9 replies to this topic

[cre8pc]

For those following the news lately on changes coming from Google regarding search, Aaron Wall has an excellent writeup:

Google Gearing Up for Relevancy Changes

Further, there are a wide array of start ups built around leveraging the "domain authority" bias in Google's algorithm, which certainly means that looking more at page by page metrics was a needed strategy to evolve relevancy. And with page-by-page metrics it will allow Google to filter out the cruddy parts of good sites without killing off the whole site.

[iamlost]

I am not so confident as Mr. Wall. Perhaps I use a different Googlespeak parser.

Yes, I expect that many of the smaller sites and 'content' networks will be 'caught' by the redesigned document-level classifier but I am not holding my breath that the large venture capital backed scraper/content mills will be touched.

Add in the increasing popularity of 'curation' sites and I fully expect increasing numbers of verticals/niches to be dominated by various combinations of (1) Google properties, (2) service partners, (3) minimum content farms, (4) curation sites aka directories 2.0, and perhaps some dominant sites.

I should like to be wrong, but Mr. Cutt's post content is something of an annual occurrence.

What the past and likely near future tells me is (1) it continues to be worthwhile to look elsewhere for traffic, (2) it continues to be worthwhile to leverage Google properties and service partners, (3) it is increasingly important to block or leverage the major content farms, and (4) it is critical to learn how to leverage the curation sites as they are the current enterprise growth area.

The sky is not falling, but the dark search results clouds continue to swirl, if in some new patterns.

[Michael_Martinez]

People need to agree on what the definition of "content farm" is before Google goes too far in settling on its own definition. As I pointed out in my own blog post over the weekend, Demand Media's sneaky NoFollow links still send traffic to other people's sites. Taking down Demand Media just because a lot of people are whining about it will probably hurt many other sites, too.

[cre8pc]

I was thinking the same thing, Michael, when reading Aaron's post. "Content farm", to me, is something like an articles site, but what would make a blog site NOT also a content farm? They too, churn out content.

and I thought link farms were commonly known as garbage. I couldn't tell if Google was really referring to link farms.
:emo3: :frustration:

[jonbey]

One blog I read (or maybe it was here....) compared wikipedia to ehow, and the difference is mostly that for wikipedia there is one article for each subject, on ehow there are many articles on the same subject with slightly different names.

My site get reference a lot on ehow, nofollow, very few referrals (90 click thrus from 32 articles so far in January). If the link is worthless, and the traffic is too, then I will not shed an eye. But, are the links worthless?

[Michael_Martinez]

I am a huge critic of Ickipedia but to be honest I find its content to be generally more useful than eHow's content. That said, I think this is a political mine field for a company like Google. Unlike Foundem, which is based in the United Kingdom, Demand Media is an American company whose revenue base is not wholly dependent upon Google.

The courts have pretty much blocked restraint-of-trade suits against Google (so far as I can tell) but there may be other legal options that haven't yet been tested.

[AbleReach]

To me, "content farm" means those so-so quality white label articles that get passed around without attribution. I trust sites that use them about as much as I trust sites that use stolen or scraped content.

Let them link to each other. Bah.

[glyn]

Sorry don't believe a word of it, but I wholeheartedly support the idea, as I do all the other press releases...sorry that should read comments by Matt Cutts. First of all quality is subjective. What I think is rubbish you might think is great and that means that the actual process of determining what is rubbish and what is not, is simply an algorhythmic one tied to flags or identifiers associated with that content, and that's the problem. As it has been and as it always will be with Google.

Still if your doing IM forget about Google, and get into Facebook.

[Michael_Martinez]

Well, it looks like they are going after Duplicate Content according to Search Engine Roundtable and Matt Cutts.

I'm not sure why Barry called this the "Content Farm Update", since Demand Media doesn't scrape sites or republish syndicated content.

[mrgoodfox]

I guess im glad that none of my sites has seen significant change in traffic.

I'm all for taking those spammy websites out as well as those article directories that are nothing more than link farms with duplicate contents. oh and new websites that do nothing but copy paste a news update from another website (where some of us actually pay hard working people to write new and good content)

Edited by mrgoodfox, 01 February 2011 - 01:23 PM.