirm?
If all you have are Linx Boss links, and Google is hitting spam content networks then most likely the link quality into your site dropped (as it has for everyone) and your site is gonna drop. The sites that I haven’t seen horrible drops in rank are those with tons of diversity in links and hundreds of thousands of indexed links. I have also not seen a drop in blogs that have no ads or any links (linking to other sites). Another thing I have noticed are sites that all pages are linked too have been okay too.
Article Marketing isn’t dead, but you darn well better be sure to either get a grip load of articles each month with the devalued links, or get your new articles tons of links to them to get them ranked, or maybe both.
Yeah same here, did a check on LinxBoss today and all accounts were hit bad. Will be keeping an eye on it closely over the next 2-3 weeks, see what happens.
I was searching all over Daniel’s site here to see if there was any information on LinxBoss. I watched all of my sites on LB plummet after the algo change. After a lot of research, I found hardly any links have been indexed since then, and the content that was being used for the links was not spun at all. Typically 1-3 paragraph snippets that were easily duplicate content.
I was actually kind of surprised to see a comment that LB spins their content. Obviously I cannot find all of the links/content being created, so I can’t confirm. But what I have seen has not been very promising.
Before I make any changes in linking, I’m focused on increasing the quality of all my money sites, lengthening posts, cutting down on target keywords, and spreading out to seem more natural. I don’t want to blame the source of the links if the problem is the recipient of the links.
Great discussion!
I have seen a huge drop in 3 of my sites lately that have mainly been used promoted using Linxboss. I’m talking going from page 1 to page page 70+. The sites are all less than a year old with not much link diversity so there my mistake right there. What’s unique is that since the new algorithm change, it seems that the sites will do really well the first few weeks and then lose their rank out of nowhere. I think it’s important to know what kind of sites won’t work well with Linxboss. I’ve been debating canceling my service lately, but I really want to see if their new changes are going to increase the quality of their service.
I have good news and bad news, The good news is that my site is still ranked in top in google for many of my keywords, so nothing happened there, but the urls that i have been focused most on promoting and building links too are not doing so good,
most of these heavy promoted urls are in page 2 or 4 in google, and one of my url on my page that i did the most link building for is lost in web space.
I have an article writer that writes unique article every day and spins the article and submit the spun to services like:
Article Ranks
Syndicate Kahuna
Build My Rank
Unique Article Wizard
Submit You Article
My article writer has been focusing for the past 6 months on writing and syndicating article for 1 of my product review url every working day that has no adsense on it, and then the next day for another product review and so on.
What all of these url have in common beside having my writer heavily promoting them, is that they have all lost their rankings, as they where in top 3 for almost a year, and they all have page rank 3 and are 2 years old.
And my favorite product review page is lost in space.
I don’t think my site has been slapped, since this has been happening every 3 weeks or so for past 2 months , maybe my site is in the google dance for these url’s ?
I think my biggest mistake would be stopping in promoting them. Maybe google is just re-calculating my backlinks, hopefuly.
What do you think guy’s ?
JUst had an email from UAW saying “Lovin’ the new algo update”
So I went and had a look at the URL were they explaned their thinking.
Seemed ok till I looked carefully at the screenshots (not that carefully mind you)
Oh dear – how dumb do they think we are.
http://linkvanareviews.com/the-latest-google-algo-update-farmer-and-the-future-of-article-spinning-musa-from-articleranks-speaks#comments
See if you can spot the rather glaring false claims there.
The error is so transparent to anyone with half an hours keyword knowledge that I’, surprised they thought they could get away with it.
I also decided to take a screeny of it as well, cause I can’t believe they are going to keep this blatent attempt at “slight of hand” up for long.
Incidently I also used a USA proxy and ran the same test they did to see where the land REALLY lies (sic)
Having a failing service is one thing – pulling a bullshine stunt like this is quite another. Big thumbs down for Dr Noel and his gang for doing this. I could say what I really think of stunts like this – but I’ll leave it at that.
Paul, is the the url you meant to put in your comment?
http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/blog/uncategorized/lovin%E2%80%99-google%E2%80%99s-new-algorithm.html
Doh – Yes – linked back to your own site Dan (sorry) looking again it’s not what I thought…
But then looking AGAIN again it sort of is.
They acknowledge the different phrase lengths but the results I get using a selection of US based proxies on Google are not reflective of the ones shown.
I’m surprised how much it varies from state to state (but then living in the UK that shouldn’t surprise me really I suppose – you are much bigger)
New York the 2 word phrase is 11 (number 1 page 2) A Calfornia based proxy puts it at 7 on page 1, and one in Arkansas puts it at 8.
My Quebec proxy has it at 10 even.
The 3 word phrase is also lower across all the different searches (and they are no-where to be seen when using a plain UK based search)
Also doing a link check through IBP does not return more than a dozen articles among they 900+ links found for the site. And looking at those they seem to be on Ezine and Article Dashboard.
I wasn’t aware UAW posted to those sites (i certainly never found any of my content posted by UAW on these high profile sites) So that’s a concern.
Is this site even supported by UAW at all? Is it just a random site that seems to be doing well that they decided to take the credit for?
I know IBP is not infallible, so maybe I’ll check with Google and Yahoo.
I suppose there are some points to be raised here. Looking at some assumptions.
If UAW supported sites are up – or at least holding position – and the very simple spinning method they use works (lets face it – the method is simple – it’s the flipping interface that’s hard as nails) then that would be interesting.
A plain 11 paragraph article spun 3x as per standard UAW practice produces a very average result in terms of “uniqueness” Every 9th submission is going to start with exatly the same opening 2 paragraphs, every 27th the first 3 will be the same.
In fact just the same opening para I would have thought would raise some red flags. – Maybe only 3 or 9 would ever survive the indexing process? Obviously I don’t know, but it never struck me as a very good way to produce unique content in the first place.
Is Swanson saying it is?
Has it really thrived after “farmer”?
Is this simple spinning method enough?
Are they implying that you need to do more than the program initially asks and do nested spins as well? (that’s not mentioned)
Is this site even supported by UAW at all?
Why (despite using several proxies from all over the US continent inc Canada) can I not get results that show an improvement and instead show a decline?
Nevertheless – if it IS ok…
I’d consider looking into where the posting sites were hosted.
If they are outside the USA in part or majority I would be concerned.
They may just be safe until famer is rolled out and catches the none US content farms.
Still – at least it doesn’t seem to be a deliberate ploy. An interesting one. It may be that this shake up brings tools we thought were redundant back up the pile.
I have pretty grave doubts about that – but It’s not something I would discount altogether.
Perhaps other methods are now better than they were before.
After all – there will always be 10 sites in the first 10 of Google.
Whevever something drops – it’s replaced by another site that used a different method.
Darn it – it may be that a wholesale re-evaluation of tools – new and old – is what is really required here.
And you’re off running the Boston marathon.
(Whenever I hear of the Boston marathon I always assume the runners setting off to “More than a feeling”)
Pretty much every service out there is proclaiming that Farmer benefitted them, and their members.
EZArticleLink – says they’re getting millions o fpage views
Article Ranks- says not hit and explains why and how to adjust
Build My Rank – not hit, and one of the safest options right now
UAW- continually getting hit, but saying this time around they’re better off
autoblogs are better off now, too
As a few of us say in New England (where the weather changes drastically from day-to-day around here sometimes…), “we have 5 seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall…and Friday”
Point being, maybe this is the Season of the Farmer, or the MayDay, or whatever…
On the one hand we have people saying every service out there no longer works and got slapped, whilst white-hatters who did everything “right” got hit worse on those sites than they did on their largely unattended autoblogs.
BTW, I ran this race here Sunday in 3:07 (20 miles, not 10! lol)
Good job on the race Daniel!
You’re right, seasons will change and so will the results. I think it’s pretty obvious what google is wanting and trying to do and what they are getting probably isn’t entirely what they had in mind….stay tuned:)
It’s a strange one isn’t it. When the dust settles not as much changed as people thought at all.
Perhaps the message was more important than the “action”
Given the trillions of web pages out there – It’s an argument that could be made that Googles bots have to keep working harder just to keep up with the number of pages that require indexing/reindexing.
To run any sort of detailed report based on huge and complicated interlinking metrics per URL would grind the entire internet to a halt OR be so slow that it could only do a fraction of the internets volume in any respectably acceptable time period.
Google will never admit it, but maybe the resources to get that much more accurate than they aleady are just don’t exist (at least without grinding the internet to a halt) and “scaring” people into making change while doing some pretty banal shuffling of the established pack (sabre rattling I suppose) is about the best they can do.
Who knows?
Well run BTW (and New England weather sounds a lot like Old England weather to me)
@ Dan,
Did you get my reply last week?
Linx Boss has been slaughtered! It still appears as one of the most recommended services on the site. Maybe time to do an update Daniel?
A couple of sites I used Linxboss on haven’t suffered at all -but then again they didn’t benefit a great deal from 11 weeks of linxboss links in the first place.
I think aged sites fare better, but considering I should have had well over 600 links per site in that time, my tools tell me the most any site I used LB on has is 145 – and that one was showing over 120 before I even signed up to LB.
Like I said though – it’s no worse than It was a month ago (in fact it’s up one place for the main keyword from 9th to 8th – again – it was at 10 before I started wi LB, and I’ve worked on it quite a bit since.
Not sure LB is ruined – may need to be evaluated though.
I submitted an article with each sentence spun 3 times and article ranks said it was only 170% spun. How many times would I have to spin the sentences to get it to 300%? 4 Times? 5 Times?
I used LB now for one months, and not the SMALLEST movement on any of the keywords, which are not competitive. Is UAW also dead? Or they are still ok? I think BMR and LV are still save.
Linxboss seems to have taken a hit. I had some sites that used it that suffered 3 weeks ago – and have not as yet recovered.
Unique content, RSS’d out every 3-4 updates seems a good bet for smaller blogs.
Of course that means writing content – and that’s where a lot of IM’s fall flat. Writers block happens to most – for many it permanent and terminal.
BMR seems ok, though after over 2500 micro articles it’s served its purpose for me. The sites that used it have stayed stable though – in fact some have gone up.
I think the rises are more a factor of sites that previously ranked higher being hit by the farmer update rather than any perceived increase in the quality of my own sites.
But then everything is relative isn’t it.
Paul
Hey Paul,
My LinxBoss efforts also took a serious hit. When I started using the program back in November I was seeing some awesome results. However, once February came my rankings fell overnight. All of my rankings went back to where they were before I started LinxBoss or worse. Not sure if their network was discovered or something. It’s more likely that it was just the process by which they built the links (scraping some dupe content and posting a link to your site).
Best,
Pat
Looks like quite a few of us were hit by Linxboss. Perhaps it’s time for a reevaluation of their service. I can’t believe how far my rankings dropped on some of my sites that have been using them. I’m pretty sure they did get discovered hence why they are now updating their program and hiring writers.
Hey guys,
I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that Squidoo was hit. If you look at their traffic numbers you can see that they were pretty much untouched. http://www.quantcast.com/www.squidoo.com
However, I do agree that some of their pages dropped a bit in ranks, but not nearly as much as HP or EZA. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is.
I think that part of the reason Squidoo wasn’t hit as hard is because of the way their pages are set up. If you look at a Squidoo lens, it has all kinds of different modules (videos, amazon, text, more text, more amazon, more videos, etc.). Simply by building a modular framework into their site they’ve made it more difficult for people to just post the same old repeated crap that’s on tons of article directories. Also, most users take advantage of these modules when making a lens and we all know that Google likes sites that have video and other things besides text.
This is just a guess though…I could be way off the mark.
Best,
Pat
So are their any networks that still works? Now that Kristina Saric of Link DOzer has closed her doors completely due to the latest Google update, i’m in search for a replacment, and I tell you it may be awhile before something is develpoed that was as great as link dozer.
But anyhow,only thing that I really see signifcant results from as far as seo and link networks, is BMR, i’m using synnd and articler anks, but it’s tuff to tell if i’m getting results from either one, as of yet.
That damn Google, always finding ways to make it more difficult us!
I used to us ezine articles a lot, but think I will change this strategy now.
Thanks for the info.
I’ve been using article ranks for a month now. I like their interface and their general level of quality. However, I haven’t seen any increase yet in the page rank of the pages linked too. On their site they say to spin it to 150%, but based on this article, I’ll try going to 300%. I also use BMR some. I think its a matter of time before these networks get devalued, but the probem is its hard to get natual links, you have to do something.
Hey Daniel,
I guess you have made updated posts about this now. I remembaer watching something on the Internet about an SEO team who would advise writing a main article for the money site then change it up a bit when posting out to article directories.
I have also seen some people wait 3-4 days (until Google crawls the new article) and then post out to the article directories. But I do think that they are not as valuable as they used to be. I don’t know…
Holly X