Google's "Farmer" Update Impacts Millions and Kills Ezine's Search Traffic

Online, March 6, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Just a week ago, Google launched their newest algorithm update named the "Farmer" update. The update affected more than 11% of all search queries and had a massive impact on the search results. Those hit hardest by the update includes the popular article directory Ezine Articles which lost over 35% of its search traffic in the following days.

Google's algorithm update has been successful in the eyes of many. However, whenever there's an update, there must be winners and losers. Ezine Article's SEO, Chris Knight, had this to say, "In our life-to-date, this is the single most significant reduction in market trust we've experienced from Google."

Ezine is scrambling to regain their trust and rankings after losing such a large share of search traffic. In his recent blog post, Chris Knight laid out a number of quality control practices that they are going to implement in order to increase the overall quality of the articles on the site. He even stated quite openly, "How long will that take before traffic recovers and climbs again? I have no idea." Obviously, Google is always trying to improve the results that their searchers get, and so they must have judged the overall quality of Ezine's content to be quite low. Lowering Ezine's rankings was no mistake - no algorithm goes public without extensive internal testing.

This has had a strong impact on many article marketers who rely on Ezine and other article directories such as Articlebase for a lot of their traffic and business. Many of them are sharing the plight with Ezine as their numbers will be way down this month and who knows for how much longer. The internet marketing community as a whole has been in an uproar since the launch of the update. Google's algorithm change is likely to force the internet community as a whole to create a higher quality of information.

Other popular sites to get pummeled by Google's update include DoItYourself, HubPages, and Articlebase. While none of them are notorious for having especially low-quality content, they have been judged so by the algorithm update.

Despite the drastic negative impact the "Farmer" update has had on many article directories such as Ezine Articles, they are striving to rebuild their trust in the search engines. After imposing stricter guidelines and regulations, the future might be brighter for Ezine and article marketers alike.