Google has recently acknowledged the release of a new anti-spam algorithm that deals with content farms.
What’s a Content Farm?
Content farms, are essentially websites that provide masses of low quality content – with the primary aim of achieving high rankings for as many keywords as possible (often with the goal of getting clicks and generating revenue through Adsense or similar advertising). Often the content from content farms is not unique and is just an aggregation of content scraped (by automated tools or manually by workers from low-wage countries).
In many cases, sites that copy the content from other websites can rank higher than the original site and the new algorithm update is trying to address this.
Google’s Matt Cutts has said:
” ‘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.’
And also :
“The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”
What should you do?
I
f you’re a legitimate site offering high quality, unique content, then you probably don’t need to do anything – and the algorithm may even give your site a boost (as low quality content farms are dropped from SERPs), but if you want to get high, long term rankings on Google, you should :
- Create a high quality website, with unique content.
- Optimise the pages of your website for both users and search engines
- Improve your site trust by getting as many good quality, relevant backlinks as possible
The content farm algorithm update was part of an ongoing strategy by Google to improve the quality of their search results by removing spam. Google is expected to release many more anti-spam algorithms this year.