Content Farms

CONTENT FARMS

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Before the launch of Google Panda update in the year 2011, many sites that were ranking high were populated with large number of articles that covered various areas of interest ranging from news, blogs and entertainment. These sites contained low quality information are today known as content farms. Content farms are sites that contain articles which are of low standard, less quality and are specifically written to satisfy the algorithm for maximum retrieval by search engines.

Articles in content farms have been found to contain identical passages which reveal general information without much in depth data. The ultimate aim of content farms is to achieve a decent ranking in search engines. Before the panda update Google's algorithm did not go in depth on the quality of the article. Articles were ranking well if they were unique and has less grammatical errors. But things changed when Panda update came out. Articles were analyzed for quality more than quantity. Google preferred to link to an authoritative source than to an article which doesn't have proper facts behind it.

There is a big difference between an article written on lung cancer by a surgeon for 30 years and a freelancer who writes for $3 in elance. Both cough out unique information but the quality and value comes from years of experience.

Content farms are considered as a search engine manipulation strategy because these site owners hire low quality personnel to write articles for their sites which are usually stuffed with keywords and have low quality content for cheap traffic purpose. Any tactic adopted by spammers to obtain higher ranking in search engines is considered as search engine manipulation. And Content farms are also considered as a search engine manipulation strategy by search engines.

Google defines content farms as:

An example can be when a site owner hires a content writer to write various articles to be posted in their site. The content writer may possess excellent grammatical skills for writing but what is required for quality content is "adequate knowledge" about each and every topic that the content writer writes. Since the writers do not have experience in each and every subject for which he writes, there are obvious chances that the information in the site cannot be relied upon. Google emphasizes on generating quality content for getting better ranking in SERPs. According to Google, there are certain questions that a content writer needs to ask himself before writing the article: (screenshot) Google's senior scientist Amit Singal points this out wonderfully in the official Google webmaster blog.
These questions help a content writer know where his article stands and what are the quality standards set by Google for better rankings.

Google always emphasizes on quality content in a site that serves good purpose to the user who reads it and derives some benefit from it. It is so annoying when you are trying to search for some information that is really required and you end up with similar and repeated passages that talk nonsense about the topic and sometimes completely irrelevant stuffs. There are many content farms that contain just good enough articles rather than best possible quality articles. Any site that has low quality content is penalized by Google's panda update and is sure to drop in rankings or get de-indexed in the worst case.

Google de-indexing low quality content sites

Content farms have been significantly reduced these days, as the panda update by Google filters all these sites for low quality content and only sites with standardized and quality information are ranked higher. There were a number of good sites that got affected by Google's panda update targeting low quality content.

In pursue of identifying content farms Google made its mistakes too. Sites like hubpages.com, expertsexchange.com, ehow.com which is regular used for 1000s of users every day for their quality information got filtered by Panda update.

This was a mistake on Google's part because there are sites that might have sub quality contents but still are high quality sites used regularly by many web users. Google tweaked its algorithm later and some sites that have good information recovered.

Still panda update was considered one of the biggest update and most revolutionary update in search engine update history. What worked for over a decade just stopped working with Google and 100s of 1000s of webmasters literally shed out a huge number of pages on their site just to get back their site in rankings. This was mainly because Google said even a small section that has low quality content can actually affect their whole site.