The following may help shed some light on the recent Farmer Algo change at least in so far as the algo wasn’t site specific but rather page specific. Yes sites were targeted but not whole cloth – Hubs still rank as do EZA articles – but many formerly highly ranked pages within those sites have dropped like a rock. And yes eHow has remained above the carnage – most likely because a decision was made to keep them out of the manual reviews.
Since late 2009 I began noticing ads placed for jobs online variously termed “search engine evaluator” or “Internet assessor” and while Google wasn’t usually mentioned as the client one could not help make that assumption. In any event one company Leapforce has provided a useful summary of what a search engine evaluators job entails. This was provided to me by one of our friends who works for Leapforce and wishes to remain anonymous.
Here are the Quality Assessment Guidelines provided by Leapforce to their Search Engine Assessors.
Introduction
This is a training to help you recognize a particular type of low quality landing pages: low quality informational articles.This training is important both for Page Quality rating, which you may do in the future, and for URL rating. Please review the Slightly Relevant section in the General Guidelines: https://www.google.com/evaluation/portal/portal_files/General_Guidelines.pdf. (Note – this link won’t work but I included it so you can see who Leapforce is contracted to do work for – Griz)
Remember: Topically relevant but low quality informational articles often deserve the Slightly Relevant rating. If the quality is so low that the page is useless, use the Off-Topic rating.
Let’s start by thinking about this: Most of you had the experience of writing papers in high school. You may remember all the ways in which you or your fellow students tried to complete assignments with little actual effort.
Did you ever copy from an encyclopedia?
Buy a pre-written paper online?
Copy a paper a friend wrote and change a few words or the first paragraph?
Fill the report with large tangentially related pictures and hope no one notices the lack of other content?
Get your little brother to write it?
Make up content yourself without doing research?
Write quickly with no drafts or editing?
Fill up pages with completely obvious sentences that repeat the topic of the paper? (“Argentina is a country. People live in Argentina. Argentina has borders. Some people like Argentina.”)Characteristics of Low Quality Articles
Unfortunately, there are plenty of informational articles out there which employ similar techniques.In general, writing high quality information articles takes time, effort, and expertise. Low quality articles usually:
Are written by non-experts
Are not authoritative or trustworthy–and information is arguably useless if it can’t be trusted!
Contain either copied content or commonly available content, though frequently the content is summarized and the wording is changed
Are not well researched
Have no citation of sources or indication about where the content came from
Contain little actual information, even if the article is long and has a lot of words
Have poor writing quality, insufficient editing, and/or the information may be poorly organized
Exist on poorly organized pages, which include a lot of off-topic/unhelpful links and adsExamples
Let’s look at some low quality examples. Please read the articles in the examples– at least the first few paragraphs. Better yet, read the article out loud.Example 1:
http://goarticles.com/article/Why-Do-Men-Cheat-On-Their-Wives-Study-Of-Marital-Relationships/4078532/
This is a low quality article. Here are some reasons why:There is no information about this author, aside from his name. In the “about this author” section, there is this information: “You can get to a place, where you feel more safe and have a deep trust that your partner will never ever cheat on you ever again, learn how to survive an affair at http://www.howtosurviveanaffairblog.com/.” Clicking on this link goes to a blog. On that blog, there is no information about who is writing or what their education/credentials are. The blog claims to be based on research, but there is no evidence of research.
The writing is very low quality. Look at this sentence “There may be many reasons as to why men who’s happily married could cheat on their wives and quite often, it’s not exactly what women would like to hear, such as men are biologically wired to seek out as many suitable partners as possible or because they’re not getting as much action at home or it’s due to the reason that his wife refuses to try new things, there may be many reasons as to why men would cheat on their wives.” This is a run-on sentence using poor grammar. Looking further, you will see other obvious classic errors in grammar, punctuation, and style.
There is very little actual information presented in the article. The multiple paragraphs could be condensed to a few sentences involving the 80/20 concept, which the author admits is not scientifically supported.
This article fails the “would you trust this?” test for discriminating users. And, in fact, if you explore the website a bit, you will find that anyone can write and submit articles (up to 10 a day!). You can make up your own theories of marriage and publish them, too.Example 2:
http://ezinearticles.com/?5-Tips-to-Fix-a-Sexless-Marriage-Or-Relationship&id=1006418
This is a low quality article. Here are some reasons why:The author has no identifiable expertise. Here is what the page says about the author: “Kate Dixon is an author and sexless relationship expert. To read more about Kate Dixon’s method of solving sexless marriages, go to this website: http://FixYourSexlessMarriage.com/.” Other than her claim to be a “sexless relationship expert”, there is no evidence anywhere of the kind of credentials needed to do marriage or relationship counseling. The website exists to sell her self-published book. The website itself is low quality. (And in fact, this article may in part exist to link to her website and sell her book, rather than to actually provide advice or information.)
The writing is low quality. Read this part: “If you’re in a sexless marriage or relationship and wish to change it to the better, this article is definitely for you, and I urge you to read it through. In order to fix a sexless marriage you need to be able to take a step back from what is happening to you and look at things objectively. I know it’s hard as you must be going through an emotional turmoil, but trust me, it’s the best sexless marriage advice I can give because it needs to be done. If you let your perspective be clouded by your emotions, it would be difficult for you to fix your sexless marriage.” The style is poor and unprofessional. There are punctuation/grammar problems. The verb tenses are not consistent.
The information is fairly generic and commonly available. Each of the listed steps (for example, “don’t play the blame game”) appears on self-help articles throughout the web. In addition, this article does not cite its sources, and there is no justification or evidence of usefulness or correctness of content.
The article fails the “would you trust this information?” test for discriminating users. Ezine is a website that allows anyone to publish just about anything.
The page itself isn’t well organized. The article is nicely framed, but most of the page real estate is devoted to ads and other links. The article font is lighter colored and less visible than the navigation and ads.Example 3:
http://www.virginiacops.org/articles/Backstabbers/backstabbers.htm
This is a low quality article. Here are some reasons why:This is a modified version of an existing article. Here is the original, full article: http://articles.latimes.com/1998/aug/10/business/fi-11827. The content in the article you are reviewing in this training (the modified version) exists on many low quality websites. To check this, copy a sentence or two and do a search on Google with quotes around the text, like this ["As a co-worker, what can you do about them? Total avoidance is often impractical"]
The writing is extremely poorly edited. One sentence is actually copied twice in the first paragraph: “Backstabbers– every office or workplace seems to have them. As a co-worker, what can you do about the? As a co-worker, what can you do about them? Total avoidance…” It also has an obvious formatting error: “USC’s business school m=name academia — despite” The original version doesn’t have these errors. We suspect this is a copy of a copy.
The article fails the trust test. Any article with obvious errors is hard to take seriously. Users would be forgiven for not even believing it originally came from the LA Times, a newspaper that is known for high quality articles.
Why was this page created? The LA Times is an authoritative website and access to this article is free. Why not just point to the article there? Why would anyone want to read a poorly copied and altered version of a high quality article that exists on an authoritative source?Example 4:
http://www.pregnancysymptoms.net/Basics/info.html
This is a low quality article. Here are some reasons why:The article is on a medical subject, but it does not appear to be written by a person or a company with medical expertise. The author is “Jane Brown”. There is no information about her education, expertise, credentials or medical degrees.
The writing is poor. Look at the first two sentences: “Pregnancy symptoms signal that you are pregnant or that you could be. As you consider if you could be pregnant, keep in mind that some of the symptoms of pregnancy may not be as specific.”
The information in the article is available on many, many websites, including authoritative sources such as well known medical sites. Most of it is common knowledge as well, such as the point about a “missed menstruation period”.
The article fails the trust test. The writing is poor, there is no evidence that the article is written or even reviewed by a medical expert, and the website itself has no information about who wrote the article or who is responsible for the information.
Since the algo update there has been no shortage of Google speculation and knee jerk reactions given to this latest serp update – most I find quite comical as everyone is an expert and has an opinion on what this does or doesn’t mean. I’m not much interested other than to say I have suggested getting out of the spam site – spam backlink game and move on to more substantial site building. Yes, easy for me to say but if you are really interested in staying around for the long haul then at least consider broadening your network to include legit sites that have a purpose other than providing adsense income.
Cheers,
Griz
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