Ask HN: Has Google's "Farmer Update" affected your sites | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has Google's "Farmer Update" affected your sites

19 pointsWillyF3 comments

So far, I've seen a pretty significant drop in traffic on one of my sites (around 25%), while my other site that is essentially a clone is doing fine (first is jobs focused and the second is internships focused). These sites aren't content farms, and they have really strong, clean link profiles (I've always played by the rules).

I'm trying to figure out what signals Google has used for this update, and so far I'm a bit stumped. I'd love to hear what the rest of you are noticing.

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Two of my site's traffic dropped by 40%. One of them is 6 years old.

Both have original content. I never even thought about gaming the system. I couldn't figure out what triggered this.

One of the site has the perfect landing page that user is looking for the queries. I don't understand how this change could improve the quality.

One of the sites I used to work on has dropped from a consistent #1 (for the past 7 or so years) for its key terms to bottom half of page 1 in the past couple of days. Traffic is down maybe 20%. I can only assume it's related.

The higher results now though are Google News for things totally unrelated and lots of ticket websites (which are kind of related).

The site itself is hardly spammy and has several well-written articles posted per week. It's practically the go-to site for this area (local tourist office points people its way for instance).

Not my problem any more but coming so soon after I leave, it looks a bit like a FU I left behind!

I'm looking at a 40% drop. Just like you guys totally by the rules and all original content. In my niche, I noticed eHow beating everyone for terms that their articles aren't even relevant for. Their results got much worse in general. Alot of people that scrap my content are beating me in rankings now.

I would have posted my resume to find a day job, but then I thought somebody would scrap it and google would get them hired first.

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