This is huge!    Google in an update called Panda changed their search engine February 8th 2011 to reduce the influence of link farms!     For people looking for information that better meets what they are searching for, this is a good thing.  Google said: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

What has been happening is that companies that been creating  huge Llnk farms.  A link farm is a group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group.    These links are not created by people sharing data with other users, but by companies trying to get their content ahead of others.

Since many SEO companies accomplish their work by basically creating link farms, It’s going to be interesting how this is going to change the SEO business.  We’ve always held the position that you need to do more than one thing to improve your search engine ranking.

This change means that Blogs, Social Media and freshness of your site will be more important.

According to the LA Times,  this change affects 12% of all queries.