What's Content Farm Algorithm
- Thread starter snareshiver
- Start date
Think i'm in a position to answer this as I own a RSS news aggregator site too and have been worried that the new algorithm changes could affect my site.
The answer is simple. RSS sites haven't been affected because the code in a rss feed agregator is pretty simple to read as it has =rss tags all over the code, indicating to Google that what you are broadcasting has indeed come from an RSS feed. Besides the rss feeds you are broadcasting are coming from places where people WANT their feeds broadcasted on other websites.. What google wants to stop is people ripping off non RSS feeds.. I'm talking about the sites that have content that they don't want broadcasted on other sites.
Also the new algorithm changes have essentially been in affect since Thursday 2 weeks ago. From first hand experience I haven't had any ill effects, in fact my rankings are as good as ever.
I too spent the last 2 weeks reading up on it all and even posting on over 10 other SEO forums. I'm basically summing up what other experts in the field have been saying.. Hope this helps.
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Looks like you missed the big blogs though. The content farm algo isn't live yet... only the scraper algo.
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-scraper-algorithm-12889.html
https://searchengineland.com/googles-content-farm-algorithm-not-live-yet-63207
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Google distribute RSS feeds themselves. Does that mean they will punish site for broadcasting them? Put it this way there is no definition for what a content farm actually is... This is what we do know. Google openly distributes news feeds, so does that mean they will punish people for publishing their articles? Would this not make Google the biggest content farm distributer in the world?
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No one really knows except Google, but here is my opinion...
The May Day update last year I think was meant to rid the web of this problem. Early last year for most long tail searches you would get 100s of search results from question and answer, and Torrent sites. They would basically create millions of pages for everything. Eg 'How do I lose weight while jumping though fire hoops' The page would have this in the content, URL and Title and therefore rank for those terms but the content isn't relevant and just trying to get as many impressions on their ads as possible or make money from you doing quizes to release the answer.
The May Day update got rid of most of those sites because they needed to add some content to those pages.
Well, just as with everything people find ways around things. It's a constant game and these sites are now somewhat of a problem. Not only that but people are annoyed because this is making it somewhat into the mainstream. Try searching for 'How to replace iphone sleep button' and you will get a lot of results with very poor information.
The way the algo is gamed now is to use sites like ehow, squidoo etc to create authority pages of pretty much useless information but because they are relevant and have some backlinks they rank well. Do a search for any lose weight keywords and you will see these in the SERPs. Us SEOs are using those sites to build links to our sites and drive traffic to them. They pollute the results and irritate people.
The problem isn't the scrape content sites - these hardly ever rank because of duplicate content - but the poor quality content sites that are ranking.
Hopefully I've made some sense and my ideas aren't too out of line of what's going on.
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Yep, most content is either scraped, or it is low quality and on a blogging platform. The difficulty comes when google has to fight its own algorithm in order to sort wheat from chaff. Backlinks are what make sites valuable in the eyes of google, that and unique content.
Clever people will have covered all the basis, and it should not affect them. I can't imagine google banning wordpress hosted blogs for example. Blogger (owned by Google) is another that is abused, as is knol.
Clever people will have covered all the basis, and it should not affect them. I can't imagine google banning wordpress hosted blogs for example. Blogger (owned by Google) is another that is abused, as is knol.
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There is a difference - at least Google sees a difference - between scraped sites and content farms.
You can include ehow and wikihow as scaled content farms. Demand Media, which just IPO'd, is valued at $1.8bn and makes somewhere around 28 percent of its revenue from AdSense. Down the ladder there are hundreds more .. Ezine, Squidoo etc
Demand Media say they are not feeling threatened by Google's algorithm changes, as it's not scraped content. Granted, it's not high quality, but a long way off the point at which Google downgrades the ranking because of very poor content quality or duplicate content.
It's down to you and I to produce high quality content that outpulls the content farms.
You can include ehow and wikihow as scaled content farms. Demand Media, which just IPO'd, is valued at $1.8bn and makes somewhere around 28 percent of its revenue from AdSense. Down the ladder there are hundreds more .. Ezine, Squidoo etc
Demand Media say they are not feeling threatened by Google's algorithm changes, as it's not scraped content. Granted, it's not high quality, but a long way off the point at which Google downgrades the ranking because of very poor content quality or duplicate content.
It's down to you and I to produce high quality content that outpulls the content farms.
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At the moment it's not just good content though. These sites, including YouTube which is owned by Google are a lot easier to rank than a dedicated site. They can also withstand more automated tasks than a new site would. This means people are Xrumering their poor eHow page, Wiki, Ezine and YouTube pages to the top of Google for a keyword.
Also the strength of the tagged and category pages internally on those sites help the natural ranking of new pages.
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Less importance?
ok 50% less importance = 100% more work = same result.
Google have created a monster, they can't now control it. But you have also confused the two issues here.
1. content spinning
2. low quality KNOWN spam magnet sites.
What about private blog networks? That sort of thing will be under the radar, so is not likely to be picked up. By private I mean a non commercial private network, as opposed to a bought in one that syndicates content from anyone that pays.
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Well so far it seems to only have been discussed that the algo will be against these sites ranking. Nothing I have seen has talked about the effect on the links on these pages.
A lot of spinned articles still have good information though, and it's the poor ranking information they are looking to prevent from ranking. So it could be as the spinned articles already dont rank that they have already been dealt with in the algo and won't be effected.
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Algorithm to me implies they edit the forumla to deal with these sites so the effect is natural across the board. Do you think they will manually punish these sites? If they do... Do they manually favour some sites?
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I agree and would add that it's certainly in Google's interest to favour, or at least not penalise, a site like eHow which provides millions of dollars of ad revenue. We don't know for sure whether this factors in Googles search algo.
Perhaps one day sites like Blekko, which are blacklisting eHow and other content farms, may come to the fore. In the meantime there are still millions of topics where well-structured smaller sites with quality content are beating bigger sites with better backlinks - but poorer content - in the SERPs.
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Again there appears to be some confusion. :9 I was replying to the post not stating the position.
Other engines have simple removed certain sites manually from their index, and are prepared to throw some babies out with the bathwater.
Google OTOH have said they will stop the pages appearing in Serps, which is a whole different shooting match isn't it.
Other engines have simple removed certain sites manually from their index, and are prepared to throw some babies out with the bathwater.
Google OTOH have said they will stop the pages appearing in Serps, which is a whole different shooting match isn't it.
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Some people write articles on their site and want it published on other peoples websites(with a link back to their own). Thats called 'RSS'.. I think what Google wants to stop are people ripping off other peoples content that don't want it distributed.
Ok I have an example for you. Yesterday I wrote a blog for taximedia.com
http://www.taximedia.com/index.php/taxi_advertising_blog/show/wikileaks_founder_julian_assange/
Today I can see another site ripping off my blog without any consent or anything.
http://brokenflask.com/2011/02/10/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange/
They have surrounded my article with ads of their own. They are now ranking in Google very well for this article.
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Here is an example of a website saying PLEASE syndicate our content. (RSS)
http://edition.cnn.com/services/rss/
http://edition.cnn.com/services/rss/
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