Google Updates Algorithm To Fight Content Farms

I remember few years ago, I had a discussion with few of my friends about Google being evil and using its monopoly to make or break businesses. Let's face it, Google has over 70% of online search share and there aren't any direct competitors Google should worry about. There are rumors that Facebook may jump into online search with access to users personal data; but there's no official word about it from the company. Recently, Google mentioned about the algorithm update on their <a href="https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Official Google Blog: Google search and search engine spam</a> and declared a war against the content farms. Google's said that it will rank the content farms lower in their search results.


Image Credit: seobook.com

The move is welcome, but a minor change in Google's PageRank algorithm affects hundreds of millions of websites and given the complex nature of modern websites, it's a tough challenge to identify what's a content farm. If you are wondering what a content farm is, let me explain it to you -  a content farm is a site that has several articles with lines or paragraphs of text copied from various sources. These sites typically have low quality articles. Google published a video to point out content farms -

<object width="640" height="390"><param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/Fy5LGfZgv04?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="390" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Fy5LGfZgv04?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

However, things get worse when a blog like <a href="https://www.labnol.org/internet/blog-as-content-farm/18750/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google Farmer Update - This Blog Gets Labeled as a Content Farm - Digital Inspiration</a> gets labeled as 'Content Farm' and sees a drop in traffic. Google's now said that they've outsourced the content farm detection via an extension in Google Chrome. The strategy is now being debated on the Internet via many forums and blogs.

CrazyEngineers, relies mostly on user generated content, which we make sure is of high quality and useful to everyone. Our moderators stay online 24x7 to make sure there's no spam and no copy-pasting is allowed. It'd be important to find out how Google determines quality content and differentiates it from non-quality content. The companies that rely on Google for being noticed on the Internet, better be alerted.

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