Greetings and Salutations!

I wanted to bring up an important issue which is sweeping search engines right now. We are extremely fortunate to be one of the only sites on the "positive side" of this change - kudos to us all for creating quality content!

The gist of this change is that search engines are now trying to distinguish between actual, authentic content (written by a person who cares personally about that topic) and spammy keyword rich content (written generally in a desire to grab traffic). In short, Google is trying to remove "content farms" from top results.

I'm sure we've all landed at eHow.com over the years. This site is a classic content farm. They hire people to crank out short, 250-300 word articles about a catchy topic. All they are doing is churning out tons of short articles on high-search topics in order to put ads on them. Google doesn't want to reward them with traffic.

There are other sites we know of who do the same thing. Their focus is on short articles which meet current-hits types of criteria. Whatever is hot in the web world this week, they want articles on it. They don't care if you like the topic or have a passion for it. All they want is to crank out content. They fill the content full of key words, bold a bunch of them, and aim to trick Google. Google has had enough.

Just do a Google search on "google announcement content farm" to read all the stories about this topic.

We at BellaOnline should be thrilled about this! Our content has never been a content farm. We don't stuff our articles with key words. We don't randomly bold key words in articles to play search engine games! All of these actions would be highly damaging to us. Instead, we write authentic articles. We write about topics we care about, we write from our own voice, and we write in "real English". We write for a human being who is going to read our article, not for a search engine indexing tool.

As a result, our content will get even higher in the search engine results, now that the content farms will be kicked out!

Please let me know if you have any questions about this - this is a superb change which will benefit our website and our individual projects!

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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