The New York Times on Content Farms

The paper of record provides a good overview of the hows and whys of content farms, and what Google has launched in the last few months to combat them. If you're looking for a straightforward, layman-friendly explanation of how content farms work and why they make money, you should check it out.

Of course, you can expect the content farms, spammers and questionable SEO companies to adapt in response, but for now, the results are looking pretty good. Read it here.

In class, I often mention "content farms" as an example of the SEO-influenced clutter that makes up most of the internet's online content. It's tough to get your head around exactly how much of the content out there is created solely for gathering clicks and viewers (and thus dollars) as opposed to actually informing people. The amount of junk content is truly staggering, and it's only getting worse.

Here, then, is an interesting tell-all by a "content farm" writer from AOL. It's not pretty stuff, and once you understand how much of this junk is being created, you'll get a much better idea of just how difficult it is for search engines to find the content that matters. As I've discussed before, Google is constantly adjusting its algorithm to rank the junk lower, but it's an uphill battle.

Google updates algorithm, targeting content farms

We saw this one coming a while back, and now it's live: Google has made changes to their algorithm that will reduce the ranking of so-called "content farms" like Demand Media or eHow, who create all those wonderful articles like "How to Get Pregnant" (seriously). These articles, though marginally informative, don't really exist to provide unique, useful information; they exist to sell ads on those very pages, and that advertising is big business - Demand Media's IPO was valued at more than one billion dollars.

It remains to be seen exactly how content farm pages will suffer in ranking. Demand Media and other large-scale content providers have been anticipating this change for quite a while, so I expect they're already attempting to work around it. But, there's no denying that web users have staged something of a revolt against low-quality, high-volume content creators, and Google had no choice if it wanted to be perceived as delivering good search results.

The twist? Google, as the largest online ad network in the world, makes millions off the ads that are shown on these sites. Reducing the ranking of high-volume content farm pages will undoubtedly impact Google's ad revenue. No one has any idea how much impact this will have on ranking or revenue, but if you're interested in an in-depth overview of the change, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has put together a thorough, detailed analysis.