Based on emails and phone calls I’ve received over time, I know that most of my readers are ‘brick & mortar’ business owners, not bleeding edge Internet marketing types.  As a result, you are probably not even aware that Google launched a major algorithmic update on Feb. 23rd.

Huge ‘content farms’ and many of the less than professional Internet marketing crowd, got their heads handed to them as a result of this update which affected almost 12% of search queries. What’s that mean in English?

It means that many of the garbage sites that often turn up on page one search results virtually disappeared. It also devalued many of the largest content farms. According to Sistrix.com’s data, some of the oldest and largest content farms suffered huge drops; sites such as wisegeek.com (-77%), ezinearticles.com (-90%), suite101.com (-94%) and hubpages.com (-87%).

Google always has catchy names for their big algorithm releases.  In this case I’ve heard it called the “Panda Algorithm Update” and the “Farmer Update“.  It doesn’t matter what you call it, but if you were not producing something of unique value, you may have seen your site’s traffic drop and your Page Rank decreased.

The Internet marketing crowd and us SEO geeks have been burning-up electrons for the past couple of weeks discussing the pros, cons and implications of Google’s latest update.  Such discussions will be hotly debated on forums and blogs for months to come.  I know that you probably don’t care, and if you have taken the advice in my SEO/Social Media book to heart, you need not worry.

So what does the Panda (or Farmer) Update mean to you?

Without drilling down to the technical (and often boring) details, the overriding message from Google is that they will reward original, unique content and will punish those whose business plans involve little more than utilizing someone else’s content.

If you keep in mind that Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the best results for every search query; they want you to feel that you received the best suggestions for your search.  By eliminating content farms, spammy websites and ‘me too’ results, they hope to improve your experience with their search tools.

Simply stated, if you as a content creator, produce unique, interesting and relevant content your site will begin to rank well for the keywords and phrases that support your overriding theme.  In other words, if you sell blue widgets, provide as much information as possible about blue widgets.  Explain why your blue widgets are unique and better than your competitor’s blue widgets, show photos of blue widgets, list blue widgets pricing, sizes, availability and make your blue widgets presentation better than other websites. Think quality and deliver unique content. Do this and you will own the blue widgets space on the Internet.

Readers of this blog are familiar with the cliché, “Content is King” as I have hammered that home many, many times. When you strip away all the tactics and tricks webmasters use to improve their search ranking, the one undeniable truth that remains is that good, quality, unique content will do more to ensure your website’s ultimate success than anything else you can do.

Google will ultimately discover all the tricks, they’re looking for the best information to present in answer to a search query. Produce quality information and that #1 website listed on page one of Google could be yours.

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