Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google’s announcement did not mention content farms. But Mr. Cutts has spoken in recent weeks about the problem and said Google was working on algorithm changes to fix it. “In general, there are some content farms that I think it would be fair to call spam, in the sense that the quality is so low-quality that people complain,” he said in a recent interview.
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 sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. [googleblog.blogspot.com...]
Demand Media Response:
[demandmedia.com...]How our content reaches the consumer – whether it’s through direct visits, social media referrals, apps or search – has always been important to and monitored closely by us. We also recognize that major search engines like Google have and will continue to make frequent changes. We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer. So naturally we applaud changes search engines make to improve the consumer experience – it’s both the right thing to do and our focus as well.
Today, Google announced an algorithm change to nearly 12% of their U.S. query results. As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results.This is consistent with what Google discussed on their blog post. It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term – but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business.
My guess is that they ran into trouble because of the small amount of text on the average page, and/or the extent to which the same topic is discussed on numerous other sites.
There's basically 2 types of content farms - those that need to pass editorial review and those where anything goes. Those that allow submission with little or no supervision have more crap.
i love u dobnjklfnjnonam ik nlkfjfnj innfknfcj jijdj jkl jljlksdja;jfkjd ... etc, etc.
[edited by: BeeDeeDubbleU at 10:14 am (utc) on Mar 1, 2011]
The one I mentioned has since been removed from Docstoc, which means that they are probably watching this thread and sweating a little like the rest of the content farms.lolol
My guess is that they ran into trouble because of the small amount of text on the average page, and/or the extent to which the same topic is discussed on numerous other sites.I've heard this from other people as well. Sites with product pages that were really thin on the amount of copy got hit too.
I've heard this from other people as well. Sites with product pages that were really thin on the amount of copy got hit too.
Incidentally, I posted a link to an example of this on their site earlier. It was moderated out but the one I mentioned has since been removed from Docstoc, which means that they are probably watching this thread and sweating a little like the rest of the content farms that don't care about their content.
Sites that believe they have been adversely impacted by the change should be sure to extensively evaluate their site quality. In particular, it’s important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site.
[edited by: TheMadScientist at 2:51 pm (utc) on Mar 15, 2011]
would anyone be able to give some examples of issues.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding here... the algorithm change is not about websites ,its about content, low quality content and or duplicated content got bumped down, high quality content on those sites was not affected
Jane_Doe, Do you think having no follow links on all user generated content would help solve that problem?
[edited by: tedster at 2:19 am (utc) on Apr 7, 2011]
