Google Tightens up Search Algorithm, targets Content Farms and Scraper Sites
With concerns that web publishers are flooding its search engine with low-quality pages and impacting the relevancy and usefulness of its search results, Google has taken action against content farms and scraper sites, changing its ranking algorithm to take out such material. Google says the changes impact 14% of its US-based search results.
Content Farms
Content farms are article-based websites. Generally, a farm site collects and posts content that is related to popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics). Content is generated specifically tailored to those searches and usually little time or money is spent generating that content, either by the site owner or the article writers.
eHow.com (despite their protests) is considered to be a content farm – Some content is well written and informative; the rest is derivative, poorly written and information-poor, with these articles typically posted with the goal of obtaining a link back to the author’s personal website. This means that websites dependent solely on self-generated article links from content farms will see their personal search engine rank drop as well.
Scraper Sites
“Scraper” sites pull content in from other sources. Some websites do this legitimately, such as using RSS feeds or aggregating content under fair use guidelines. Other sites simply “scrape” or copy content without modification from other sites using automated tools. It is these latter sites that Google is targeting.
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, with scraper sites falling in rank.
Google has implemented these two changes on their US site, with plans to implement worldwide.
