Lessons in SEO: Google and the Content Farms
Wednesday, March 2
So the big news in the search marketing world is that Google plans to, at long last, go after content farms; you know, those annoying, spammy websites with low-quality "information" that rank highly in search results despite being useless to pretty much everyone. Earlier this February, Google launched a new feature for Chrome crowd-sourcing content evaluation, enabling users to weed out the obvious clutter themselves. And last week, the company made changes to its search algorithm in order to eliminate the content farm spam from ranking so highly and so frequently in its search results. The change significantly impacts a massive 11.8% of search queries.
Of course, Google didn't directly give the finger to content farms, but everyone knew this is essentially what it was doing. And it makes sense...savvy web users groan whenever their search results pull up these obvious spam vortices. Content farms exist not to provide users with information but to provide their owners with ad revenue from the page views that come with their (formerly) high page views. These page views result from having the farm's writers write specifically to the search algorithm, a sort of perverse "market demand journalism." Content farming is what happens when quality content development is sacrificed for SEO.
So why is this relevant to our customers? It's a sign that Google is constantly changing to make its user experience better and more useful--a sign that relying on article submissions to content-farm-esque sites and otherwise using an early 2000s strategy for a 2011 world is not going to cut it. Our strategies for SEO, social media, even online reputation management aren't based on ways we know to "game the system." They're based in content: good content, quality content, content that not only brings potential customers to your site, but that literally informs them and helps to set you apart as a thought leader in your field, whether it's super-complex B2B, or a consumer-focused shop.
SEO isn't magic or crazy search juju...it's just research, experience, and hard work.
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