Leaving Them Out To Pasture: Google’s Content Farms Update

Amid all of the recent news that has been hitting newspapers, online blogs and forums, Google continues their campaign on useless websites. Announced yesterday (Thursday, February 24, 2011), Content Farms are the most recent casualties, affecting 12% of websites. Content farms are websites (and companies) that have a lot of textual content, aimed at pleasing search algorithms, so their website appears high in search engine results. They typically lack useful data however.

So here we have it, another crackdown in the movement toward eliminating websites that don’t contain good, original content, worthy of sufficient page rank.

Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts discussed yesterday in their blog “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 websites which are low-value for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

WebiMax Founder and CEO Kenneth C. Wisnefski discussed in yesterday’s blog that he “envisions another large scale update via Google in the near future, aimed on eliminating ‘search spam’ (aka useless results)”.

As search engine guidelines change (what seems to be daily), it is becoming ever more important to make sure your SEO Company adheres to the changing policies and follows the SEO Code of Ethics. Many SEO firms aren’t paying attention to recent news on crackdown and changing policies. There is 1 out there however that has proven to always stay 1 step ahead of the curve. That’s what separates #1 from the rest.