A couple of side notes:  Not only do excessive images impact site speed (which can decrease customer usability and lead to higher bounce rates), but they don’t look as attractive.

But the question remains – if content on your home page is a good thing - how much content is enough?  In our opinion, enough content is that which easily and effectively communicates your product and service offerings to your audience and the search engines.

Is this a quantifiable figure? Probably not. For some of you with shopping sites you may want to take the Zappos.com focus and provide less direct information but more linking text and contextual content around the breadth of features and products they offer.  However, for those of you with blogs or information-focused sites, you may want to emulate the sites of Dave Taylor and Jim Boykin.  Both provide a TON of content in the form of blog posts, industry links and customer testimonials that Google is clearly using to effectively place them at the top of the search engines for dozens of competitive queries.  Just “google” them and you’ll see what I mean.

What Does Google Say?

As for Google’s stance on this question, check out the below Google Webmaster Help video from Matt Cuts:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In the video Matt addresses this exact question but doesn’t give a clear answer. He does say that you wouldn’t want to have a home page containing 20MB of data since that would clearly be too much. He then continues to relate the following:

“But in general, if you have more content on a home page, there’s more text for Googlebot to find, so rather than just pictures, for example, if you have pictures plus captions – a little bit of textual information can really go a long way”

In the end, only you can decide how much content is enough for your home page. In our opinion though, it’s always better to have too much content as opposed to not enough.

Second, open a support ticket at Discover Bing. Click on the “Bing” option in the list of options to create your ticket.

You’ll then be prompted to provide your full name, email address for contact and email address associated with the account you’re inquiring about.

Next, select “Other” from the drop-down menu then use the description box to include information about your Web site as a news source.

In order to increase the chances of getting your site included, you should address the following in the description box:

• An introduction, historical background and credentials of your Web site.
• Credible ranking of the site in its field, if any.
• Name the local area or audience scope that the site covers. Be sure to provide the state/city names and zip codes for the stories or describe the groups of users.
• Provide statistics on the site – including traffic, Alexa ranking, etc. (Anything that shows that your site is credible and popular)
• Mention if the site is mostly news-related and if not, explain the unique news angle.
• Give the URL of your main news entry point, as well as entry points of major channels.
• Provide an RSS link to your site.
• Be sure that your site complies with technical requirements on the Bing Webmaster Tool Blog and state in your request that your site complies.

Finally, click “Continue” and you’re done! If you get approved, you should receive a notice within about a week.

It is our belief that by addressing your request for inclusion with a specific eye to the above particulars, you should be in a good position to be accurately reviewed for inclusion in Bing News. Good luck!

Google Burns Down Content Farmers

Content is King… you’ve heard it stated over and over again.  Well, this month Google has decided to show us once again exactly what that means.

Algorithm Update #1 – The Scraper

The first of two algorithm updates has been quietly dubbed the “Scraper” algorithm and is intended to block low quality content scraper sites from showing up in the Google index. Immediately after it released some webmasters complained that their traffic had dropped as much as 40-60%. These same webmasters also claim to have in depth content, and point out that the real content farms and scraper sites have either maintained or risen in ranks.  Good news for some, bad for others.

Google Wants to Level the Playing Field Again – Get Rid of Those Sites that House or Generate Poor Content.

Google’s Matt Cutts stated that the algorithm is very targeted and only 2% of queries were changed in some way and only 0.5% of the results would change enough that anyone would notice. He also stated that the algorithm is designed to elevate those sites which created the original content over those sites who republish it.

Algorithm Update #2 – The Farmer

Later in the month Google released its second algorithm update dubbed the “Farmer” update that is believed to specifically target content farms. Google has stated that this update impacts 11.8% of queries which is pretty significant compared to most updates in the algorithm.

The dust is still settling, however – this may leave you wondering how exactly Google is defining a content farm. In the past this has been a very loosely used term with no clear definition. However, thanks to this update we can see by example who Google feels has made the cut and who has taken a big ranking hit and been labeled a “farmer”.

Again, there is nothing wrong with these sites in general – but the auto-generated content abuse has taken it’s toll and quite frankly, this “BURN” was way overdue, IMO.  Here is the list so far:

Farmer:
Mahalo.com
EzineArticles (all article directories for that matter)
HubPages.com
Business.com
faqs.org
Wisegeek.com
The Other Guys:
Facebook
EBAY
Wikis (wikipedia, Google Knol)
YouTube
Instructrables & Ehow (both are VERY surprising but were not touched)
Yahoo Answers (very surprising here)
Etsy.com (comparison shopping)
Amazon
If your site was hit by either one of these updates you should consider “changing your ways”… you can do it!  Create original high quality content and replace any auto generated content and you’ll insulate “your house” from any future “burnings”.

Cya.