Were you hit by the latest Google content farm algorithm? I have seen tons of sites and webmasters claim they were hit, even though they have unique and compelling content.
As you know, Google announced they will go after low quality content and content farm sites in early 2011. Google launched part or all of that algorithm on the 26th/27th of January.
So what do you do if your site was hit by this new algorithm?
Well, you can step back and try to see why Google might have classified your site as that. And if you can figure out why, then rework your site.
But I did spot an additional clue... JohnMu of Google replied to one person who was upset over his ranking decline in a Google Webmaster Help thread. Now, I am not sure if it is directly related to this new algorithm, but the ranking drop seems to have hit this webmaster at the time of this new algorithm release.
John from Google recommended he break out the content that is auto-generated from the content that is unique. He said you should separate out the auto-generated low quality content from the rest of your awesome content. By doing so, Google's new algorithm may just impact that portion of the site and not the other content on your site.
JohnMu said:
One thing that is very important to our users (and algorithms) is high-quality, unique and compelling content. Looking through that site, I have a hard time finding content that is only available on the site itself. If you do have such high-quality, unique and compelling content, I'd recommend separating it from the auto-generated rest of the site, and making sure that the auto-generated part is blocked from crawling and indexing, so that search engines can focus on what makes your site unique and valuable to users world-wide.
How do you separate it out. I'd assume subdomain is best, which might not be easy for most of these sites.
If you fall in this bucket, you may want to check out the thread.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
UPDATE: I was wrong in assuming the "content farm algorithm" was live. It is not live yet. What is live is the algorithm to block low-quality scraper sites from showing up in the Google index.
