deadsea - 1:44 am on Jun 29, 2011 (gmt 0)

So this person from Google says that words per article and text-to-ad ratios are not part of the Google algorithm. What does that leave that Google could be using to measure sites for shallow content.

My guesses:
1) Content farms have lower user engagement metrics -- people don't find the articles helpful, come back to the SERPs, and click on something else.
2) Content farms never update content, they only add content. You can tell content farms apart from news organizations that also work this way because the content farms write about "evergreen" topics that get hits month after month.
3) Content farms have many similar articles all focused on various high volume ways of phrasing the same query. Sites with deeper content tend to have fewer articles on a given subject, and titles that are not targeted at a high volume keyword phrase for the subject.
4) Content farms don't have pages that AREN'T focused on a keyword. Every page they have is targeted to some phrase with search volume.
5) Content farms have no overall site focus, but write about anything at all. You can tell this apart from wikipedia, maybe?