The Content Farm Shakedown: Google's Latest Algorithm Change and Why it was Necessary

You wouldn't think that as an off again, on again writer for Associated Content, I would be in favor of the recent algorithm changes to Google. But there's a reason why. Because I've been a webmaster far longer than I've been a writer at any so-called content farm, I have a different perspective on the entire situation than most people who write for these places. So not only do I welcome the changes, I think they were long overdue. Here's why:

How we got to this point

Recently, one of the biggest threats to the so-called "Information Highway" has been the emergence of the content farm and "news aggregator". Examples of these types of sites are eHow, Yahoo! Answers, About.com, Squidoo, Huffington Post, Gawker, HubPages, Associated Content, Answer Bag, and yes, even the exalted Wikipedia. Initially, looking at these sites you can't help but wonder what makes them so different from, say, How Stuff Works, Ask Men, or iVillage. After all, on the surface they're all well made, professional looking sites providing information on a wide range of topics, from growing azaleas to learning how to cope with the side effects of chemotherapy.

But there is a radical difference. What differentiates an Answerbag.com from a WebMD is the philosophy behind their existence. Whereas a site like WebMD is meant to provide information for information's sake and merely uses ads to pay for the the costs of running it, sites like Answerbag.com are meant to provide information for profit's sake. Because of this philosophy, many content farms actively encourage their users to create a prodigious amount of hastily written content in a short amount of time with a heavy emphasis on SEO, and at the expense of quality. Why? In order to rank highly in the search engines--particularly Google-- so they can profit in the form of affiliate advertising.

This stance by many content farms has resulted in gobs and gobs of content written by amateurish writers being poured onto the web, much of it mediocre, rehashed or flat out copied from pre-existing sources. Ordinarily, this shouldn't be a problem. After all, conventional wisdom says that if you produce crap, it doesn't matter how well SEO'ed it is, it just won't rank well in the search engines. But unfortunately, the opposite happened. Since the content farms mastered the art of gaming Google and other search engines-- and since so few of them exercised quality control-- some of their worst, most useless articles managed to flood search engine results-- and with a vengeance.

This flooding had a terrible impact on the internet in the form of pollution and parasitism that hurt both webmasters and internet users alike. For the webmasters who actually worked hard to produce unique content, many of them had to endure the sting of seeing their sites rank worse than the content farm articles that were based on their material. Adding insult to injury was the fact that because so many content farm articles were merely rehashed, plagiarized, or otherwise, they often had to compete with their own material to get ahead in the SERPs. But competing wound up being a losing battle, since there was no way they could compete with the thousands and thousands of published content being pumped out of content farms daily.

For the average web surfer, finding information became all but a chore as he or she had to literally wade through pages of search engine results to find an article written by an actual expert, as opposed to the various amateurs on Yahoo! Answers, eHow, or some other content farm that merely paraphrased, ripped off, or sourced that expert's material. This pollution was beginning to render search engines nothing short of useless.

Given all that, you can understand why I would be in favor of the "content farm shakeup." Clearly-- with web surfers constantly being thwarted in their searches and webmasters having their material leeched by content farms-- things were reaching a critical point. Something needed to be done. And finally something was done-- Google changed its algorithm to no longer give SEO-reliant content farms the unfair advantage they've been enjoying for the past two years at the expense of other sites and search engine users.

The wake up call

There is another reason why I'm in favor of the Google change. As you can expect, the reactions to the new algorithm have ranged from fear to just plain frustration and anger. Although they're unfortunate reactions, they're very understandable and those worst impacted have the right to feel the pain and disappointment of suddenly being smacked by major losses in traffic.

But there's been another reaction to the changes that has frankly disturbed me. It was this reaction that solidifed in my mind why the Google changes were necessary.

In the end, what is a content provider? It's someone who publishes content for public consumption, whether in the form of posting information, pics, free files, or something else that people want. Although in the long run he hopes to earn some money from it, that's not the primary reason why he's creating the content in the first place.

What is a search engine? It's a service that enables web surfers to separate the wheat from the chaff when searching for information, because with the billions of sites online it would be virtually impossible to find what he wanted otherwise.

Lastly, what is the relationship between the search engine and content provider? The content provider submits his site to the search engine in the hopes of reaching an audience.

Before the "content farm" revolution, this was clearly understood by everyone. You didn't produce content for the primary purpose of milking Google with SEO techniques. You produced content for the sake of producing content. Furthermore, you knew you were at the mercy of any search engine because, bottom line, it was up to the discretion of that engine and its users to decide how "valuable" your content is. If tomorrow your web site dropped off the face of the earth in a search engine, then it dropped off the face of the earth-- that was it.

Because of content farms, an entirely new generation of writers and content providers have developed a completely skewed version of what it means to publish content on the web, as well as what the nature of the relationship between a search engine and writer or provider should be. They literally feel that publishing poorly written content for the sake of gaming search engines for revenue is not only acceptable, but a God-given right. And if you penalize their content by enforcing some kind of standard in terms of search engine rank, it's "censorship" or an evil plot to screw them over or the company that runs their content farm.

Furthermore, they also feel that if they generate a lot of ill gotten views for their content and earn money to boot, no search engine has the "right" to make any moves that could disrupt their revenue. I have even heard a few people rant that Google should've "consulted" them first before making these changes as if by virtue of making money, they're suddenly in the position to now dictate to search engines the terms of their rank.

To any veteran webmaster, this brash attitude on the part of the newbies is nothing short of laughable and displays a shocking amount of clueless arrogance that would've never existed had it not been for content farms. After all, just as no Tom, Dick, or Harry has the "right" to get his 30 paged novel accepted by one of the biggest publishing houses in the country, no one has the "right" to a high search engine rank just by virtue of publishing something on the web.

In addition, the search engine was never created to cater exclusively to or be a money-making tool for content providers-- never was, never has been. It's a tool for the average web surfer to find what he wants. Therefore, to insist that a search engine must now take into consideration a content provider's revenue when making an algorithm change is ludicrous.

Seeing this "culture" emerge in the wake of the Google changes has really opened my eyes to the second reason why the algorithm was so sorely needed-- to give the new generation of content providers a nice, big, fat wake up call about their place in the grand scheme of things and what internet content is supposed to be about. Apparently, they were clearly getting carried away with their dizzying page views and hollow SERP ranks to the point of feeling as if the search engines exist for the benefit of them and not the web surfer. Hopefully, they'll have gotten the hint although, I suspect, not without a lot of anger and disillusionment.