For those of us who spend our time creating content online (as I do) and strive to make that content of the best quality and of value to people, the rise of so-called “content farms” has been an annoying feature of the online landscape: both the networks of sites that simply scrape our content and surround it in ads… and the networks of sites that churn out incredibly large quantities of low-grade content that is optimized for SEO so that their pages can rank highly and get eyeballs to their pages and their ads.

For we who strive to create “high quality” content, the spammers and content farmers were annoying in that Google search results seemed to feature these sites (because they were trying to game Google) when our higher quality was ranked lower.

The good news is that as they threatened earlier, the folks at Google stated that they have changed their ranking algorithm to de-value low quality sites. That is to say… they are aiming to hit the spammers and content farmers at their critical reason for being: search engine result placement.

From Google’s blog post, with my own emphasis added:

But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. 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. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

Yet to be seen is exactly what they do and how they tweak the algorithms… there will always be an arms race, I fear, between the search engines like Google and those who want to try to game the system.

Regardless, the move is welcome!

Many articles written about this today… some I liked include:

• SearchEnglineLand: Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update
• GigaOm: Google Tightens the Screws on Content Farmers
• Mashable: Google Declares War on Content Farms

Bring on the changes, Google! We who spend our time striving to create high quality content welcome them.

Image credit: rgs_ on Flickr

UPDATE, Feb 26: There have been a number of articles out there seeking to show the actual impact of this change. One of the best I’ve seen is this post from SISTRIX that shows the 25 biggest losers according to the research they’ve done.

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What is Google going to do about the perception that there are more “spam” sites in search results? What will Google do about content farms?

On Friday, Matt Cutts at Google published a great piece entitled “Google search and search engine spam that is worth reading for all involved in online content creation. Somewhat predictably, he starts out pointing out that in truth there is less spam in search results than there used to be… but then he clearly accepts the “perception equals reality” mantra and lays out what they are looking to do about it.

This part was interesting, particularly the last line:

To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

This issue of people copying others’ content continues to be an annoyance to me, particularly because content scrapers keep scraping a lot of Voxeo’s old content. Anything that can reduce the value in people doing that is a win by me!

Similarly, there are a great number of sites out there operating as “content farms” that just spew out large quantities of low-grade content with the idea that they will increase your SEO/search engine results. Matt Cutts takes them on, too:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

For those of us who are actually spending the time to create quality content online, this is definitely good news.

He ends with a note that Google does not take into account whether or not sites run Google advertising when it is taking action against those sites. I’m inclined to believe them on this point, because at the end of the day, Google’s a pretty geeky, hard-core technology company… and Search rules.

It’s good to see Google come out with a clear statement like this… and I look forward to seeing what actions they take.

And for us who are creating online content, it’s important to monitor whatever changes they make so that we don’t wind up inadvertantly having our content somehow devalued amidst the changes.

Image credit: arndog on Flickr

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