In search there is, always, a cat-and-mouse game between search engines and search engine optimizers. The former look to create as level a playing field as possible while the latter are interested in how to ‘game’ a search engine in order to promote the websites they are hired to optimize.

 

Here’s a potent example: In 2007 Google carried out a massive algorithmic upgrade taking into account the abuse of link-building (and link selling and buying) which had been going on and it discounted at a stroke, PageRank (PR), reciprocal links, paid-links and link-farms. It also changed the importance it had been giving to PageRank in organic search engine results (SERPs) rankings.

 

The end result was that in a matter of days, many established directories dropped between one and three PR points, many sites which had paid for links and had been dominating the first page of Google vanished without a trace and hundreds if not thousands of sites which were innocent also felt the sting of the new Google filters.

 

We are supposed to be in slightly more enlightened days where abuse is more constrained and where content is king. Right? Well, yes, and this has led to different abuses of different kinds. Content aggregators and article submission sites are not new. Interestingly, the first one was InternetDay, back in 1997 (yep, that’s last century!) and since then we have seen the rise and rise of content aggregators like AOL’s seed.com, Yahoo’s recently acquired Contributor Network and slightly smaller players like Demand Media and The Writers Network.

 

Last month, at PubCon, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, said, "There is a debate going on internally at Google over whether they should consider content farms web spam." The key is how Google would determine what a content farm is. One way it might look at this is to see if the content is autogenerated. Some content farms use auto-generated content which is readable by machines but not by people.

 

If Google goes down this path it will mean that it has finally reached a great degree of semantic sensitization in its algorithm and it will signal the advent of the semantic web, where indexing will rely on the sensitivity, contextuality and thematic-relevance of the content of each page, linked to the website as a whole.

 

This makes sense in the direction Google has been going towards for some time now, looking to increase relevance in its search results and magnify the end-user experience as it attempts to maintain its lead in search on the web.

 

Webmasters will then have to make absolutely sure that they are not keyword stuffing and that the content on their websites is absolutely rock-solid valuable to those who read it.

 

Honestly, at this point no one really knows. While Google is targeting Content Farms actively with a change in its algorithm we should bear in mind two crucial points. First, the major players in content rely on human contributors to generate that content so in terms of just how valuable that content is, they are already several levels above Content Farms which use autogenerated content. Second, Content Farms rely on Google ads as an additional, parallel, income stream. By the inverse side of this coin, Google makes millions off them each year. Would it penalize against them if it meant losing money?

 

Google is a corporation which has always taken the long-term view. It knows that the only reason it dominates search is because it provides consistently better results than any of its competitors. My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that Google will filter out Content Farms such as Demand Media and Contributor Network if the test results they have at their disposal at Googleplex (and they test everything) bear out that these sites are indeed perceived to be spamy. If they are not, they will be safe. If they are they will drop like a stone in the Google rankings and that will be that.

 

If you have a lot of content on your website and even if you haven’t, it makes sense to now prepare for the Google change that’s surely coming.

 

 

1. Make sure that all the content on your website says something very specific and of potential value to those who read it (otherwise why is it there?)

2. Make sure that what you say on your website is in total keeping with what your website does (the digital equivalent of comparing oranges with oranges and apples with apples).

3. Make sure your content is original.

 

That’s it!