It started with Google’s Caffeine and the Mayday programs and then in 2011, Google Panda stomped its way to hammering the last nails on the coffin. Content farms masquerading as efficient databases with the help of the vacuous art of Article Spinning are meeting a steep fall from grace in their SERP rankings as search engines (Not only Google) wised up to their rank hogging tricks.
There used to be a time when websites simply used to stuff their domains with a more than adequate amount of key words. This was the time when search engines conducted linear searches to yield a search result which was arranged as per its popularity and certain relevance irrespective of the nature and quality of the content as compared to each other. And that’s about all that search engines used to do. Such a system was not hard to get around. The methods were labour intensive but it yielded efficient results. Websites at that time were well capable of outsmarting the fledgling Search engines of yesteryear which were yet to become the industrious content quality predators that they are now.
This was usually done by hiring a vast hoard of content writers who would replicate the content originally produced and thus not only expand the size of the website but also help the website don a property of seeming to have a vast reserve of data on a subject. This also helped in getting more clicks and visits since one article would simply lead to another. Besides, by having a plethora of articles similar in structure, there was a chance that at least one page would procure vast traffic and in turn simply lead the readers to explore other articles present in the domain. Of course, considering it’s the internet, few methods steadily stand the test of time and Article spinning became just one of the few tricks to cultivating what became infamously termed as “Content Farms”, a breed of websites which industriously produced an assembly line of articles which were notoriously similar in content.
While Search engines steadily trod the path to discovering how the worth of a page can be gauged aside from the familiar and outdated criteria of popularity, dotcom intelligentsia everywhere invented new and evolved tricks of Search Engine Optimization. They found radical new ways to set-up content farms as well as earning a steady wage from them. Yes, there were sites that supplied reliable and original content, but these content farms prospered as well. Until now that is.
Many must be acquainted with the news of drop in the SERP and traffic of 12% of all sites since the launch of the Google Panda algorithm (a majority of which were E-Commerce sites). Considering the formation of 4.5 mn URL’s every month (as measured in 2011) as well as taking into account the billion pages already in existence, an unfathomable number of sites have been affected and the rest 88% are just surviving, I’m guessing. Although one has to concede that the truly productive sites must have had a hyperbolic spike in their traffic.
While the Panda has rendered nothing short of a sucker punch, I’m supremely confident (in it’s obviousness) that the Search engine gods are yet to unleash their Kraken. Google being the sovereign of Search engines will lead the witch hunt for Content farms, and websites will have no other options but to elevate the quality and variety of content unless they want to be weeded out by yet another monstrosity of a rolling update in its algorithm that Google unleashes every other month on the web-world.
Content Farms aren’t dead yet, but their condition is nothing if not terminal.
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